the door and a line formed. All would file, one at a time, into the post office which was lit with one dim kerosene lamp. It was a pioneer moment in my memory, directly from a Louie L' Amour novel.
People would get their mail and some would open an anticipated letter right there, trying to read it in the semi-darkness. The school always had the most official mail and sometimes it took me two trips to carry it all. When I got it into our quarters, Marie and I sorted out the most urgent ones and sometimes we might send an answer back on their eastward run. We could do this if a fishing boat would take our outgoing mail over to False Pass, because the Garland would always stop there at the cannery on its return to civilization. There was never any freight or mail sent from farther on the Aleutian Chain to us so they never stopped for us when heading back south.
Who will be the first to spot the GARLAND, our mail-boat?
It got pretty lonesome for us after the mail-boat came and left, so to spread the time out a little longer, I would stack our incoming personal letters in chronological order and we would play Canasta. Marie would have to beat me in a game of Canasta before she would get to open a letter from the pile. The game got quite competitive during those times! I never eased up to let her win. I know I played the bad guy, but my motivation was to lengthen the joy of reading our incoming mail. I wanted the anticipation of communicating with people to last as long as possible into the next month.
Jan 7th Sandy and the older boys painted the outside of the school yesterday. First they put a red lead primer coat and then finished it with a Kelly Green. The total school looks great along with the sign he made, "Pauloff Harbor School on the island of the Lakes" He printed this lettering above a picture that he painted of Sanak Mountain rising above a lot of lakes.
Other things we did to fight the loneliness was to daydream of what we would do when we returned home. Marie dreamed of buying and wearing the gorgeous yellow swimsuit she had seen in the Sears catalogue. (She did buy one when we returned to the lower 48, but when wearing it in the water, she noticed you could see right through it, so that was the end of the yellow swimsuit dream. Darn!)
I dreamed of throwing a big party with all our friends. When we got home other things took priority, so that dream also went unfulfilled.
We both talked of going to the drive-in and having a big juicy hamburger and a fresh peach ice cream milk shake. Just simple little joys, they seemed, but the thought of them cheered us up. (We did accomplish that dream on returning.)
Jan 15th Played Ping-Pong in the old school storehouse tonight, beat Sandy 2 out of 3 games. People admired the sign Sandy put up. Older boys came for the Boy Scout meeting at night. Sandy started a Troop here, No. 511. They made a flag for the Emperor Goose Patrol, work on hobbies, and make airplane models from the kits we gave them.
The first month up north we had a portable radio and one big dry cell battery. We enjoyed listening to the Armed Forces radio broadcasts of baseball games and the program Ozzie and Harriet, Marie’s favorite show. We discovered one major item we failed to foresee in our pre expedition planning, an extra radio battery. Our battery went dead right in the middle of the final game of the World Series, bases loaded and two outs. Nobody up there was a baseball fan, so we were frustrated for two months. The only way we learned who had won was to ask in a letter to our sport minded friends and wait for the second month for the answer. So much for instant gratification!
As an alternative to radio entertainment, I got pretty good at making up my own fictitious Ozzie and Harriet story plots for Marie. I wrote each play and acted out all the parts with my own humorous touch to keep her entertained until we got the new radio battery.
Wanting to learn to knit, Marie brought an instruction book and yarn to Alaska. She felt no need to do a practice piece and started right off on her main project, a fancy vest. She finished the back knitting under stress when I was in the Cold Bay infirmary. Later she knitted the front during a calmer setting, but when she put them together, they didn't match. She had knit the back part so tightly that it was way too small. She tore it all out and re-knit the entire piece, but never wore it because the memories connected to it were too painful.
Marie wrote her inner feelings and fears in her diary but never mentioned any of our serious trials or troubles in letters to her parents. There was only light talk and humor as if everything was just fine, when in reality it wasn't. She said since she was just the simple farm girl, she wanting merely to live out a quiet wholesome life so her letters always reflected that.
The simple life! Yes, our life was reduced to the basics. Not necessarily food, shelter and clothing, but three other basics: mental health amid gloom, personal safety amid lawlessness and our career dedication to improve the lives of the students in our care.
Of course, basic survival was always on our minds, but we also searched for beauty and optimism. The native population had a serious alcohol problem and "the isle of free love" environment prevailed in a house near the school. We felt a personal challenge to try to teach these kids a better life. We found our balance and a measure of contentment during trips out into the wild beauty of this treeless island during the few days we had of good weather.
Jan 23rd This is the 5th straight day of gale wind. It goes right through our outside storm door into the classroom. The gusts even shake our strong metallic igloo. This morning before school, the ramp out to the dock blew down and was pulled away by the current into the inner harbor. Emil Anderson's dory broke its mooring at recess time, so the older boys and Sandy went out along the beach to save it. Zanzibar Johnson's dory overturned, Rhule's got busted up, Ben's seine skiff sank, and the Uranus which is now listing to starboard, is still tied to the dock out there. We have no way to get out to the dock anymore until we get a skiff repaired . The dock is like an island out in the center of the harbor. A truism for the Aleutians: If you want to discard something, throw it into the air during a storm and you'll never see it again.
After the first couple of months, we felt good about our adjustment to this island life. I must qualify that and say that I loved it as a modern equivalent of the Wild West, while Marie just wanted a bath tub. We did enjoy certain members of the island folk, though we had little in common with them. Our intellectual conversation was limited. We'd often reminisce the wholesome times of our upbringing, the music of the 40's, the good books or movies we had enjoyed and the many good party times we’d had with friends. Talking of those memories made our life tolerable during that rigid, frigid existence when we went forth to the north.
The bath was pretty primitive
Marie knitted a lot, as well as baked bread and pies every week. However, her genius was creating attractive meals from our monotonous canned and dried food supply. She was able to magically transform powdered milk into a palatable drink, powdered eggs into a reasonable breakfast with Spam, powdered potatoes into mashed potato paddies and work those awful packages of margarine, to make that white lard look like butter. In those days we had to hand squish a little capsule of yellow dye into the white Oleo in order to have it simulate butter.
With a return to a normal routine after all the various problems we endured in the village, came a new attitude of acceptance towards us. We had suffered alongside everyone through each crisis and, even though I was but a first year teacher, I felt clearly in command of my position as the professional educator. Maybe some of the naive Tom Sawyer in me was becoming mature.
Many families invited us into their homes and loved to share the unique island history with us. Those fisher-folk that befriended us were rough living, spirited, frontier people, mostly of AleutNorwegian stock. Even
