alt="Screen shot 2011-04-13 at 8.09.56 PM.png"/>Our first day of school was set to begin starting at 8 AM the next morning, yet we were dog tired from all the continued stress of preparation, travel and getting settled in. For the first time we surveyed the pile of books we'd be using the next day and finally found the teacher's manuals. They were on the bottom shelf so we sat down there on the floor and started reading. Marie's books were the outdated "Dick and Jane" series, the very ones she had used as a first grader herself seventeen years before. After a couple of hours we dropped the manuals only partly finished and made up the folding couch into a bed.
Marie couldn't sleep. Long after midnight she woke me and said, "I'm not sure I know how to teach. What do I do? All the stuff we learned in Miss Graybill's Teaching Procedures class was just theory. This is for real, now. We are on center stage up there all alone!" "No problem, honey." I said, ”Just follow the teachers manual," and I went back to sleep.
The next day my brave little wife responded to what she saw was needed in the life of her students and taught from her heart. She rose up to the challenge and did wonderful as "the teacher" starting that day through all her twenty seven years as a professional educator.
Sanak Island is twelve miles long and three miles wide but doesn’t have a tree on it. There is no vegetation over six inches high, only tundra and grass. Being from the Pacific Northwest we really missed evergreen trees. One sight, however, did relieve the monotony of that bleak landscape, the thirteen hundred foot mountain. It stood up, as if forming a backdrop to the village like in one of those old black and white staged photographs.
Nellie Anderson came in while drunk and wanted to enroll in grade 7 ( She is 19 and married) Sandy said she could but she had to be sober. Nellie assumed we as "teachers" must know everything, and expected us to teach her mid-wife skills, she totally forgot about it the next day.
Sept 13 First full day of school. It went slow for both of us so Sandy went behind the blackboard and set the school clock 15 minutes ahead just so we could let the kids out a bit early and spend the extra time getting our own life in order.
All eight grades inside our Little Red Schoolhouse
That label of the hard luck school reputation started happening to us the first week we arrived. We had school but two days when Gurman Halverson and his Aleut wife were found in a bloody mess, each shot dead with a 12-gauge slug. The wife's body showed signs of a struggle. A shotgun lay close to Gurman on the floor. Their three kids came home from school and found the door locked so they stayed with friends that night. The next day after school, the door was still locked so they asked the neighbors for help. That was how the village learned of the tragedy.
The U.S. Commissioner, our nearest “law” was the wife of a tavern owner 160 miles away on Unga Island. Her qualification for the position was that she had finished one year of college, an art major. She was notified by Emil relaying a message via the THRASHER's small VHF radio, connecting to another skipper aboard his fishing boat, who when he came ashore to the tavern, carried the message by word of mouth to the Commissioner.
In the meantime, Marie and I found out, to our surprise, that it was usually the school teacher who was expected to take charge of a situation like that. When the Commissioner did arrive, a few days later, she didn’t even view the evidence, saying she didn’t have "the stomach" for it. The entire crew from Unga had been getting fortified for the ordeal with homemade hooch so their stomachs as well as their minds were clearly not in any condition for the viewing.
The murder scene, the school used as a morgue and the funeral director
The Commissioner turned my school into a court and held a six-man inquest, which consisted of six people telling their views of what they thought had happened. I was appointed to make out the death certificates and she left. After hearing what the six villagers said, I wrote on the official document that it looked like the man had shot his wife, then himself. But with no investigation and no evidence presented, no one will ever know what really happened in the mystery cabin on that fateful night. The cabin lay empty and unvisited all the rest of the year.
The school store-room was used as a morgue, where two coffins were made ready. I wondered who was to conduct the funeral service.
One of the first friends we made on the island was old Chris Halverson. He was a classic Nordic fisherman type who had traveled the sea lanes as an ocean nomad, until he settled with an Aleut wife on this, his hideaway of Sanak. Gurman was his only son and when he came to me, in tears, to ask if I would perform the funeral, he said, "It was hard to lose my wife eight years ago, but to have a son die before you do, is more than I can bear."
I felt tremendous compassion for my newly found friend and accepted the responsibility, without really knowing how I'd handle the situation. I was far from the dignified pious type, but by conducting the funeral, I became more than just "the teacher" and eventually earned a place in the spiritual scene of these Aleut fisher-folk. My formal education hadn't prepared me for anything like this. However by stepping up to the role that was thrust upon me, I began to temper that happy-go-lucky Tom Sawyer demeanor that had up to that time been my trademark.
On the day of the funeral I walked to the cemetery behind the coffins with Marie’s Bible in my hand as I’d seen in John Wayne movies. I wore my only white shirt and a tie. The rest of the villagers followed behind me. When we got to the graveyard there was a loud argument among the fishermen as to the mechanics of how to lower the coffins. I read the 23rd Psalm and as I finished I heard clapping and cheering. Zanzibar Johnson, an old one-eyed sailor who’d chosen Sanak as his retreat from the world, was responding in his own fashion. I spoke a simple sermon in respect for the living present, saying it wasn’t for us to judge what was done and that we should remember the departed for their good qualities not for their last moments. Then I recited the Lord’s Prayer after which all the villagers went to their homes, except for the orphans, who were left to cover the graves of their mother and stepfather.
Two triple crosses were placed on the twin graves. These islands had been occupied by early Russians and the Russian Orthodox Church came with them. The only grave markers they had ever known were these. The marker has a little piece above the main crosspiece and then on the lower part a shorter slanted bar. The three bars represent the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
It seemed to me so cruel to allow the children the gruesome task of shoveling dirt onto the coffins, so I started to take over the job and have the kids return to the village. But an old man gently took hold of my arm and shook his head. I found that an outsider doesn’t change the established habits of a culture. This, he told me later, became their final act of grieving, separating the living from the dead. It was meant to show clearly to the children that they would not be seeing their parents ever again in this life.
I always wondered if the way Gurman looked at my wife coming across from False Pass had anything to do with this tragedy. This was our first week on this strange, isolated island and we wondered, with no little trepidation, what the following months might bring.
Sept 21st Our 8th day of school. We had good organization and lesson plans went well. Gave my first test today. The kids didn't do too well. We each took a bath in the wash tub set up by the stove. Mr. Halverson gave us
