Harbor via a gillnet which is technically illegal this time of year. One of our formal, unrealistic college professors that taught Teaching Procedures Class was Miss Graybill. There hasn't been a day go by that Sandy didn't ask with tongue-in-cheek, "I wonder what Miss Graybill would have us do in this situation?"
Marie at work at her desk ---Pauloff Harbor Territorial School
I bought a fixer-upper dory from John Holmberg who was about to discard it along with its old worn out nine horse Johnson engine. The boat had some broken ribs but I did some repairs to make it seaworthy (almost). I ordered some Johnson outboard parts from the Sears catalogue trying to make the craft usable in these Aleutian waters are known as “The Cradle of Storms.”
We found out how fast the weather changes during a trip to a neighboring island during our first sea trial of the dory.
Earlier I had taken seriously Katie Morris's offer of help our school, writing to her in Sandpoint of our need for electric lights in the school. She responded by scrounging up an old Kohler generator that wasn't being used in Sandpoint and promised to send it to Sanak on the next boat. Light fixtures and wiring would be up to me. When an old Swede fisherman on Caton Island offered me some used electric wiring, I jumped at the chance to go get them. The Army left all their electrical supplies to him when they vacated his small island after the war. He said I could have them if I'd just come over and pick them up.
It is ten miles of open sea from Sanak to Caton Island. In my newly acquired 14-foot dory, it took us two hours. We made the trip over without serious mishap, with just the inevitable motor trouble of that cranky old Johnson. The weather then turned sour so we stayed the night.
The next morning we started our return trip on a glassy calm sea----too calm to be normal for the Aleutians. It changed to a gentle swell fifteen minutes out and to white caps and blowing spray twenty minutes later. As the wind and the sea grew worse so did our troubles. My dory had some leaks and was developing more as the wave action opened up the seams. Also, the outboard was occasionally hitting on just one cylinder. We were busy, as we tried to bail amidst all the electric wiring that had now fallen into the bilge. I tinkered with the Johnson, using the only two tools I had, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Steering to keep the bow into the waves was difficult without enough power and we both had to hold on to the gunwales to keep our balance in the sloppy weather. Soon waves were five feet high coming from the stern on our starboard quarter. As we came close to Sanak we could see the breakers dashing against the rocky cliffs next to the harbor entrance. We had to run along these cliffs in order to get into the mouth of the harbor. The unreliable motor gave us some anxious moments when it coughed. If it should stop at this time we’d be carried onto those jagged rocks and be churned up into kindling in a minute.
As we neared our island home, I assumed the sputtering motor might be caused by lack of fuel. So I took the can and tried to pour gas into the tank while the boat was rolling. I didn’t try to stop the motor to fill it because I needed to keep the boat going forward as we were too close to the rocks. I managed to splash some gas in the general direction of the opened lid of the tank, but some gas washed over the spark plugs grounding them out. That was bad!! I furiously wrapped the starting chord around the top of
We were now in sight of our cozy calm harbor, but still outside of that safe haven. Our biggest challenge was yet to come. The sea was coming from the starboard side and our harbor lay on our port side. Sometime we must turn away from the swells to enter the harbor and at that precise moment we would be broadside to the waves and at risk of having one come over our starboard gunwale. I made the move and when we turned were in a delicate balance on top of a giant comber. Suddenly we were hit with a big foamy cresting wave, just at the wrong time.
It heeled us over. A dory is a very seaworthy boat normally, but when it has a foot of water in the bilge, it gets “cranky.” We had been too busy to bail and there was all that electrical wiring in the bilge, so we couldn’t get at the water anyway. All that bilge water rushed to the downhill side when that big comber hit us. We took water over the gunwale and almost tipped over. We both leaned to the high side and righted our filled-up craft. In next few minutes we drove our half sunk dory safely through the Pillars of Hercules only to run out of gas before we hit shore in front of school. We were one wet but happy crew.
Many a story ends with a "just-in-time climax" of the hero and heroine ducking out of danger just as the violent villain misses them. Not so this one. Ten minutes after bailing the boat, we looked out to see the storm had spent its fury. The very sea that had just threatened us with disaster had quickly changed back to be again flat calm and peaceful.
During the war many soldiers went stir crazy in these islands from the fog, the gloom, the isolation and the continuous wind flapping their tents. We found a way to keep our minds in balance by merely taking walks on the beach and climbing the mountains.
Marie and I decided to climb our mountain one week end. We knew from the summit we could see all over the tiny island, the surf pounding on its rocky shore, the many streams chucked full of spawning salmon as well as the three hundred sixty five lakes, one for every day of the year. On a rare clear day a person could even make out the range of smoking volcanoes way over on the mainland, stretching westward all along the Aleutian chain.
All the villagers thought we had missed too many boats when one morning we started out with our sleeping bags, tent and two days food. We were not only going to merely climb to the summit, but try to camp over night on top of Sanak Mountain. We had to put our tent stakes into solid ice and were almost blown off the summit in the middle of the night but we succeeded in our goal. The next morning we had an experience so emotional it still affects me to this day.
We had finished our meager mountaineer’s breakfast, packed up camp and were hiking along the highest ridge with fog on both sides of us. All of a sudden, the sun came out on our right side like a spotlight. That was nice, but when we looked to our left, we saw a circle rainbow. In the middle was an image of some kind. As we moved, it moved. We waved and it waved back, but on the opposite side. Marie was on a different side of me in the image. It was a mirror of us in the sky below the crest of the mountain. That image was on a silver screen made of fog. The rainbow was in a complete circle around the two of us. It was incredible! I had never heard of such a thing happening to anyone. This was the first year of our marriage and we had had some pretty traumatic events happen to us so far. Undoubtedly, there’d be more ahead. and this clearly was a “mountain top" experience for us.
On our return to the village, Ol’ Chris Halverson told us the early Aleut culture that inhabited Sanak, were directed by the village Shaman who might have said that experiences such as this were “sacred messages” directed solely to the person receiving them. This Shaman era had been during the ancient island times, long before Vitus Bering and the Russians came. After this talk with Chris, who had become my mentor of the island culture, I became very interested in Aleut history and later did some research through the Fitzhugh-Crowell book, “Crossroads of Continents, Cultures of Siberia and Alaska.” Through that source, I learned of the dominating influence each Shaman held over the life of the early Aleuts. Since our rainbow experience happened on his turf, it could mean that this ancient Shaman had given a sort of guardian spirit to Marie and I, as a favored couple of his island. The circle rainbow might have been the manifestation of that promise. Even though this Shaman ruled in the distant past, his influence may have continued on because this, clearly, had been his island.
Whether that was the true message is not
