We didn't see the Garland at all during the month of December as the weather was too rough for them to unload. Were we going to miss Christmas because of bad weather?
However, Emil Gunderson took the faithful Thrasher sixty miles in rough seas over to False Pass where they’d left all our mail. His return to Sanak four days later included the cargo of our Sears and Roebuck order so the kids would have their gifts at our preplanned school program. Sanak would have Christmas after all!!
Dec. 18 Play practice all afternoon. Every kid had a part in the program that Sandy made up. Wrapped some of the 85 Christmas presents for the island people tonight.
Dec. 23rd All the upper grades with Sandy and I went caroling at 7PM. It's a shame to waste those good songs on all the drunks. On the November mail-boat, we got some Christmas decorations from my sister Irene, but there are no trees in the Aleutians. Sandy found a dead driftwood branch on the beach that may have floated in from Siberia, so we wrapped it with green crepe paper and stuck on Irene’s decorations. That was our Christmas tree.
Marie and I adapted a Walt Disney type Christmas skit with choral music for the enjoyment of the islanders. Every person on Sanak Island fitted into the old school storehouse for our program, some standing and some on makeshift benches. It was about Santa’s workshop at the North Pole. With our music and the gifts, the school kids performed well in their program. It was a real Christmas holiday for everyone.
Dec. 26 Had school in the morning. Gave out candy, oranges and apples that the Garland gave to the kids. We forgot to give them at yesterday's Christmas party.
One day, old Mrs. Sophie Holmberg came storming into the school and into our living quarters at the lunch hour. She first asked, "Did I disturb your lunch?" Of course she had, but we invited her in anyway. She came right up to within six inches of my face and shouted, "I want you to find out who infected my little Sophie with lice!" I politely responded that I would check every kid in school when they came back after lunch break. She accused the Hoblet girls, who came from across the bay every day by rowboat. That was like being from the "other side of the tracks" according to the Holmbergs, who seldom spoke with either of the two families who lived on that "other side" of Pauloff Harbor.
Marie and I checked every head that afternoon, running our hands through the hair looking for little white specks next to the scalp. Luckily we didn't find any, as the social implications would have been devastating for the family involved. Prejudice and conflict existed here even in this isolated small, fishing community. We used the incident to give a health lesson to everyone concerning washing hair and general grooming. Every week afterward we held hair inspections.
Every mail day was sort of a holiday celebration on the island. Peter Nielson, the postman, would usually tell everyone when the Garland was about to arrive. Then everyone would be anxiously waiting around the dock in front of the school. When they heard its steam whistle, the fishermen would get in their small skiffs and head out to where it would drop anchor. In bad weather one of the bigger fishing seiners would go. The mail-boat would stop about a mile off shore and the skiffs would arrive just the same time as the anchor hit the water. If the weather was calm enough, everyone would tether their skiffs to a drop-line and come aboard. Each seasoned islander would clamber up the sides like boarding pirates. Soon they would throw down the mail sacks and freight into the waiting dories bouncing along side. The men in the waiting dories would try to receive them safely.. A few times, in rough weather, mail sacks had been lost overboard. When that happened, they'd just shake their heads and say, "Too bad."
There was always a brief trading session with the skipper or sometimes even with a crewmember without the skipper's knowledge. That transaction usually concerned some Sanak smoked salmon in exchange for fresh food from the ship's supply or sometimes from a crewman's personal stash of booze. After the sacks of mail were delivered, the anchor would soon be hauled and each native would climb back down the painter or step carefully down the Jacobs Ladder and jump the remaining distance into his waiting dory and speed away to the Harbor.
When the sacks arrived at the small post office which was housed in the closet of the old abandoned school store room just across from our Quonset Hut, Peter would close and lock the door until he had the sacks opened and all the mail sorted. Many of us would be waiting outside the door. Usually about thirty of the total ninety people on the island would be there. By then it would be dark. Soon Peter unlocked 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!