Moving Where? - Alaska

There were and probably still is four basic reasons people move to Alaska to teach school:  The young just out of college looking for adventure; couples who want to increase their retirement portfolio; those who want to start a fresh life; and those who can’t find a job in the lower 48 and just want one.

The young are divided into two varieties – singles who crave adventure and the married who realize that with the money they make they can pay off their student loans in just one or two years.  They leave debt free and, if they are careful, have a little nest egg to buy a house back in the lower 48.  Some stay longer of course and pay cash for the house when they return which usually coincides with them wanting to start a family.

The older couples are usually retired school teachers and want to fluff their retirement nest egg.  They claim they are going to stay until vested in the Alaskan state retirement system but usually leave after three or four years.  They begin to miss the life they had near shopping centers and restaurants and their children start to have children and the grandparent things pulls them home.

The person who wants to start fresh and thinks the last frontier is just what is needed usually find that places change and people don’t.  They leave after one year or sometimes at the semester.

The last group of people, and the ones becoming more prevalent, are those just looking for a job.  They are first year teachers who can’t find employment in the lower 48 or those who have been laid off from teaching positions and any job will do.  They really don’t have the desire to go north but a recruiter paints such a rosy picture, that they think why not.  Not a good reason.  They start putting their resumes out the day they get here and as soon as a job in the lower 48 opens, they leave.

One of the bigger problems with education in bush Alaska, or at least it use to be, is the turn over rate.  We always had a huge turnover rate in every school I taught in.  My first year I saw 60% of the teachers leave, the next two years 50% left and one year I went to a school that every teacher there was new.  Try to run a business with turn over like those.

So why you may ask did I go to Alaska, and more importantly why did I stay as long as I did and would under the right circumstances go back again?  Good question, one that I have not satisfactorily been able to answer in my own mind let alone explain to anyone else.

There were days I would have gotten on the next stage out of Dodge but reality would strike and staying was the only logical thing to do.  The money was a draw but it wasn’t enough to go in the first place and not enough to keep me there longer than I was.  There were more kids that irritated me than warmed my heart and if any of my friends from back home would call and I was not at home, my answering machine said “Greetings from the land of nonsense.”  That quote always seemed to sum up about how I felt about the place day-in and day-out and all the idiotic situations that occurred in and around the villages.  Someone said I was odd to go and stay or the phrase I liked best was that I was just one dog short of a team.

The best reason I can come up with as to why I went and why I stayed and would go back was the fact that I had a dazzling social life.  I had plenty of friends back in Independence especially and I knew they would be glad to see me, but after the flurry of get togethers they would manage to ease back into the life they had with out me.  Some how they all would have managed to move fore ward while I was gone.

My social life in Alaska was much more active and stimulating than any other place I ever lived.  It was out of necessity of course to keep from going bonkers but the interaction between and among teachers kept me busy and stimulated.  Other villages were better than some but there was always something going on to keep from getting cabin fever.  Hooper Bay had the best teacher interaction and the village I liked the least. While Noatak had very little teacher to teacher contact on a social basis but the village I liked the most.  There was always something going on and the community made you feel a part of it.  Go figure.

But back to the social life.  In Hooper Bay, and this is as true as I can recall, the following was a typical week:  On Sundays we would go to the Marshall’s for coffee and pastry.  Later that same day a bunch of us would pile onto a four wheeler and sled and go to the beach to hunt clams.  On Monday, those of us who did not eat clams would go back to the beach to see what had washed up the night before, some times a whale would be there if we were lucky, or even a walrus if we were really lucky.  On Tuesdays the Gillans came over for dinner and always had pictures to show us about the previous summer they spent at a youth camp or tell us stories about the last 10 years they had spent in Hooper Bay.  Wednesday we had a Bible Study with the local missionary, which we sacrilegiously called Back to God Night.  Thursday the Krolls would come to dinner and we would watch our favorite TV show (it was such a favorite I can’t remember what it was now) but if the cable was out, which it tended to be now and then we would just gossip about everyone one else.  Which we figured was alright because it was not Wednesday.  Friday was pot luck at Marta’s or Jane’s and Saturday we would usually dine with the Neufeldts.  Life did not get a whole lot better than that. 

I realize that Tom Wolf was correct when he coined the phrase “you can’t go home again” and I don’t want to relive the past I just don’t want to forget it.

Letters from the Last Frontier 5

November 22, 2002

Professor Boris Segerstahl

Director, Thule Institute

University of Oulu

Finland

Dear Boris,

I have written about the wake and funeral that is taking place for the young girl, but it is really to lengthy to send over via email.  Just a couple of pages so I am incorporating the event into a series of short stories and would just as soon not type them more than once.

I still would like to share it with you so if you would send me your mailing address there at the university I will send it off as soon as possible.

Regards,

Conley

Email from Professor Segerstahl

24 Nov 2002

Hi Conley,

This is a long message but be patient and read it.  Ignore it, if it does not make sense.

I read your previous message several times.  Before I continue I want to tell you that one of my (too many) academic fields is literature, and I have read a lot of American literature.  Your message could have been a preliminary synopsis for a novel.  Not only for the content, but there is a possibility that you have a capacity to produce a literary style.  If the text had been in a quiz, I would have been tempted to say that it tries to show a style somewhere between Tom Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway, with a taste of Claude Simon (a French writer.)

Don’t fall off the chair – you are not there yet.  But have you ever thought of writing a novel?  I know that authors hate advice from editors, but let me be brave and suggest that the title could be “The Wake” and it starts:  “The wake and the funeral have been postponed.  The dead body cannot be flown in due to bad weather.”  The rest is only hard work, depression, long nights and disappointments, before you possibly end up with a good novel.  More than the average reader ever notices.  I am sure you could get support and advice from course material that exists on creative writing.

Your synopsis invites stylistic ideas connected to the Latin American school of fantastic realism.  I don’t know whether you have access to library services in Hooper Bay.  If you have, you should try to get “The Death of Artemio Cruz” by Carlos Fuentes and “Home is the Sailor” by Jorge Amado.

In your most recent message you indicate that you are working on a series of short stories.  That is great, if I understand correctly that you already write.  A novel is however a completely different animal.  Talking about short stories – one of the greatest short stories in American literature (but completely forgotten) is Bernhard Malamud’s “Idiots First”.

Mail is really terribly slow.  How about cutting the text about the wake into bits of plain text and send it as a few small messages.  I will patch them together when they arrive.  I would guess that you use MS Word and communicate over a modem.  Save it as plain text and it should be as compact as it can be without compression.  If you really want to send as snail-mail, I put in my official signature at the bottom of this message.  I really dislike it.  It makes me look like a pompous ass (I hope I am not).  I have been told that that impression is needed now and then.

I assume we are of approximately the same age.  I have been a university professor for 33 years since the age of 29.  I will leave the details for a future message.  Stay in touch, Boris

One more thing:  Service’s writing is nice but not great.  He was overrated a hundred years ago.  Not his fault.  He certainly gave many readers a lot of relaxing entertainment and perhaps even fun..  It is, however, possible that Sam McGee and Dan McGrew are better known than Robert Service.

Professor Boris Segerstahl

Director, Thule Institute

P.O. Box 7300

, FIN-90014 University of Oulu

Finland

Note to my blog readers:  I do not remember sending Boris anything and if I did he never responded.  I do know there were several emails but they have been lost through the years and we eventually lost touch.  Just recently I sent him an email, but it got bounced back, so I sent a note via snail-mail.  We shall see if he gets it or not.  If by chance any of you are computer stalkers and can track him down, please let me know.

Deutschland Diary 3

Tuesday 11th September 2300 hours, 1984

I have been asleep for 2 ½.  It is cold and windy.  I hope it does not rain.  The day has been long and for the most part boring.  I worry a lot about not performing well.  I also worry about you all at home.  I know you can all take care of yourselves, but I worry.  I worry most I guess about you all missing me.  I worry about all the times I could have done things with you and didn’t.

It is the strangest feeling to know that the Russians have 30 Divisions of soldiers less than the distance between KC and St. Louis.  I don’t really worry about them attacking or anything, it just seems strange.

On Monday on our way to K-Town we saw from the distance the ruins of an old castle and then stopped at a gas station.  That is the only experience I have really had with Germany.  I hope I can call Saturday.  Love

Log 10 - Alaska

 Log 10

1/14/03

No entry for a long time.  Went to Dixon and KC, had a nice time visiting kids, better than usual.  Been doing most of my writing working on stories, trying to get them ready to send to friends.  There is a lot of snow and the weather is very cold now.  Alexa came back with us.  She doesn’t appear to like me much, perhaps time will change that.

The teachers are all in a ditty because they heard that a consultant was making a hit list.  I’ve gotten along well with the guy but people like Mike Jump says he is not to be trusted.

There are some things wrong about the educational system in Alaska.  The Administrators by and large are inept and have no long range programs.  The school boards are comprised of well meaning but culturally different Eskimos who think tradition should over shadow all.  There are a lot of teachers that just give up and are staying for the money only and find it easy to fool the administration and community that they are doing a great job.  All one has to do is keep the status quo, tell the parents how great their kids are doing, and basically just not rock the boat.  All so the parents are very lenient.  Given the combination above it doesn’t make for a good learning environment. 

There are many ways to solve this problem one of which is to have everyone held accountable via standardized tests.  One problem I can see is how do you standardize a test for Eskimos, some of which have never seen a side walk?

1/18/03

Snowing, cold, and basketball game.  Have spent the morning doing little except studying on my Alaskan History course and sending emails.  Paula cooked a nice breakfast – Egg omelet, bacon, raisin bread, yum, yum.

2/2/03

Saw the northern lights.  Spent a long time getting on my clothes to go see them.  Not a real good display.  Reports of polar bear prints north of town.

Hunting and Gathering - Alaska

There is a cycle to hunting and gathering.  Not as much today as in the past because there is always the local Native store that sells everything from fruit to CDs.  But the cycle still exists albeit modified some due to modern technology. 

Effie Hadley, friend, confidant, and village elder says she can remember how they use to hunt and gather food and can even recall the cycle they use to follow, although she does admit, “It is hard to say for sure, some of it just sort of blends together at my age.”

“When springtime came," Effie continued, “and the snow returned to the earth we use to hunt for eggs and pick berries.  After a long winter it really was a treat to eat something different.  Eventually though it would be time to hunt the beluga and seal and we would walk the riverbank leading to the ocean.  Along the riverbank we would find berry patches, some eggs, and now and then rhubarb.  I liked rhubarb.  I would pick as much as I could find and what I did not eat or give away I would bury.  That would keep it fresh until I returned from the coast.

“There were a lot of seal and the men would have no trouble getting all they wanted or could use.  Every part of the seal was used either for food or clothing.  The bones we would make into needles, the skin of course for clothing, the flippers and sinew for mukluks, and of course the oil.

“It seems like we would work all day and all night,” Effie said with a chuckle.  “The beluga would start to come around and the men had found out that you can run down a beluga with a motor boat pretty easily but some men thought that when they did they did not get as many whale.  They said the noise scared them off.  So depending on things, the men would line up their boasts and stretch them out as far as they could and sit and wait quietly.  As a beluga would come close the men would attack.  After a kill they would light a lantern and that was the signal for the women and children to boat out and drag the kill back to the beach.  We would prepare the beluga, divide it among the families as to need and the men would continue the hunt.”

Apparently nothing of the beluga was wasted either.  Bones, meat, even what Effie called rancid flippers were saved to boil during the winter just in case they ran out of food.

“Even the head was cooked.  We would scrape out the brain, mix it with a local leaf called surra, and fry it in seal oil or its own oil.  It was a real treat to eat it out there on the beach.  It tasted like crispy fried rice.

“You had to be careful however of what combinations you ate.”  Effie said emphatically.  Some things apparently did not go well together and were even lethal.  Effie claims that her people learned a long time ago that you did not eat muktuk (whale meat) and raw salmon berries.  “It would kill you.”  I asked her if she knew anyone who died from eating that combination.  “Yes,” she said, “My sister died from doing that ,  But that was a long time ago before I was born.  I don’t know anyone now that would be so foolish to try it.

Appian Way - Tirrenia

I appreciated the use of the interpreter, but I told him the next morning after leaving the restaurant in Livorno that I thought that his time would be spent better helping out the younger members of our contingent.  I decided to explore the surrounding area on my own. 

I started out not real early, perhaps around 10:00 and decided to walk around Tirrenia on my own.  It was a modern little Italian village but different in a lot of ways.  The center section of the town had cobble stone streets with a lot of little shops of all kinds that seemed to specialize in different products.  Tobacco, wine, pottery, clothes, jewelry, and several quaint little cafes.  I found an ice cream shop and bought a cone of some strange flavor that I really can’t describe.  There was a festival that the local Catholic Church was having to raise money I guess for some worthy cause, so I bought some flavored coffee, which wasn’t much good, sat on a park bench and just watched the people parade around in their Sunday best. 

I went to Mass that afternoon at the local church and was able to follow the service pretty well.  I understood every part of the Mass except for the serman of course.

After leaving Mass I ran into one of the young men that was part of our group named  Terdoff.  He was a little older than the other guardsman and had grown tired of pretending he was on just another army post.  He too wanted to take advantage of seeing the local Italian scene.

We went to a place that was a combination deli, ice cream parlor, and bar and had a glass of wine.  I joked with the owner about him giving us California wine (it was a white wine from Tuscany.)

We ventured back to the festival area and ate a pastry that was creamy on the inside and fried on the out side sprinkled with sugar.

We went to a spegatteria  across the street that served different kinds of pasta but it was run by some Arabs.  After another glass of wine we decided not to eat there and walked down a side street that I had not noticed before  We stumbled across a quaint little café that reminded me of the restaurant where Michael shot the Turk and the corrupt police captain in the Godfather.

We ordered a dinner that consisted of red wine and spaghetti with white sauce that had small chunks of ham infiltrated though out.  They served some interesting flat bread sticks, a small pizza with mussels, a chocolate éclair and some of the worst coffee I ever tasted in my life.

We both went back to the spa and to bed.  I woke around 3 am, still suffering from jet lag, went down to the main lobby and started writing some letters and post cards.  The desk clerk thought I was crazy.

I noticed during my meanderings that day that the normal people, the middle class I guess, dressed a little different.  They all seemed to be just a touch more poor than our middle class, but that might have been because it was a small town and not very cosmopolitan.  Their clothes did not match it seems and their shoes were not up to our standards. Many of the women who walked around held hands and the older ladies dyed their hair a deep red, almost purple. 

I just hung around the lobby writing and “reading” magazines until breakfast and hoped that the coffee would be better in the morning.

Panama Pundit 3

Jan. 3, 1991

We convoyed over to Camp Russo to deliver a 5 Ton truck and pick up two smaller vehicles for the return trip to Base Camp.  We almost had to transport a large sum of money back to the Base Camp, which I was not looking forward to, but it got cancelled at the last minute.

While at Russo we heard that an American helicopter got shot down in San Salvador.  The American soldiers that survived the crash were executed by the rebels.  It was a couple of hundred miles away but it did make us stop and think.  We realized that we “weren’t in Kansas anymore” and there were people in the general area that didn’t really like us. 

Captain Johnson said he had heard that Air Force One had landed at Howard AFB near Russo, but I didn’t believe him, so we decided to check it out before we returned to Base Camp.

Jan 4, 1991

The trip back to Base Camp was uneventful.  I did miss a turn in a town called Solo Palto.  There were five Panamanian bar fly’s hanging around the outside of a bar.  I guess they had been there all day according to their appearance, watching all the trucks go by.  They all pointed in the direction we were supposed to go.  As I was turning the convoy around I drove by them, leaned out of the jeep and yelled, “American Stupido.”  Which is Stupid American in Italian.  They understood what I meant and laughed very heartedly.

The set up of the Base Camp had made a lot of progress in the two days we had been absent.  We put our gear away and walked into town, if you can call Numbre a town.  They have a dirt road, shacks, two grocery stores (or a least a place where you could buy food), a café operated out of a house and an Asian Restaurant that also doubled as a grocery store.  One of the grocery stores had a bar.  We went to the one that had the bar.

There were a bunch of Panamanian playing something that looked like dominos and a pool table that was infested with beetles.  We didn’t play pool, just drank their $0.25 bottled beer, called Panama oddly enough.

Jan 5, 1991

We got up and took a ride to Ft. Davis and requisitioned material to paint directional signs for when the main body arrived.  Captain Johnson and I took the material down to a rocky beach and painted them.  We needed to clean our brushes so after soaking them in kerosene we cleaned them in the ocean.  I had been watching the waves and had figured out that every 5^th wave was larger than the other 4.  So when the 5^th wave was coming in we would dash back up the rocks.  I did not count on any abnormality in the wave cycle.  One wave took us by surprised and drug us both off the beach into the Atlantic Ocean.  Lucky for us there was a large boulder that we latched on to or we would have been picked up by some sort of current and our bodies found floating in the Gulf of Mexico or off the tip of Florida.  We took longer to dry than the paint on the signs.  We returned to Base Camp after driving by the supposed Air Force One, which it was not, and finished our brush cleaning on a sand bar in the Numbre River next to Base Camp.

Jan 6, 1991

We got up early and drove into Ft. Sheridan to pick up a truck convoy to lead to the Base Camp.  Just as we were about a mile away from camp we heard over the radio that there had been an accident on the road just ahead and a medivac helicopter had been requested immediately.  From a hill we watched as a group of men tried to save another man’s life.  We halted all traffic going down the road and took in the event.  Apparently the driver of a fork lift had lost control of his machine, the fork lift started to bounce, he un hooked his seat belt and stood up trying to get a better view of the road and guide the lift around the pot hole and large rocks.  The lift turned over and trapped the young man under the lift just below his waist.  It crushed him but he was still conscious.  Controlled panic developed.  His band of brothers immediately called for assistance, but the only medical helicopter available was in Panama City.  It was dispatched immediately but distance was against him.  They did what they could for the young man but by the time the helicopter arrived the 19 year old National Guardsman from Sikeston, Missouri was dead.  The Base Camp was named after him, Camp Thomas.  Some day I might write a story about that.