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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Survival / Success
- Subject: Life Experience
- Published: 05/27/2024
Surprises, Alaskan Style
Born 1947, M, from Oceanside, United StatesSurprises, Alaskan Style
If you’ve read my previous entry about my eye-popping encounter with the northern lights, you saw how surprised I was. But that wasn’t the only surprise I experienced during my year on the sight. There were several others. One had to do with the native Americans (Indians) who lived in the village next to the site. Some of them worked for the government while others did not. Either way, both did the same thing during the winter in order to help them keep insulated against the cold. They lathered their skins with something that smelt like burnt popcorn. Do you know what it’s like to hang around someone for any length of time who smells like burnt popcorn? Major yuck!!
Another surprise had to do with the Indians’ dogsleds.
In all kinds of movies and TV shows, you saw dogsled teams act on command. These teams would stand up when they were told to. They’d mushed when they were told to mush, plus they would never fight amongst themselves. It was like watching precision drill teams in action. Then I saw my first dog sled race live and in person. It took place in the village on the other side of the runway. What a shock!
The dogs these Indians used to pull their sleds through snow were not disciplined at all. They climbed over each other, got tangled up in their reigns, and even fought with each other, like ducks squabbling over the same morsel of food. It startled the heck out of me to watch the Indians grab these squabbling dogs by the scruff of their necks, slap them around, then slam them back down on the ground to try and get them to cooperate. Ouch!
And then there was the living conditions of many of these Indians. The best way I can describe it is to say, I had seen pictures of outhouses that looked more inviting than what some of them lived in. A number of their houses consisted of two-by-four shacks made up of discarded wood and pieces of sheet metal, tacked together whichever way they could. Some of these shacks were even up on stilts in case the Yukon river next to the village flooded over in the spring. Others sat on bare ground.
Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t criticizing them for the way they lived. It was just so different from anything I had ever known. You see, I had come from your typical middle-class environment. Everyone I knew lived in nice houses. Before that point in my life, I had never seen people living in what almost amounted to little wooden and tin boxes practically held together with Band-Aids.
Actually, only some of the Indian huts were like this—mainly the ones who didn’t work for the government. The ones who were connected to the Air Force had much better housing.
Just as surprising was seeing some of the Indian children running around with blue eyes. At the time, I was positive Indians weren’t supposed to have blue eyes. But being in such close proximity to a bunch of horny GI’s who were cut off from all female contact for a year, it was inevitable that more than one member of the military might take advantage of the situation, even though the pickings were mostly amongst old women with missing teeth and wrinkled bodies. There were a few young ones around, some even nice looking, others not so. But after being up there a while, old or young, pretty or not, they all started to look good.
Another reason why there might have been so many Indian children with blue eyes probably had to do with the fact that the government would pay some of these women a supplement for every child they had, whether or not the father was Indian or American.
So, you see, it was definitely profitable for some of the Indian women to get pregnant a lot.
Some were even lucky enough to latch on to a GI who would marry them, such as the American who worked as a baggage handler for the commercial airlines that had civilian flights landing at our base. He had been stationed at our site before he got out of the Air
Force. That’s how he and his wife met.
An American also owned the bar in the Indian village, which might have been one reason why so many of the Indians were drunk so much of the time. Between the village’s general store and the bar, they seemed to be able to get all the booze they wanted.
Heck, there were even times when a bunch of us GI’s went over to the bar in the village to drink beer instead of consuming the watered down 3.2 version the Air Force served in the NCO club. But if you were down in the village drinking, you damn well better make sure you didn’t get a drunk Indian mad at you. Because if he said he was going to get his gun, you had better haul your butt out of there; he meant it.
Which just goes to show you, it was never a dull moment. Even Mother Nature tossed in a few surprises of her own. For instance, I had never heard of something called an ice fog until I got to Alaska.
Basically, an ice fog is made up of crystals of ice instead of droplets of water. I guess, wherever it gets as cold as it did with us, they probably have ice fogs, too. Once these fogs burnt off, they’d leave behind at least a couple inches of snow. I think that’s where we got a good portion of our ground cover, since we didn’t have that many actual snow storms, at least not enough for huge amounts to accumulate. But we did get a lot of these fogs in the winter.
I’ll tell you about more surprises in my next entry.
Surprises, Alaskan Style(Tom Di Roma)
Surprises, Alaskan Style
If you’ve read my previous entry about my eye-popping encounter with the northern lights, you saw how surprised I was. But that wasn’t the only surprise I experienced during my year on the sight. There were several others. One had to do with the native Americans (Indians) who lived in the village next to the site. Some of them worked for the government while others did not. Either way, both did the same thing during the winter in order to help them keep insulated against the cold. They lathered their skins with something that smelt like burnt popcorn. Do you know what it’s like to hang around someone for any length of time who smells like burnt popcorn? Major yuck!!
Another surprise had to do with the Indians’ dogsleds.
In all kinds of movies and TV shows, you saw dogsled teams act on command. These teams would stand up when they were told to. They’d mushed when they were told to mush, plus they would never fight amongst themselves. It was like watching precision drill teams in action. Then I saw my first dog sled race live and in person. It took place in the village on the other side of the runway. What a shock!
The dogs these Indians used to pull their sleds through snow were not disciplined at all. They climbed over each other, got tangled up in their reigns, and even fought with each other, like ducks squabbling over the same morsel of food. It startled the heck out of me to watch the Indians grab these squabbling dogs by the scruff of their necks, slap them around, then slam them back down on the ground to try and get them to cooperate. Ouch!
And then there was the living conditions of many of these Indians. The best way I can describe it is to say, I had seen pictures of outhouses that looked more inviting than what some of them lived in. A number of their houses consisted of two-by-four shacks made up of discarded wood and pieces of sheet metal, tacked together whichever way they could. Some of these shacks were even up on stilts in case the Yukon river next to the village flooded over in the spring. Others sat on bare ground.
Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t criticizing them for the way they lived. It was just so different from anything I had ever known. You see, I had come from your typical middle-class environment. Everyone I knew lived in nice houses. Before that point in my life, I had never seen people living in what almost amounted to little wooden and tin boxes practically held together with Band-Aids.
Actually, only some of the Indian huts were like this—mainly the ones who didn’t work for the government. The ones who were connected to the Air Force had much better housing.
Just as surprising was seeing some of the Indian children running around with blue eyes. At the time, I was positive Indians weren’t supposed to have blue eyes. But being in such close proximity to a bunch of horny GI’s who were cut off from all female contact for a year, it was inevitable that more than one member of the military might take advantage of the situation, even though the pickings were mostly amongst old women with missing teeth and wrinkled bodies. There were a few young ones around, some even nice looking, others not so. But after being up there a while, old or young, pretty or not, they all started to look good.
Another reason why there might have been so many Indian children with blue eyes probably had to do with the fact that the government would pay some of these women a supplement for every child they had, whether or not the father was Indian or American.
So, you see, it was definitely profitable for some of the Indian women to get pregnant a lot.
Some were even lucky enough to latch on to a GI who would marry them, such as the American who worked as a baggage handler for the commercial airlines that had civilian flights landing at our base. He had been stationed at our site before he got out of the Air
Force. That’s how he and his wife met.
An American also owned the bar in the Indian village, which might have been one reason why so many of the Indians were drunk so much of the time. Between the village’s general store and the bar, they seemed to be able to get all the booze they wanted.
Heck, there were even times when a bunch of us GI’s went over to the bar in the village to drink beer instead of consuming the watered down 3.2 version the Air Force served in the NCO club. But if you were down in the village drinking, you damn well better make sure you didn’t get a drunk Indian mad at you. Because if he said he was going to get his gun, you had better haul your butt out of there; he meant it.
Which just goes to show you, it was never a dull moment. Even Mother Nature tossed in a few surprises of her own. For instance, I had never heard of something called an ice fog until I got to Alaska.
Basically, an ice fog is made up of crystals of ice instead of droplets of water. I guess, wherever it gets as cold as it did with us, they probably have ice fogs, too. Once these fogs burnt off, they’d leave behind at least a couple inches of snow. I think that’s where we got a good portion of our ground cover, since we didn’t have that many actual snow storms, at least not enough for huge amounts to accumulate. But we did get a lot of these fogs in the winter.
I’ll tell you about more surprises in my next entry.
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