June, 1973–Kodiak Island
Lead-in to this episode is HERE.
I’ve reached a memoir milestone: I’m home, in Alaska, at last, with only 29 years to fill in before I get up to the present: about half my life. Also, I’ll still need to fill in the missing years of childhood and youth, my first marriage, and much detail about the times already covered. At times, I’ve left out detail because it seemed unnecessary to include it, but later saw that it was pertinent. Many times these walks down memory lane refresh memories of forgotten events and overlooked details. The final print version of this story will be richer, fuller… longer, after I’m done revising.
Moving around so much has made it easier for me to recall and date events. I have geographical associations for them, and know, for example, that what happened in north Texas was between 1956 and 1961. Having lived in one place from 1983 to 1998, the longest I’ve ever lived in one place, makes events of those years more difficult to date. Sorting out the events of the first half of my life has been simpler, in a way, than it will be as I move into the latter half. But for now, in the summer of 1973, there was still enough novelty and adventure in everyday events to keep the memories sharp, and enough moving around to make chronology clear.
As soon as we were off the boat we started asking around for work. We learned that there would be cannery work later, but that Kodiak was filled with hopeful people waiting for work. The town that wrapped around the harbor wasn’t large, but some of the streets were steep enough that I tired easily. As the sun went down, I realized why I was so tired: it was late. It didn’t get dark after sunset, just stayed dim and dusky a while and then started getting light again. I had watched a lot of sunsets and sunrises, but not that close together before.
There was something else peculiar about Kodiak. Many of the cars and trucks I saw parked or in traffic there were bashed in and dented, as if a demolition derby had strayed off the raceway. Stony and I speculated about the cause: maybe drunk driving was a big problem there, or maybe they were just bad drivers. Stony commented that this would have been a good time to have some bodywork skills and a workshop. A year or two later, I would be reminded of this and the mystery would be cleared up for me.
I was carrying a backpack, as was Stony. We had a duffel bag, too, which we alternately carried. We had wandered the town and port area all afternoon, until the only activity in the business district was in the bar. We decided to go in for a beer and to try to connect with someone who could provide a place to crash for the night. We didn’t have much money, and were used to places where one could buy a glass of draft for a quarter to half a buck. No draft beer in that bar, and the cheapest bottled beer was two bucks. Welcome to Alaska.
We had been to the ferry office, learned that the next ferry to Homer, on the mainland at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, would be in about four days. We had enough money for our fares, and only a few dollars extra for food and whatever. Our plan was to seek work in Kodiak until the ferry came and if we hadn’t established ourselves on the island by then, to go on to my friend Mary’s place in Anchorage.
After fighting our way through the crowd to the bar and learning, with a shock, that the beer cost more money than we were prepared to pay, we started pushing through the crowd to get out again. Then someone called out to us and came shoving through the crowd and pulled us back to a table to meet some friends. It was one of the men from the Chief, one of the two whom Stony had helped rescue from the small boat before it broke up. He introduced us to several men and someone bought us a beer. We told them we were looking for a place to spend the night, and were invited back to Bell’s Flats to stay with two young men who lived in a quonset hut out there.
Arriving during the brief hours of twilit “night”, our hosts showed us around the quonset with flashlights. We were off the power grid there. They told us that bears were not a problem, usually, at night. Great, glad to hear it, guys. Just what sort of “problem” are bears in the daytime then? I look back now on the depth of my ignorance at the time, with a sense of incredulity. Had I never heard of the great Kodiak brown bear? I guess I just hadn’t thought about them being in the yard, and had not yet snapped to the fact that I was now in their backyard.
The boys’ recommendation was that we go to the outhouse with a partner, and take the shotgun that was propped beside the door. With a brief warning to “snug it up tight” to the shoulder before firing, they showed us where to spread our sleeping bags, and we all retired. Sleep did not come easily. My insomnia was compounded of the sunlight streaming in the windows, the chill seeping through my inadequate sleeping bag, and my excitement at being there, in Alaska, among the bears and all.
Our time in Kodiak was a time of hunger… not starvation, just not enough to eat. I’d been through such times before, but it was becoming more difficult and I was weak, tired and irritable a lot of the time, the first time I ever really noticed symptoms of hypoglycemia, although I didn’t have a name for it then. After having gone hungry for several weeks almost a decade before, it had long been my habit to keep a store of food on hand. On the road, it was nuts, seeds and dried fruit. My supply was so depleted at that time that I was counting the nuts I ate, limiting myself to three per meal.
Bell’s Flats was a great place for scrounging. I’d been dumpster diving for years, and had gone on salvage trips as a child, to the city dump with my father. Being in Bell’s Flats was like living at the dump. Scattered throughout the woods were many quonset huts in various stages of decay. We saw maybe a dozen of them that had been patched up and were occupied. While we sought work, we also scouted for a repairable hut where we could live if we decided to stay.
Each hut had its own midden, with trash dating back as far as World War II. Along the roads were other dumpsites where townsfolk had disposed of garbage. Abandoned vehicles, both military and civilian, sat alongside the roads and at the bottom of slopes beside the roads. At one intersection was an immense pair of tracks from a tank or cat or something. They stretched out there like a parallel pair of long rusty benches, and I sat on one at midday one day that Stony was in town looking for work and I was scrounging the middens of Bell’s Flats, to munch my ration of almonds and raisins.
Among my trash finds were several pieces of the old brown “composition” plastic military dinnerware from the WWII era, and a big 14″ cast iron skillet. I used the coffee mugs and cereal bowls as camping gear for years, until I learned their monetary value and put them away for safekeeping. Stony objected to the weight, but I put the rusty old skillet in our duffel bag anyway. It would be a year or so before I got around to cleaning off the rust with Naval Jelly and seasoning the pan for use, but it is still in use in my kitchen now.
One of our hosts was stockboy at the grocery in town. While we were there, he brought in a few items he had stolen at work, including a case of hot cocoa mix. He told Stony and me to help ourselves, and later complained at how fast the stuff disappeared. It was a distressful situation for me, being somewhere with no supermarkets, no place to do the “loaf of lettuce and head of bread” trick. Accustomed to earning my keep in various crash pads by shoplifting and preparing food, I was without resources in that environment.
I couldn’t even forage effectively. I was tryng to identify the vegetation, but wasn’t finding much in Back to Eden. I was walking the woods, still sparse this soon after breakup–there were still heaps of dirty snow in shady low-lying areas–with a field guide in my hands for the next three years or so, before I could forage effectively.. It was particularly distressful since we and our hosts were going on short rations. Obviously, I needed to find work soon or get out of there.
Neither of us found a job by the time the ferry came, so we lined up with a ragtag bunch of other travelers and boarded the Tustamena for Homer. This was the first of many rides on the Alaska Marine Highway System for me, and I was mildly shocked at the number of passengers like us, with neither a vehicle nor the price of a cabin to sleep in for the voyage. At night, dozens of sleeping bags were laid on the decks of the common areas, both inside and out on the open decks. It was too cold for comfort out there for me, but I loved the scenery I saw through the windows of the forward lounge. The ferry made only one stop between Kodiak and Homer: Seldovia, the prettiest town I have ever seen, anywhere, any time, out of dozens of lives… just gorgeous, charming, surrounded by breathtaking bays, fjords, crags, forests, and stuff. Seldovia… saw it that once and haven’t been back, yet.
On the trip, Stony struck up a friendship with a small, slender, gray-haired man with a harelip and a hard time making his speech understood. Marty was accustomed to having to repeat himself, and neither Stony nor I objected to paying the extra attention and asking for repetition, to communicate with him. He had lived his entire life in Alaska, and had the old-time Alaskan attitude of helpfulness and neighborliness. (In remote areas even now, in winter, when someone leaves home, they leave the door unlocked, a fire laid and ready to light, and food available to the traveler in distress who may wander in in their absence.) He asked where we were going, and when he learned that we planned to hitchhike to Anchorage where my friend lived, he offered us a ride in his truck.
We arrived in Anchorage with the gear we were carrying and (if memory serves) $3.47. I was starving, and had Marty stop at a Safeway supermarket on the way to Mary’s place, where I spent one of my last three dollars on yogurt. I didn’t really know what kind of reception I’d receive from Mary. She had said, when we were in OWCC together, to come visit her, and we had been exchanging letters while I was in Colorado. I had not told her I was on my way because I had no idea when I might arrive or whether I might not make it all the way to Anchorage at all. I expected her to be surprised to see me, but she wasn’t.
To be continued….
It had cleared enough overnight to bring frost, and there’s a thin layer of ice over the flooded muskeg across the street.
dear Marian) to be sad that I don’t have that nice sunny kitchen and all. If we are going to be sad because Kathy doesn’t have her dream house, let’s really take a look at the house that Kathy wants.
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