ICE DREAMS - CHAPTER THREE

I will be posting one chapter per week of my latest book, ICE DREAMS. Please note that the numerical chapters are autobiographical. The alphabetical chapters are pure fiction. 

We left Elmendorf Air Force Base on January 18, 1960. During the time we were there, Lorraine was receiving my letters in four days time. I was also receiving mail from her since she began writing me the day after I left. When we arrived on Shemya Island, the mail did not come and go  regularly. During January a plane carrying the mail to us and returning to Anchorage with our outgoing mail came only on Fridays unless the weather was too bad and it was delayed a couple days or more.

The temperature hovered around the freezing mark in January. During the daylight hours it might go several degrees above freezing. At night it was almost always below freezing. There was also a lot of snow. During the month of January there was about fifteen inches of snow. It did not melt! On Shemya, in an average year 225 days of 265 had some form of precipitation.

In one letter after I had begun duty on Shemya, Lorraine complained that she had not had any letters from me for ten days. So she had pulled out old letters I had written to her in 1958 before we were married and 1959 before she joined me in Syracuse. In another letter she said that she had received a large stack of letters from me. She was debating whether to read them all that day or to ration them out and read only one letter a day. Reading them all that day won out.

Much in her letters concerned the baby we were expecting. She was sure it was going to be a boy because of the energetic kicks she received. She told me about a game the baby played with her. When it was kicking she would pull up her top to see if she could see the kick from the outside. The baby would quiet down. She would lower her top after a few minutes and in a short time the baby would start kicking again. She said that happened on repeated occasions. She was never able to SEE the baby kick. Whenever her mother saw her pull up her top and look at her stomach, she would chuckle because she knew the baby was playing its game with Lorraine.

Lorraine told me about some maternity tops that she made or was making. She didn’t have a sewing machine so she was doing all the stitching by hand.

She registered for a class in “natural childbirth” sponsored by some doctors at Johns Hopkin Hospital but taught at the YWCA. She met with several problems. When she went to register for the class, which met one evening a week, at first they refused to register her. They said she was supposed to have a letter from her doctor. Someone interceded and they said she could register if she would bring the letter the next week. Once in the class, she had another difficulty. She wrote:

“During my class on Wednesday (last night) at the YWCA the instructor went into (what I now believe) decisive detail of the importance of a husband during a woman’s pregnancy. Looking back, I realize she dwelled so on this subject because she feared losing the one male pupil she has (he seemed to be getting little from the course). However, I didn’t expect this and allowed myself to lose all perspective. Why I didn’t is because I never thought one way or the other. You were going away and that was that. I felt bad but soon accepted it.

“Well, here was a good chance for me to pity myself. I began feeling sorry for myself and suddenly felt helpless. Luckily, some good sense began to work. Soon I was back on the ground and feeling quite foolish (although no one knew of these thoughts). I was shaken by this incident, however.

“Now I believe that I wasn’t disturbed because of the talk, but of a feeling I’ve had that my instructor thinks I’m not married. Strange and silly I know. But I feel very strongly about this. She even calls the other girls Mrs. but me Miss. Well I’m not going to worry myself over that. I know the truth. I’ll just make a mental note to correct her the next time she forgets to address me properly.

“Well, as I said, I was shaken by this incident. When I arrived home, I quickly prepared for bed and took your letter with me to my room. You can’t imagine the joy and comfort that letter brought to me. A few times I shed some relieving tears. I felt as though you were right with me; I had told you my troubles and you were oh so gently soothing me. You couldn’t have been closer if you had been sitting on the edge of the bed. Your love has meant so much more to me since you have gone. I’m trying to figure out if this new rich love has always been with us or if it has developed because of our separation. Darling this separation is paying off.”

During that first month that I was away, we decided on a name for the baby if it was a boy, Paul Troy, and a name for the baby if it was a girl, Elizabeth Ruth.

By the end of the month, Al had still not returned the car despite several phone calls to him. The promised $25 had included the stipulation that he was to Simoniz the car. He had not even started to do that. Then one night, past midnight, Al called. He had been driving all over Canton looking for the garage. All he could remember was that it was #12 in a row of garages. Lorraine gave him the address of the man who rented out the garages. With that information he was able to find the garage. His father had followed him to take him home. He had Simonized the car after all, cleaned the interior of the car and even lubricated the door hinges.

That was not the end of Lorraine’s problems concerning the car. The car insurance premiums jumped about 50%. She wanted to drop the car insurance since it was not going to be driven until I returned. However, she had to make a decision before she could get an answer back from me. Her sister’s husband advised her to drop liability and collision coverages and just keep comprehensive.

When she called our insurance agent, he told her to cancel the insurance altogether because comprehensive insurance was included in my car payment to the finance company. Cancelling the insurance also meant that she could not renew the car tags which would expire soon.

She wanted me to do the federal and state income taxes, so she was gathering all the receipts, W-2s, and the forms I would need and was going to mail them to me.

We were paid on the last day of the month. I was broke. In one letter Lorraine had enclosed $1. In another letter, she enclosed $5 but because of delays in the mail, I did not receive it until several days after we were paid.

We were paid by check. After I moved into one of the trick barracks I met a man who lived in a room diagonally from mine. He was strange. He had a stack of pay checks that he had never cashed. He would awaken about a half hour before anyone else, go into the shower room and wipe the soap residue from the soap holders in the shower and wash basins in order to wash and shave. He collected cigarette butts out of ash trays, stripped them and salvaged the tobacco from them which he put in a little cloth bag. Then he rolled his own cigarettes. He was forever “borrowing” (bumming) things he needed. I heard that he came from a well-to-do family and that he owned a number of rental houses.

I finally moved out of the makeshift barracks and into a barracks building in which men from different tricks and day time workers all lived. The barracks buildings were wooden, one-story buildings with a hall way going down the center of the building. There was an outside door at each end of the hall way. Once outside there was a stairway going the height of the building up to the road level on one end and at the other end, really a fire exit, the stairway went up onto tundra. In the center of the building there was a laundry room with washers, dryers, and laundry tubs. There was a latrine with toilet stalls, and there was a washroom with sinks and showers.

On either side of the hall way were two-man rooms. The rooms had   two beds (a little narrower than a single bed), two dressers, and a wall locker on either side of the room. On my side of the room there was a window over my dresser. Lorraine told me to send her the measurements of the window and she would make curtains for it. I sent them to her and in a little over a month I received a package from her with curtains and a matching dresser scarf which she had sewn by hand.

My roommate had a fishing net hanging all across the wall above his bed. The net held a collection of glass floats. These were old because now the fishing boats use cork or rubber floats. The clear glass floats were beautiful – various colors and different designs. He was not in the room for much more than sleeping or getting ready for work. He liked to comb the beach for items of interest the waves brought ashore. He also scoured the tundra for artifacts from World War II. He told me that in addition to the runway that was now being used, there are several other runways on the Island that have not been maintained and thus are unusable. However, they were good places to scrounge for souvenirs.

There was another man in the barracks whose wall was decorated with snapshots. He had written to TEEN magazine’s pen pal column and said that he was being sent to a remote island in Alaska for a year and he was going to be lonely. He asked for pen pals. Every time the mail came, he received a bushel of letters, mostly from teen age girls. Most of them enclosed a snapshot of themselves. Some were wearing bikinis. His wall was solidly covered with snapshots. When the wall was completely filled and he was still receiving snapshots, he began editing the wall, taking down mediocre pictures and replacing them with new, more striking pictures.

The mess hall was located near one end of the runway which ran alongside the mess hall. Although the plane carrying our mail was only coming out to Shemya once a week, there was a variety of other users of the airport. Northwest Orient Airlines had leased the airport from the government after World War II. They flew daily passenger planes from Seattle to Japan, landing at Shemya to refuel. Other airlines had to fly via Hawaii to reach Japan. This was several hundred miles further. Northwest allowed SAS passenger planes to refuel on Shemya. They also permitted Reeves Aleutian Airlines to fly into Shemya from Anchorage. They allowed Flying Tigers Airline to refuel in Shemya because it carried only cargo.

There were a number of military planes that landed on Shemya. One interesting plane was a Navy cargo plane. It serviced Navy personnel on floating ice floes who were doing meteorological and oceanographic measurements. These planes were equipped with JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) so that they could take off in the short space allowed on an ice floe. Sometimes, planes flying from an air base in Japan or Korea to Eielson AFB near Fairbanks, Alaska would land to refuel. (There was a cocktail lounge in the terminal building. It was OFF LIMITS to enlisted personnel but flight crews and our own officers knew of its existence and patronized it.)

We would stand alongside the runway and gawk when we heard a plane overhead preparing to land.

The Reeves planes would sometimes unintentionally put on an exciting show. Their planes were old. Many times the pilot couldn’t get one or two of the engines to start no matter what he or the ground crew tried. As a last resort, he ordered everyone off the plane, even the other crew members. Then he took off and slowly made a circling climb above the airport. It would take him a long time to reach the altitude he needed. Then he put the plane into a steep dive. The propellers of the engines that were not running would be screaming as the dive spun them at high speed. At the last minute, the pilot switched on the ignition for the sick engine(s) and they would fire, spraying engine oil all over the ground. He would pull out of the dive only hundreds of feet above us. Such a roar they made and you could hear the metal plates on the wings rattling.

We had an air show in our back yard and it was free.

Sometime after we had all moved out of the makeshift barracks it was put to use again. An Air Force plane based in Japan wandered off course and into air space over a part of the Pacific Ocean with territorial limits claimed by the U.S.S.R.  Soviet fighter planes scrambled against the plane. It evaded most of the fighters but one of them managed to badly damage one of the plane’s wings. Shemya was much closer than Japan and the winds were favorable for trying for Shemya. The plane just did make it. The plane was placed in a hangar in order to work on it.

There were about a dozen men on the plane. They were wearing flight suits over their underwear. You can imagine their reaction when they were shown the only living accommodations available. That was only the beginning of sorrows. They had no American money. It wasn’t allowed in Japan. They only had military “scrip” which our Base Exchange couldn’t accept. They were each given $40. Our Base Exchange had men’s underwear and socks but no jeans or shirts. The First Sergeant went around collecting donations of clothing from the men. Base Supply loaned them parkas.

They could not believe that there was no phone service, no movie theatre, no enlisted men’s club where they could buy beer. They couldn’t wait to get home to Japan. Some aviation mechanics had to be flown out from Elmendorf Air Force Base. Until they arrived to remove the damaged wing, it couldn’t be known what parts had to be ordered for the repairs. They arrived, removed the damaged wing, sent it back to Anchorage, and waited several days for a new wing and the necessary parts. Then it took a couple days to install the new wing and make other repairs. The crew of the plane walked around the Island scowling or sat in the mess hall drinking gallons of coffee and smoking endless packs of cigarettes.

Finally, the day arrived when the plane was ready to fly. The crew boarded the plane in the hangar. A tow tractor was attached and began pulling the plane out of the hangar. When it was halfway out of the hangar, a powerful gust of wind caught hold of the plane and whipped it to one side. It ripped it off the tow bar, twisting the forward landing gear strut and ripping the new wing off the plane. The crew disembarked and returned to the makeshift barracks for another five days.