ICE DREAMS - Chapter 1

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. 

It was our first wedding anniversary and I was three thousand miles from my wife in Baltimore, Maryland. I was at McCord Air Force Base in Washington state, waiting for a plane to fly me to Alaska. That is where I would be stationed for a year. If all went well, maybe I’d return in time to celebrate our second anniversary together. It didn’t happen that way, but I’m sure I was hoping for it at the time.

I was in the snack bar of the terminal, nursing a Coke at a table with Brannon. He was also married and had left his wife and infant son at her parents’ home in Georgia. He kept feeding the jukebox playing “Georgia, Georgia, Georgia On My Mind” over and over. It was a dark winter night outside, and inside the snack bar there was a blue fog of homesickness. We were surrounded by men we knew and many others we didn’t know, but we were missing our loved ones.

After waiting an hour or more, our flight was called. We stood in line with our duffel bags and overnight bags. At the front of the line were two sergeants who were rummaging through the bags.

“What are they looking for, Brannon?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they think we can hide our wife in a duffel bag.”

When we got nearer to the sergeants, we could hear the question, “Do you have any alcoholic beverages in your bags?” My heart sunk. Lorraine’s Christmas presents to me had been a thick wool sweater, a back scratcher, and a fifth of Smirnov Vodka. When the sergeant asked me the same question he had already asked fifty other airman, I admitted that I had a bottle of vodka, reached into my bag and pulled it out. He took it from me and tossed it into a nearby barrel. I heard it crash into other bottles of confiscated spirits.

We boarded a chartered plane and flew for hours into the dark northern sky. It was the middle of the night when we landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. We boarded buses like school buses but painted Air Force blue and were taken to the transient barracks. They were nice. The buildings were brick and the squad bays had single beds with mattresses, not the usual bunk beds. The next morning, we were allowed to sleep until 8 am, went downstairs to the mess hall where we had a delicious breakfast.

I left Baltimore on Monday, December 28, 1959 and arrived in Seattle, Washington that evening. I stayed at the YMCA until the evening of Thursday, December 31, 1959 when I took a military bus to McCord AFB. I had very little money. For breakfast, I had a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee at the YMCA. During the day, I walked around Seattle. There were a number of really steep streets. Some streets were so steep that there were concrete strips across the sidewalk placed a footstep apart to assist in walking up the hill. I ate again at 3 pm letting one meal count for lunch and supper. I chose an inexpensive cafeteria where the cheapest meal on the menu was salmon steak. I had the salmon steak special for the three days I was in Seattle. In the evening, I spent my time in my small room at the YMCA writing a letter to Lorraine and reading. After a diet of oatmeal and salmon steak specials, the Air Force mess hall in Anchorage was haut cuisine!

For ten days at Elmendorf AFB our only duty was to attend various briefings and go to medical and dental examinations and appointments. There was no doctor or dentist on Shemya Island where we were being sent to work for a year. The doctors made sure all of us were in excellent health and weeded out anyone who was not. The dentists filled every cavity, pulled any tooth that wasn’t salvageable, and double checked every existing filling. For the year that we were there, if someone absolutely had to see a doctor or be hospitalized, it was a day long airplane trip back to Anchorage once there was a plane to come out to Shemya.

During our free time, we could roam the base – go to the Base Exchange, fast food concessions, movies, bowling, or library. We could also go into Anchorage. Buses ran every half hour to town. One day when I was riding into town, we came upon the bus which had left a half hour before the one we were on. The bus looked like it had been bent into an “L” shape. There was an ambulance and some police and MP cars with lights flashing. A moose had charged the bus and reshaped it! We heard on the news that evening that the bus driver said the moose walked away shaking its head.

January 1, 1960 was an important day for Alaska residents. On that day, the Federal subsidy for transporting food to Alaska was discontinued and the price of food in the grocery stores and restaurants leaped upward. I went to a little restaurant which only had a counter, no tables. I ordered a hamburger and coffee. The price of the hamburger was about three times what it would have been in Baltimore or Seattle. However, there was a tradition concerning coffee which continued. You paid for one cup of coffee, but the counter man kept refilling it as long as you were there.

Lorraine had begun to write letters to me the day after I departed for Seattle. She wrote long letters every day. I began to receive them while I was in Anchorage. Our letters to 0ne another became a second world and a second reality in which I lived during our year apart.

Finally, the morning arrived for our flight to Shemya Island, the “Black Pearl of the Aleutians.” We boarded a Reeves Aleutian Airlines DC-4 for the flight to the Island. The flight took all day. As we departed the terminal we were handed a bag lunch. Actually, it was going to be our lunch and supper. Shemya is the next to last island in the Aleutian chain. It is a LONG way from Anchorage. We were flying there in a propeller driven plane. The first leg of the journey was dangerous.  Going over the Kenai Peninsula the plane has to fly over some high mountains. Many planes have crashed into the mountains for a variety of reasons – wind, snow, fog, icing on the wings, engines losing power in the cold air, and others.

We didn’t reach our destination until well past supper time. Of course, it was dark. In January, Alaska has only a couple hours of sunlight. A sergeant met us as we disembarked. As we stood in ragged formation before him, he said, “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there is a hot meal in the mess hall waiting for you. The bad news is that we don’t have any vacant bunks in any of our quarters. After you eat, I’ll take you to a vacant building. We will bring you two oil stoves, stove pipes, racks, mattresses and pillows, blankets, bed sheets, and pillow cases. You sergeants, organize the men into work parties. If you all pitch in and work hard, maybe you’ll have a place to sleep sometime after midnight.”

The building was left over from World War II when there was a large contingent of Army Air Corps personnel stationed on the Island. It was shaped like an “L” and had a dozen or more SeaBees living in the short leg of the L. Where the two legs met there was a latrine and a shower room.

We examined the empty, damp, cavernous room that we were to make into our living quarters. A truck arrived from Base Supply. As could be expected, someone counted wrong and they were short ten racks, mattresses, pillows, pillow cases, and twenty sheets and blankets. Also, there was no toilet paper!

The men who were installing the oil stoves had a difficult task. After setting up the racks, putting mattresses on them, and making up the racks with sheets, blankets, and pillows, we watched the seemingly impossible task of putting the stove pipes up through the roof. The roof was at least twelve feet above the floor. The men assembled stove pipe sections until the pipe was long enough to reach the ceiling/roof. There was a spring hinged trap door for the stove pipe to be pushed through. While one man tried to hold the assembled sections vertical, another man was trying to guide it to the hole. When they thought they were under the trap door they shoved upward. If they were even an inch off, the pipe would not go through. It was a tedious, frustrating task. Meanwhile we were all shivering in below freezing temperature in that barn-like room.

When the pipes were extended through the roof and attached to the stove and the stove was filled with oil, no one could figure out how to light the stoves. Several men went off trekking through the dark, cold night looking for someone who knew how to light the stove. The building was near to the mess hall and the Filipino mess crew was cleaning up. The men explained our plight to an older man who seemed to be in charge. He sent one of the young men who was mopping the floor. Grinning from ear to ear, he quickly lit both of the stoves. Since he couldn’t speak English, we had no idea what he had done that we hadn’t already tried. We prayed the stoves would stay lit. They did; we began to thaw out; and the dampness gradually dissipated.

The next morning, we wandered over to breakfast. The mess hall was a large building with many tables and chairs. About six men sat at each table. The dining areas were at each end of the building. In the center, there was a serving line on one side. In front of the serving line were tables with beverages, bread, and condiments. Four meals were served each day – breakfast, lunch, supper, and midnight breakfast. The men worked on three eight-hour shifts  - days, eves, and mids.

The food service was managed by Northwest Orient Airlines. They had two groups of workers, who each had charge of the mess hall for forty-eight hours. Then they switched. One group was Japanese and the other group was Filipinos. There was no love lost between the two groups! Just like us they worked on the Island for a year. Then the airline flew them home for free. Many of them saved their earnings and used them to buy a house or even a farm. They lived in barracks buildings just like the Army and Air Force personnel. The Filipinos had their own barracks building as did the Japanese.

After breakfast, the First Sergeant came down to the temporary quarters where we were staying.

“I’m sorry for the uncomfortable living arrangements. They are building a new barracks building and that is where all the attention is given by the brass. It won’t be ready for at least a year, so we have to make the best of it. This morning I will assign you to “tricks.” The trick which is on days works six days on days and then has two days off. After two days off they work eves for six days and then have two days off. Then they work mids for six days and have two days off. After that it is back to days for six days.

“I will read your names and tell you what trick you have been assigned and what shift they are working today. The bus that takes you to work will always be outside the mess hall. Report to the trick supervisor at work. Be sure to wear the badge you were issued in Anchorage. You can’t get into work without it.

  “The barracks buildings are assigned by tricks. When a barracks has a vacant bunk, the trick supervisor will tell you who will move into it. I don’t think any of you will be in this building more than a month or so.

“Finally, the plane that you arrived on brought us a couple bags of mail. We don’t receive mail every day. Every time a plane arrives from Anchorage, there will be mail. From now on, you can go to the mail room to check if there is mail in your box. The mail room is located in the same building as the orderly room and the recreation room. If you see mail in your box, you come back during the hours posted that it is open and the clerk will give you your mail. Right now, I have the mail for those of you who arrived last night. I’ll read your names from the mail I have.”

There were a couple letters for me from Lorraine and one from my mother. She was also expecting a baby.

I was assigned to the trick that was working days. Those of us who were assigned to that trick were told to be ready to go to work in a half hour and a truck would pick us up outside the mess hall and take us to the operations building. On the ride to work we had our first view of the area where the orderly room was, the building where Base Supply was located, the tiny building in which the base Armed Forces Radio Service station was located, and the barracks buildings on either side of the road.

The barracks buildings were long, one story wooden buildings. Each one was located in a deep hole such that the roof was level with the surface of the road. To get into a barracks building you had to descend by a pair of wooden stairs.

We learned that the reason they had been built down in holes during World War II was to keep them from being blown down, the roofs being torn away, or some other damage by the ferocious winds to which Shemya was subject. These winds, called “williwaws” could reach 150 mph. We had all been issued special parkas whose hoods were thickly trimmed in dog fur. When walking in high winds, you could close the hoods and peer out through the fur. This protected your eyes and face from dirt being blown like bullets by the wind. Along the road on one side there was a thick rope strung along and fastened to pipes driven into the ground. These were to hold onto while walking in high winds.

When we reached the operations building, we walked up to the door and had to hold our photo identity card under our chin. The person inside compared your face with the photo before admitting you to the building. The shift supervisor already knew the training each of us had received before being given orders for Shemya. We were each assigned a work station. I worked at the same station the entire year that I was there whether I was working days, eves, or mids. You were expected to remain at your station for eight hours. If you had to run to the toilet, the man next to you had to do your work and his while you were away. That wasn’t feasible for more than a few minutes.

When we were off duty, there wasn’t much to do. There was a small Base Exchange which was only restocked once a year. Once a year there was a period of time when the ocean waves were calm enough that a ship could send a barge loaded with supplies. When it was unloaded and the shelves of the Exchange refilled, you could buy any brand of cigarettes, soap, laundry detergent, shaving lotion, razor blades, shave cream, candy, chewing gum you wanted. As the year went by, every pay day the shelves became emptier. Toward the end, men were forced to roll their own with pipe tobacco, use hand soap to shave with, rubbing alcohol for shaving lotion, and shampoo for doing the laundry.

Laundry was a real problem while we were living in the makeshift barracks. The barracks buildings had washers and dryers. The SeaBees also had a washer and dryer, but we had none. A few of the men knew someone in one of the barracks buildings. The rest of us had to pay a Filipino to wash and dry our clothes on one of the days Filipinos weren’t on duty in the mess hall.  

The Base Exchange ran the entire length of one half of a building which was located between the Base Supply and Motor Pool building and the radio station. These buildings were across the road from the building housing the orderly room, mail room, and the recreation room. The other half of the building, in which the Base Exchange was located, contained a conference room with a long table and very nice chairs, posh enough to be the board room of a bank or large company.

That half of the building also contained a library which had only two bookcases and less books than many families have. It also housed the chapel. Outside the chapel room there was an impressive assortment of paperback books by several Catholic publishers. The books were for the taking and I took my share of some really good titles.