There were gullies down their sides and scars of raw earth. Spruce and alder choked the ravines. A fine rain was falling.
Kodiak, Alaska
July 29, 1952
Dear Dad, Molly, & Mrs. Millet:
Ten long hours in an Army transport plane. Bucket seats. We followed up along the coast of British Columbia. Below could be seen the patches of snow in the mountains, lakes half sealed with ice, bare places on slopes and snaky paths that betrayed lumber operations, smoke pluming up from a fire in the forest, a line of jagged snow-shrouded ramparts seeming to march beside us….
I’m not going to include all of the details of my final arrival here. It was as I expected. Nobody seemed to be expecting us. Typical naval procedure. My ears ached from the drop into a normal pressure, my head ached and I was dead tired….
I am hardly settled here. My job is that of a typical laborer with pick and “muck-stick” (Alaskan lingo for a [he-he] shovel). This afternoon I could see my breath in the air.
I hear a lot of fellows got stranded for jobs on the Alaska mainland. I’d have been foolish to have joined them.
This is a very incoherent letter, but I just wanted to get word to you.
Love to all,
Sam
P.S. The pilot undershot the runway coming in and had to gun his engines at the last minute. We hit like a ton of bricks, and barely missing going in the “drink.” (Oh, well, he was an army pilot.)
AFTER A BREAKFAST REMINDFUL OF MY service days, a paunchy fellow with a jutting jaw checked our papers. He chewed on a toothpick and enjoyed our confusion. He pointed to the ghostly shape of a mountain.
“That’s Barometer,” he said. “Our weatherman. If you can see Barometer, it’s going to rain. If you can’t see it … it’s raining.” He glanced slyly over the group to see if his comment made us any more miserable than we were, then dispatched us to the various checking-in stations that were scattered across the base.
There weren’t enough rooms to go around in the civilian barracks. I had to share one with a southerner who probably resented my presence as much as I felt uncomfortable in his. A calendar hung crookedly on the wall. The days of July were crossed out up to the twenty-fifth, which had a red circle around it, inset with the word Hooray. My instructions were to unpack, get into some working clothes, eat lunch, and report to the superintendent’s office, wherever that was, by one o’clock. It was now almost noon.
I made it.
Then I waited for perhaps an hour in an atmosphere as cheerless as the rain that hit like sand grains against the windows. Apparently, a laborer was one of those low forms of animal life not deserving of a welcoming word or a handshake. I was moved gruffly along from the superintendent to the foreman and finally to a seamy-faced straw boss with a Wyatt Earp mustache. He didn’t introduce himself or ask me my name, so I stubbornly kept my mouth shut. He deposited me into a ditch with a shovel. His grunts and hand signals communicated that a leaky water pipe had to be exposed.
I scrabbled up shovelfuls of shale and mud until I had the pipe uncovered, but not for long. The water welled up around it. My feet got soaked. The steady cold rain seeped through the shoulders of my denim jacket. I had foolishly decided against the rain gear. A pump was started, the intake hose lowered to me, and the pipe appeared once more. The boot-ed plumbers then took over after I dug a sump hole for the end of the hose.
After that, I was whisked away in a truck to a large building. Compressors breathed and bellowed like shuddering metal monsters as they supplied air through the black hoses to the jackhammers that rumbled from within the clouds billowing from the entrance. Men were breaking up the cement floor. They were just shapes in a gray haze. While some trembled over the hammers, others shoveled up chunks into wheelbarrows. I was handed a pair of giant nippers, and as the lumps fell away from the probing of the bit, I cut the embedded steel mat of reinforcement rods. Again I felt involved with a nameless society. Discontent hung in the air like the cement dust. Between the stuttering bursts of the hammers, I caught their comments:
“I’m finishing the week and that’s all she wrote for me.”
“To hell with the contract. They can shove it. I’ll pay my own way back.”
“… I’ve had a bellyful …”
Sam in his room at the naval base on Kodiak Island.
“Who they kiddin’? This ain’t Alaska. They sent us to Siberia!”
One fellow loading a wheelbarrow showed me his hands, raw and blistered. His face was flushed. His hair and eyebrows were powdered with dust.
“All right for farm boys,” he muttered. “They’re used to it. Hell—I’m a musician.” He played a sax in the evenings in some joint in town. Something had to break for him soon besides his back. He couldn’t stand much more of this, he said. “Not even a respirator,” he grumbled. I just kept cutting and listening. This wasn’t as bad as the ditch. At least I was out of the rain.
About ten minutes to five, we loaded into the back of a truck and bounced on the plank seats as the vehicle careened over the gravel road. Men hurled epithets at the driver.
“I get stuck on this rock much longer,” one bearded character said, “I’m grabbin’ me one of them jacks and jumpin’ off a pier.”
We stopped in front of a low building with a sign on it: LABOR POOL. The musician nudged me.
“Spelled wrong,” he said. “It should read: FOREIGN LEGION.” We piled over the tailboard, out of the truck.
A gang clustered in a sloppy line around the time clock. They were eyeing its face, waiting for the minute hand to lurch to freedom. Young and old, white, black, brown, and Indian. They were like convicts doing time. My eyes roved over their faces. All had their reasons for being here. I wondered what they were.
Were they putting on an act for the new man? Well … they weren’t going to discourage me. I had a job and I intended to keep it. Hard work was what I needed. I’d done it before. Now I was going to jolt myself back into shape again.
CHAPTER 4
Taking Hold
The days wore on.
I progressed from sore hands to blisters, from blisters that rose in hard bubbles across my palms, to blisters that broke and burned like fire and peeled away, to stinging slits that healed into calluses. Jackhammer, “muck-stick,” pickax, and sledge were my insensitive taskmasters.
Unloading cement sacks from piled-high flatbeds, staggering with heavy vats of mess hall slop, muscling up heaped rubbish barrels to be emptied into a truck—all contributed to my shrinking waistline and the return of the old firmness to my arms and shoulders. I found myself reflecting on those Parris Island boot-camp days when we drilled in the sand, when I kept myself going by glaring at the Drill Instructor who drove us to exhaustion, when I blew at the sweat running down over my face and kept repeating under my breath, “I can take anything you can, you son-of-a-bitch.”
What boosted my morale more than anything else here was getting a room to myself. The physical punishment of the job was as nothing compared to the aggravation I felt returning to a roommate whose habits were the complete opposite of mine. He either had a cigarette bobbing on his lips or a bulge of tobacco in his cheek. Draining sinuses caused him to snort and sniffle almost continuously. Long after midnight, he kept a light burning, and the large can beneath his bunk was not only the target, often missed, for his cigarette butts, lungers, and jets of tobacco juice, but also a convenience for his urine. One evening he came in glassy-eyed from town and vomited all over his blanket.
He