second mate, two days later, as we wallowed in the heavy swells of the North Pacific. We both were up on the bridge straining our eyes through the fog, to catch a glimpse of our new home. At last we sighted a dim silhouette outcropping of rock in the distance, but then our Captain came on the bridge and said, “Looks like it’s too rough to unload at Sanak. We’ll head for False Pass and try it again tomorrow.”
It had been twelve days of anticipation for us and now just as we were almost there, we had to turn away. That was disheartening, almost as disheartening as my dinner the night before.
They served great meals aboard this little ship. It was porterhouse steak that night.
I had eaten all around the main, big, medium-rare mouthwatering last bite. That was all I had left on my plate. I was saving it, because I knew it would be my last steak in a long, long time. I was talking with one of the crew and looking at him across the table when the steward came, thinking I was finished, took my plate away. When I looked back it was too late. My last juicy bite was gone. I have never forgiven him to this day. They still owe me that one big bite of steak!
False Pass is a quaint fishing cannery village at a spot where the waters of the Pacific Ocean meet the waters of the Bering Sea. The pass is too small for large ships to get through, thus the name.
On the dock, we were fortunate in meeting Emil Gunderson who was just leaving for his home on Sanak in his fishing boat after his summer salmon season. We skipped dinner, quickly grabbed our personal gear, and jumped aboard his boat to head for Sanak that night. We only hoped our supplies would follow the next day. The trip over in a following sea was quite rough and tossed the THRASHER around like a cork. I was over my seasickness by then and volunteered to take a turn at the wheel. Emil said “Steer Sow by Sow-East”, and walked out of the wheelhouse. He didn’t even check to see if I knew how to hold a course, let alone steer in these difficult following seas. In the Navy I was the special duty helmsman on a destroyer, but Emil didn’t know that. I thought it to be fairly unique that a greenhorn schoolteacher would know the skills of the sea, but these people seemed to take it for granted. I was soon to find out, they took many other things for granted also about their teachers.
In getting acquainted with the rest of the crew of the fishing boat, we met Gurman Halverson, a rough looking unkept fisherman of mixed race. He seemed to be brooding over something. He spent most of the time by himself and looked at Marie in a way that was disturbing to me. I wondered if he had ever seen a young pretty white woman before. Half way across, Emil came rushing into the wheel house and asked if I had seen Gurman. No one could find him and it was feared he might have fallen overboard. But a thorough search found him alone on the fantail just staring down at the churning waters astern.
Four hours of bucking into a head wind in the pitch black night brought us to Sanak. Emil took the helm from me and squeezed the THRASHER in between two rock mounds resembling the Pillars of Hercules. There we entered the shallow boat anchorage of Pauloff Harbor containing a little dock, with connecting walkway to shore.
As soon as the THRASHER docked, the skipper's wife, Marina, came aboard and took charge of our welcome, telling us about the island, its people and about the children we would teach. She and Marie immediately started a friendship that would last through the years. Marina seemed to be the matriarch of the island and we felt she was measuring us up to see if we'd meet her expectations. We talked for an extended period of time as she offered us a handful of sailor's hard tack called pilot bread, that we dipped into real gourmet butter from a can. It was our first introduction to that combination which has become a mainstay in our cupboard ever since.
We must have passed her inspection as we were soon invited to go ashore to meet our destiny. Chris Gunderson, the school agent, then led us to our new home. As we walked along the wooden walkway in the dark, we heard giggles and saw the heads of children peeking out at us from behind corners of various buildings. Each student was making his or her first impression of us that night. Luckily, in the dark, they couldn't detect how anxious we were. It had been a long day and we hadn't had a meal since early morning.
The first building we saw at the end of the walkway was a Quonset hut. That was the school. The front section, fifteen by twenty-five feet, was one classroom used by both of us. It contained thirty desks with fold-down seats jammed close to each other. At the end were two teacher’s desks. The back fifteen feet was to be our living quarters, with an oil cook stove, table, four chairs, a folding couch that doubled as a bed, cardboard closet for our clothes and a five gallon gas can cut in half for our sink. For light we had two Coleman lanterns, which I couldn’t seem to get lighted without help from a fifth grade boy who happened in just at that moment. On the wall was a scrub board for wash day and two ancient flat irons were on the stove for ironing. Marie was well acquainted with flat irons from the farm and vowed right then she wouldn’t be doing any ironing up here. There was no sink drain so all our water had to be carried both in and out. A 5-gallon can was under the sink to be dumped outside when full. This space was our home as well as our work place for the year. It was definitely a pioneer setting.
Despite it all, we heaved a great sigh of relief. There was good news and bad news. We were finally home! Yet a great concern plagued us. Would our supplies get there and did everything get shipped as planned? Chris had made a nice warm fire for us and since it was past midnight, we just crashed onto the folding couch out of exhaustion.
The next morning, we awoke late to a big commotion outside the school. While we had overslept, the GARLAND had arrived and all the village mail and supplies had already come ashore onto the Sanak dock. Our packing boxes were at that moment being hauled up the walkway and stacked into the school storehouse across from our Quonset Hut. It was done bucket brigade style by everyone in the village. Young boys of school age were there helping, so we passed the word that we'd start school with a half day of classes the next morning. We worked steadily until noon when we broke open a box of crackers and soup for our first meal since the day before. We were starved! It was 11:00 PM before we got everything stored away and accounted for. Hurray! Everything was there, so school would open on schedule in the morn.
Marie couldn't sleep. Long after midnight she woke me and said, "I'm not sure I know how to teach. What do I do? All the stuff we learned in Miss Graybill's Teaching Procedures class was just theory. This is for real, now. We are on center stage up there all alone!" "No problem, honey." I said, ”Just follow the teachers manual," and I went back to sleep.
The next day my brave little wife responded to what she saw was needed in the life of her students and taught from her heart. She rose up to the challenge and did wonderful as "the teacher" starting that day through all her twenty seven years as a professional educator.
Sanak Island is twelve miles long and three miles wide but doesn’t have a tree on it. There is no vegetation over six inches high, only tundra and grass. Being from the Pacific Northwest we really missed evergreen trees. One sight, however, did relieve the monotony of that bleak landscape, the thirteen hundred foot mountain. It stood up, as if forming a backdrop to the village like in one of those old black and white staged photographs.