.
 |
It was in the early 1960s and I was fresh out of journalism school at Chapel Hill, a reporter for the daily Telegram newspaper at Rocky Mount, some 60 miles east of Raleigh. But my new bride and I had plans to go North to Alaska. We were turning a worn-out local school bus into an RV to take us, about half hillbilly and half hippie.
I was sitting in a dentist office, a regular patient but also gathering information. My dentist had been in Alaska in the Air Force and told me good stories.
He had also shot a massive white polar bear, made into a rug mount. Not laying flat on the floor but he had it hanging on a wall vertically, the huge white head hanging down almost to the floor of the waiting room. Trophy males reach 1,700 pounds.
We all watched and laughed one day as a little girl, maybe two years old, left her mama and walked over to it. She started stroking the beast’s giant head, and we plainly heard her cooing to it.
“Nice kitty,” she said. “Kitty … kitty …”
Never saw a white bear but did put my size 11 boot into a fresh grizzly track near Tonsina. It was longer than my foot and very round, like a dinner plate.
Stone age mummies
June 1965, went to work on the Anchorage daily but it didn’t pay enough so got myself hired as the news writer for KENI-TV, Channel 2.
My Southern accent kept me away from cameras or mikes but they had a handsome guy from California to read the national news at 6 p.m. and my local news output. KENI had a 24-hour radio operation, too, and the deejays often read my stuff.
Recently read a book reprinted, originally published in 1930, by a famous Arctic explorer named Harold McCracken. Complete with maps and old photos.
All about ancient native peoples out on the Aleutian chain of islands in the Bering Sea, who made mummies of their leaders, similar to those found in Egypt. The author found some in caves and photographed them. Some had wives and/or servants who were killed and mummified themselves to assist their master in the afterlife.
Little Diomede island was mentioned. Two small islands face each other across 2 miles of water in the Bering Sea. Little Diomede is Alaskan, Big Diomede is Russian. Never went there but had several interviews with a man who did.
Wanted better boat
He was a white man, maybe 40 best I recall, who served as a missionary to the small village on Little Diomede, the bigger island thought to be unoccupied.
He asked for free airtime to beg money to buy a dependable boat for the village use.
“It’s about 50 miles of open ocean to the mainland,” he told us.
“All we have is a leaky crude boat with wooden frame, wrapped in a walrus hide or two. Have to go to a port in bad weather sometimes, and I am fearful that ours is going to collapse and we all die.”
Had his eye, he said, on a Fiberglass cabin cruiser with a large motor.
Some public service announcements were soon broadcast for him. Saw him on the street a few weeks later and he was happy, had raised enough money to buy the needed craft.
He told me their only attempt to contact Russians on Big Diomede was a midnight commando-style trip to the Soviet side that he led with some of the Little Diomede villagers.
“We left a stack of Bibles on their beach,” he said. “Saw no one and nobody saw or spoke to us. That was it.”
He also said that his wife always stayed home down near Seattle, and he visited her on a random schedule.
She was safe there, he said, since some of the villagers carried scars from polar bear attacks, the animals invading their homes in winter looking for food.
Lard from a pig is what makes your biscuit taste good, right?
Well, oil from seals tastes good to both polar bears and natives who kept it inside their houses on Diomede, good for eating and also giving interior lighting in rude candle rigs.
Man told me hungry polar bears would come in the dark nights, homing in on the scent of seal oil, nothing could stop them.
Escape from Russia
We were at Anchorage two summers, 1965 and 1966, came home to Carolina about Christmas time in ’66 with a gnarly beard and new baby Jill.
One of those summers, two Russian men left their homeland and came across the Bering Sea, well south of the Diomedes, in a tiny boat with a teeny motor.
They were on the windy open ocean non-stop for about two days and two nights, landing safely at a large island village with a guest house for visitors.
One was a single man, the other had family with a wife back in Siberia. Both exhausted from their ordeal, the family man fell asleep.
But there was a big Sears catalog on the reading table, and the single man stayed up all night looking at it, according to the villagers. Coming from a strictly-controlled socialist economy, he was amazed at the display of consumer goods for all Americans.
Both were soon brought to Anchorage, where the Russian embassy folks were screaming to get to talk with them.
The family man soon surrendered and was taken back home by the Soviets.
But the single man, as far as I know, could not be turned around. He was flown south by our side and may be still living in the good old U.S. of A. today.
Wally Avett first wrote for the Cherokee Scout as editor in 1969. His books are available as signed copies at the Scout office in Murphy. Call him at 828-837-5531 or email wallyavett@gmail.com.