Alaska (156 page)

After Rostkowsky had buzzed the village twice, the entire population, it seemed, hurried to the landing strip, so that when the Cessna came to a halt, everyone who had business with the new teacher, and that included most of the village, was there to greet her. When she backed out of' the plane, stepped gingerly upon the wing, and dropped down to the ground, there were gasps of approval when the villagers saw how young and attractive she was with her pageboy hairdo, her enthusiastic smile and her obvious delight and eagerness to meet the people she would be serving. It was an auspicious beginning, highlighted by a long, low whistle from an Eskimo boy who looked as if he might be a senior in the high school. Others cheered his boldness, and as Kendra was being introduced to members of the school board, one of them whispered to her neighbor: 'I think this time we got a good one.'

And then, from the back of the crowd, Vladimir Afanasi, bareheaded, gray-haired, clean-shaven and with an Asian face that was almost perfectly round, came forward: 'Welcome, Miss Scott. I'm Afanasi. We talked on the phone. Let's go to your quarters,'

and he led her to what was called the Teacherage, a low, minimal frame building which had two side-by-side front doors. 'Mr. Hooker has this side with his wife. They're out fishing. This side is yours, all furniture and bedding are there,' and he banged open the door to lead Kendra into a compact apartment bath, kitchen area, living room which was smaller than any she had seen in either Utah or Colorado. But it was clean and it did have unobstructed wall space on which she could hang posters or maps or prints. It had the clear making of a comfortable home for a bachelor woman.

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When Afanasi said with some pride, for he had ordered the building of this home for teachers: 'This could become a comfortable refuge for a young girl,' Kendra corrected him: 'I call myself a young woman,' and he laughed: 'Woman it will be. I've found that if people aren't self-proud, they don't amount to much.'

When her three bags were delivered and stowed in the middle of the empty room, she made no effort to deal with them; instead she said: 'Now, where is the school? I've been dreaming about it ever since that first phone interview.'

'That's it, there,' Afanasi said, taking her outdoors and pointing to a low, undistinguished one-story wandering building which, although new, already needed some repainting.

To Kendra it looked like some nearly abandoned country store in a backwoods Colorado mining town that was down on its luck. Inadvertently she blurted out: 'Nine million!'

and as soon as she uttered the pejorative words, Afanasi leaped ahead, turned to obstruct her passage, and thrust his face close to hers: 'It's crucial, from the first minute on, that you understand the Alaska to which you've come,' and he turned and pointed to each of the compass directions.

'What do you see, Miss Scott? Any trees? Any department stores? Any lumber warehouses?

Nothing. The sea, where if we're lucky, we capture a walrus now and then, and maybe a whale. The sky which is dark half the year. And in this direction as far as the mind can reach, the tundra with not even a bush that could be burned.' In some agitation he led his new teacher into the bleak schoolhouse, which consisted of two large classrooms separated by a sturdy soundproof wall and a gymnasium much bigger than the rest of the school, a fact upon which she remarked.

'We need the gym. It's the heart of our community,' and then he began his instruction.

Pointing to a nail which had been hammered into place, he said: 'This nail, that strip of wood, that pane of glass, where do you suppose they came from? We didn't go down to the hardware store to buy them, because there is no hardware store. Every item in this building had to be ordered specially from Seattle, had to be ferried up here by barge.'

'I didn't know,' Kendra said, as if making an apology for her insensitivity. Afanasi bowed, accepting the courtesy, then took her by the arm and explained the real disadvantage of being at the far end of a barge line in the arctic: 'You must understand, Miss Scott, that the barge from Seattle comes only once a year, late August usually. So if the builder of this school wants nails, he must anticipate that need almost a year

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in advance, for if they miss the yearly barge, he must wait a second year. Costs rise under such a remorseless system.'

'Couldn't the builder bring the nails in by airplane?'

'Ah, you see the possibilities, and believe me, Miss Scott, that calculation will form a major problem for you. You'll mull that one a hundred times next year.'

'I don't understand.'

'You can fly in almost anything you need. But your cargo, the keg of nails, for example, must be crated and taken to the Anchorage airport. From there it's flown to Fairbanks.

There it transfers to the plane going to Prudhoe, where they're transshipped to Barrow.

And from there Rostkowsky, in his little Cessna, flies them over the tundra to here.

By barge the keg of nails, maybe thirty dollars. By airplane, maybe four hundred dollars.' He stared at her, allowing her time to digest this amazing discrepancy, and when it looked as if she understood, he pointed to various items which made the bleak school a little more congenial: 'We flew that in. We flew in the carved backboards for the basketball baskets. We flew in a great many things you'll appreciate, and in the end it cost nine million dollars.'

As he spoke she kept nodding her head, and her submission to the reality of Alaska was so genuine that he laughed and led her outside, where he pointed to the sixty concrete pilings on which the building stood: 'Why do you suppose we spend two million dollars to build those pillars before we lay a single board?'

'Floodwaters in the spring?'

'Permafrost four seasons of the year,' and he explained how, if a heavy structure was built flat on the ground, its accumulating heat would melt the permafrost and allow the building to sink right into the muck, then crack apart when the mud shifted.

He pointed to the Teacherage, in which she would be living: 'How much did it cost us to build that for you? Guess.'

When she was a child her family had lived in a modest house in Heber City and she remembered what it had cost, for her parents had agonized over what they considered an extravagance: sixteen thousand dollars. 'We had a house something like it in Utah,'

she said quietly. 'Sixteen thousand dollars.'

'We spent two hundred and ninety thousand ... so you could be comfortable when the winds howl,' and she saw that it had been built on a score of pillars.

'Did you make such decisions? As president of the board, or whatever?'

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'The president of the board is in Barrow. But he listens to my recommendations.'

'Didn't it cause you some . . . ?' She fumbled for the right word, because even though she had talked with Afanasi for less than ten minutes, she could see that he was a man of strong convictions, one upon whom she must depend in the years ahead.

'You mean, did I wonder if I'd done the right thing? Never. Not even one twinge of remorse. The North Slope is getting millions of unexpected dollars from Prudhoe Bay, and I persuaded our people that the best way to spend this windfall was on education.'

Leading her back to the Teacherage, he said with quiet pride: 'I gave a deposition in the Molly Hootch case.'

'The what?'

'A famous case in the Alaskan Supreme Court. Molly Hootch was a little Eskimo girl whose case clarified Alaskan law. Our constitution, which I helped write, said that every Alaskan child had the right to an education in his or her own community. But when I was young, if a child in a Native village wanted a secondary education, he had to leave home for a year at a time and go down to Sitka, and the emotional shock was fearful. The Molly Hootch consent decree changed all that, and now we have good schools all through the bleak regions, some with six students, some with twelve, but all with first-class teachers.'

'Is Desolation a Molly Hootch school?'

'We had a school of sorts here before the settlement. Molly Hootch provided us with the money to make it into a secondary school.'

'How many students do you have?' and she was amazed by the answer: 'In the high school, that's what you'll be teaching, three students, two boys and a girl. In the elementary school, that's where the principal, Kasm Hooker, and his wife . . . You'll like him, he's a teddy bear. He teaches the elementary school because he doesn't want the responsibility of the seniors who might know more than he does.'

'How many students do he and his wife have?'

'Grades one through eight, thirteen.'

Kendra was so astonished by these figures that she stopped short for a moment, and as Afanasi waited for her to catch up, she exclaimed: 'Sixteen students in a nine-million-dollar school?' and he said: 'That's Alaska. We put first things first.'

But a bigger surprise was in store for her, for when she and Afanasi returned to her apartment he pulled two chairs up to the built-in desk and shuffled through the papers that awaited .her there: 'Yes, here it is, and we're almost out of 956

time. But make out your order and I'll telephone it down to Seattle tomorrow. Just in time to catch the barge.'

Kendra understood not one word he was saying, but when he thrust before her a ninety-six-page catalogue, in fine print, she saw that it referred to groceries and household items like cleaners, toilet paper and toilet articles. 'Your supplies for the year. Ross & Raglan in Seattle have a branch that does nothing but ship goods north to people like you and me in the arctic,' and in the next two hours Kendra Scott, reared in civilized areas like Utah and Colorado, was inducted into life north of the Arctic Circle, because the time-tested R&R order forms covered everything that a normal individual or family might need during the next twelve months. In addition to the forms that dated back to the late 1890s, when Buchanan Venn compiled the first version, Kendra had the wise counsel of Vladimir Afanasi, who had helped several young teachers make out their first orders.

The amounts that Afanasi suggested staggered Kendra, who had been used to shopping twice a week for one person: 'Miss Scott, I firmly advise you to order four bushels of potatoes.'

'Where will I keep them?'

'In the cache,' and he rose, opened a door at the rear of the apartment, and showed her a storage room almost bigger than the room she was in: it was lined with shelves and had low platforms onto which barrels and kegs could be placed, and a super refrigerator for storing meats and frozen goods. It was not until she saw the endless shelving that she appreciated the task in which she was engaged: 'I've got to order enough food for an entire year!'

'Not exactly. Like with the nails. You can, when you run out of something, ask R&R

to ship it to you airmail. Can of sweet potatoes, two dollars in this order by barge, six dollars by air.'

When Kendra finished her list, Afanasi made a hasty calculation of the cost, and the barge bill came to about three thousand dollars. Kendra stared at the total, mouth gaping: 'I have no money to pay a bill like that,' and Afanasi said: That's why our school district pays you an advance right now ... today,' and he handed her a check drawn on the bank in Barrow for five thousand dollars.

As he was leaving, he stopped and indicated the apartment next door, the one occupied by the principal, Kasm Hooker: 'Many people consider him one of the best teachers on the North Slope, an opinion with which I concur. Early forties, long string bean, married to a woman who adores him, came to us from North Dakota who knows how many years ago.

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His greatest value, Miss Scott, and never forget this, is what he does with basketball.

Help him in that, and you'll make a grand contribution to our school.'

'He has a curious first name. Religious?'

'Oh, no. Hooker came from a very limited background. Not literary at all. In his first days in our school he referred to the ”chasm that lies ahead,”but he pronounced it with a soft

ch, the way you say church.

After he'd mispronounced it several times, for it was a word he relishedthe entire world, in his opinion, faced chasms of the most fearful kind one of his students came to me and said: ”Mr. Hooker . . . he talks about chasms but he says it wrong,'

so I had to come over to his room, he wasn't married then, and I told him outright: ”The word is

chasm, as if it was spelled kasm,”

and in his innocence when he met with his elementary classes next day he told them: ”Last night Mr. Afanasi was kind enough to tell me that what I was calling chasm is really kasm,”

and thereafter everyone in town called him Kasm Hooker. You'll hear them cheer him at the basketball games. He's worth every penny of the ninety-four thousand dollars we pay him.'

Kendra, amazed at this figure, asked: 'And how much does his wife get?' and Afanasi said: 'She's had years of experience. Forty-nine thousand dollars.' When he was gone, she totted up the salary schedule for her school, and when she saw the total, gasped: 'One hundred eighty-eight thousand dollars for sixteen children!' And she was not yet aware of the additional $22,000 paid the parttime Eskimo woman called a 'Recognized Expert”who tried to teach the students their Inupiat language, which they ignored in favor of English, or the $43,000 paid the janitor who kept the new building operating.

The grand total, which she would learn later, was $253,000, or nearly $16,000 per pupil just in salaries.

That night, the first in her new bed, she awakened at two-forty-five in the morning, sat bolt upright, and hurried to her desk, where the R&R order form lay flat beside its envelope. Grabbing a pen, she added in the ample space provided for Miscellaneousshelled pecans, eight pounds; heavy Karo syrup, eight one-quart cans; kumquats, one dozen cans. Then, feeling better, she returned to her bed and a sound sleep, even though it was bright daylight outside.

BY THE TIME SCHOOL OPENED IN THE FALL, KENDRA HAD

ingratiated herself with two-thirds of the families in Desolation, for she proved to them that she was an outgoing enthusiast who liked children and who respected the traditions of the