Sweet Home Alaska

by Carole Estby Dagg

  Mother stood and held out her hands for the nightgown and rubbed it against her cheek. “Is there anything softer than new flannel? I hate to get into it after five days on the train without a proper wash, though.”

  Pop opened a side door and peeked in. “I think this will make you happy then,” he said. “Ta-da! Your own private bathtub, my lady.” He bowed.

  Mother tiptoed toward the opened door, as if afraid she might make the bathroom disappear if she made a sound. “Yes,” she said. “I’m going to soak for an hour in hot water and put on a clean nightgown and sleep for twelve hours in a clean bed.”

  Meanwhile, the twins had already eaten all the candy. Except for what Terpsichore ate, of course.

  • • •

  The next day at least two thousand people crowded the dock to see them off at the Bell Street terminal. Seattle had prepared a royal send-off.

  The twins bounced like they were on pogo sticks. “We’re famous, aren’t we, Mom? Everyone wants to see us!”

  High school girls handed out picture books, toys, and apples. Men in band uniforms milled around at the edge of the crowd, testing their instruments.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” Pop said again and again as he elbowed his way closer to the ship where the Alaska-bound passengers waited to load.

  Photographers motioned for families to move closer together for photographs, and everywhere she looked, Terpsichore saw microphones labeled NBC and CBS. The whole country would be hearing about the Johnsons and the other families going to Alaska!

  On the other edge of the crowd, Terpsichore saw the boy from the railway car. He was watching the crane load piles of lumber and huge crates with POTATOES stenciled on the side. High above their heads, a crane plucked up one crate at a time and swung it over to the gaping loading door of the St. Mihiel. Somewhere in those hundreds of crates piled high on the dock, Tigger was probably howling for Terpsichore to rescue her. Poor kitty didn’t care about being a part of a historic event. She just wanted her own place on Terpsichore’s bed again.

  As pioneers started to board, a man standing next to a newsreel camera narrated in his official, deep, announcer voice. “And there they go, folks, brave families walking up the gangplank to their new lives, courtesy of one of President Roosevelt’s programs to take families off public relief and start anew as Alaska pioneers!” After a moment, he motioned for the cameraman to stop cranking the camera, but gave the signal to roll again when he spotted Cally and Polly.

  The twins had found a clear spot near the edge of the crowd, fluffed out their skirts, and set their mouths in little-girl pouts. Terpsichore knew that warm-up routine. Cally and Polly were about to break into their performance of “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”

  For Christmas, Grandmother had sent train tickets so they could visit her in Madison. She also treated the family to the movies. The twins sat through three showings of Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes and memorized every gesture. Now, all fifty-six ringlets on each head bobbed just like Shirley Temple’s, and their hands moved in exactly the same patterns Shirley Temple had used in the movie. Their voices were pure and sweet. Who could resist watching them? Two photographers with large box cameras moved in for still pictures. Then several moving picture cameras rolled forward on tripods. Cally and Polly might be in all the newsreels!

  As one of the cameramen swept his camera over the rest of the crowd, Terpsichore stood on her tiptoes behind everyone else crowding in to be included in the newsreel and waved. Her hand in a newsreel. That was probably as close as she would ever come to being famous.

  If Eileen saw the newsreel, she’d see the twins for sure, but she’d have no way of knowing that somewhere in the crowd, Terpsichore was waving good-bye to her.

  Their moment of fame over, the Johnsons walked up the gangplank.

  The twins weren’t the only ones trying to get in the newsreel—a man with a harmonica and another one with a guitar took up positions at the top of the gangplank. Terpsichore recognized the tune. It was Gene Autry’s version of “Springtime in the Rockies,” but they had changed the words. Terpsichore laughed along with the crowd at the new words: “When it’s springtime in Alaska and it’s ninety-nine below . . . Where the berries grow like pumpkins and a cabbage fills a truck . . . We want to make a new start somewhere without delay. So, here we are, Alaska, AND WE HAVE COME TO STAY!”

  • • •

  Just before sail-away, Terpsichore took two rolled-up streamers from a basket on deck. She held onto one end of each, then threw the rest of the rolls down to be caught by someone on the pier. The air was quickly filled with spools of yellow, blue, and pink streamers. The deck of the St. Mihiel began to vibrate with the engines and the ship gave out three long, deep bellows. The loose streamers grew taut as tugboats nudged the ship out of its slot. Terpsichore stretched her arms over the rail, trying to delay the moment when her streamers would snap, but she couldn’t prevent the inevitable. First one, then the other snapped and the broken ends fell limply into the water. The Seattle docks and the pyramid-topped Smith Tower grew smaller and smaller as the ship edged out of the harbor.

  In newsreels and movies, ship passengers had private staterooms and dressed for dinner as if they were going to a ball. Terpsichore quickly realized that the St. Mihiel was not that kind of ship. Pop and all the fathers and older boys were herded off to a dormitory in the bow. Terpsichore, her mother, sisters, and baby Matthew were herded to a vast open area that would house nearly all the women and children. Matthew added his distressed howls to those of all the other babies.

  Terpsichore looked at the rows and rows of triple bunk beds. Only one of those triple bunks was for the Johnsons. Mother collapsed on the bottom bunk with Matthew, patting his back to settle him down.

  Cally and Polly were still bouncy after being photographed by real moving picture cameras. “We call dibs on the middle bunk!” they singsonged. They slid into their slot to try it out.

  Terpsichore clambered from her mother’s bunk to the twins’ bunk to reach the third tier. She closed her eyes to shut out the chaos around her, but she couldn’t close her ears. Nearly seventy mothers and over one hundred children, including fifty-nine babies, would be crammed for the whole trip like sardines in a can. Mother slid cautiously out of bed and handed Matthew up to Terpsichore so she could tuck the long edge of a blanket under the edge of Terpsichore’s top mattress to tent in the two bunks below. “A little better,” she said.

  Terpsichore bounced gently, testing the thin mattress.

  Two sets of fingers poked into her back from below. “Stop it! You’ll squish us!”

  Terpsichore leaned over her bunk to see for herself. The springs supporting her mattress were particularly stretchy. She wasn’t squishing her sisters, at least as long as they stayed perfectly flat on their own mattresses, but if she bounced and Cally or Polly chose that moment to roll over, they would collide.

  Terpsichore leaned over and shook the blanket divider to get her mother’s attention. “Where are our pillows?”

  “I heard we’re supposed to use our life preservers as pillows,” Mother said.

  Terpsichore heard a high-pitched toddler’s voice. “Is this to pee in?” Terpsichore leaned over to see what he was referring to. It was a five-gallon lard bucket.

  Another voice answered. “It’s to throw up in. Each family has its very own.” Apparently having your own upchuck bucket was the St. Mihiel’s definition of luxury.

  Although the first night out was fairly calm, Terpsichore couldn’t sleep. Somewhere toward one of the mess halls, she could hear someone strumming a guitar. More folks had learned the new words to “Springtime in Alaska,” as they now called it, and Terpsichore mouthed the words along with them.

  The next night was worse. The sea heaved, the ship pitched, buckets and suitcases slid, and unlatched doors slammed. The twins were suggestible—if one upchucked, the other follo
wed soon after in sympathy. “It’s their sensitive, artistic temperament,” Mother whispered.

  For once Terpsichore was glad she didn’t have a sensitive, artistic temperament. Her mother, Cally, and Polly were still moaning in their beds in the morning, but you wouldn’t catch Terpsichore getting seasick. She was going to be strong and optimistic, just like President Roosevelt wanted her to be. Although the deck was wet with spray, she spent the morning breathing fresh air and watching for whales.

  At noon, the captain reported over the loudspeaker that they’d be heading into “a little chop,” and he ordered all passengers to leave the open deck and stay inside. From a window one deck up from their sleeping quarters, Terpsichore watched the storm. The ship hit twelve-foot-high swells, and the front end of the boat rose at the angle of a flight of stairs and everything not nailed down went sliding. And then, like jumping off a cliff, the front end smacked down with a jolt.

  As she watched, the boy with the sled dog sidled up. “Seasick people are usually described as green,” he said, “but I’d say you are more pale yellow than green. You’ll find that you can minimize the effects of seasickness if you face forward or back and look at the horizon, which stays relatively in place, rather than to the side, where motion is more apparent.”

  Since she was not being climbed by a cat with claws out at this meeting, she had a better look at him. He was short, with sandy hair and features too big for his face: a nose he would have to grow into; a big mouth, literally and figuratively. Even his eyes were too big, or maybe it was just the magnifying effect of his glasses. And those braces! Terpsichore winced to think what it must feel like to wear them.

  “I see you’re admiring my brilliant dental appliances.”

  “Don’t they hurt?” Terpsichore asked.

  “They do when Dad tightens the arch wire.”

  For the first time, she felt sorry for this strange kid instead of annoyed.

  “Mendel Theodore Peterson,” he said, holding out a hand.

  Terpsichore didn’t let go of the windowsill to shake his hand. “Terpsichore Elizabeth Johnson.” That would be one advantage of the move. In Alaska she could reinvent herself and finally escape her horrible nickname. “Terpsichore,” she said. “As in—”

  “I know, I know, the Muse of Dance,” he said.

  Terpsichore narrowed her eyes. “How did you know that?”

  Mendel smirked. “You’re not the only kid on this ship who knows Greek mythology. And my name, Mendel, is for—”

  “The composer Mendelssohn?” Terpsichore wanted to show he wasn’t the only one who knew his composers.

  “No,” he said. “Gregor Mendel, the guy with the twentynine thousand pea plants. The guy who figured out how two parents with brown eyes could have a blue-eyed baby.”

  “I knew that,” Terpsichore said. “The reason I guessed Mendelssohn first is that my mother used to teach piano.”

  “And my mother used to teach botany, so I got stuck with ‘Mendel.’ Anyway, since I read up on sea travel in the library before I left, I’ve been able to minimize seasickness. At least I didn’t toss my cookies.”

  “Toss your cookies?”

  “Puke, vomit, upchuck, retch, heave, spit up, spew up, disgorge, be sick to one’s stomach, be nauseated, return your breakfast, or blow your lunch.”

  “Stop!” Terpsichore said. “Just the words . . .” Who ever knew there were so many ways to say throwing up? All the same, she couldn’t quite control the grin that quivered at the corners of her mouth.

  “I should check up on my mother and sisters,” she said. “They’ve been too busy tossing their cookies to leave their bunks.”

  “You catch on to the lingo fast,” Mendel said. “See you.”

  Terpsichore gagged as she climbed down the stairs into the dormitory. Not everyone had made it to the slop buckets, and they were too sick to clean it up. Trying to hold her breath, she mopped up the area around their bunks.

  “Thanks,” Mother whispered. She tried to roll out of her bunk to help, but groaned and leaned back on the bed.

  “Still pukey?”

  Mother moaned. “I’m nauseous, not ‘pukey,’” she corrected. No one as refined as Terpsichore’s mother would do anything as crude as “puke.” She paused to spit into the bucket again. “A touch of mal de mer.” She rolled back on the bunk.

  Matthew was restless in his own crate beside the bunk beds. Terpsichore changed his diaper, since doing it might make her mother throw up again. She felt better staying busy, so she played nurse, fetching small cups of ginger ale and soda crackers from the cook.

  By the fourth day, everything Terpsichore owned had been upchucked on. The captain called their journey the worst crossing of the Gulf of Alaska he had ever seen.

  Terpsichore was on the deck with most of the other passengers when the St. Mihiel pulled into the harbor at Seward. After a bone-rattling crunch and ear-splitting squeal of the ship against the wood of the dock supports, the engines went silent and the vibration under Terpsichore’s feet halted.

  Careening into the dock—what a way to announce their arrival in Alaska.

  CHAPTER 9

  Landing in Alaska

  TERPSICHORE WATCHED HER FATHER WALK DOWN THE gangplank to the dock. He would travel ahead on the first trains to Palmer with the other men. Tomorrow they would each draw a number from a box that would decide where in Palmer they would make their home.

  The next morning, the train returned for the women and children. After a stop in Anchorage, they were finally on the last leg of the journey to their new home. Terpsichore jostled with her sisters for window space. After miles and miles of unpromising land with stunted evergreens, they entered a gradually widening, more promising valley with dense bushes and birch, spruce, and poplar trees.

  • • •

  It was midnight when the train arrived in Palmer. Terpsichore was surprised there was still enough light to see that beyond the rows of tents, jumbled stacks of cut-down trees lay like abandoned games of pick-up sticks played by giants.

  Somewhere in the throng of men hunkered down along the tracks in the rain and mud, Pop was waiting for them. Terpsichore’s breath fogged up the window, so she pushed the latches on either side and tugged it down to see better. Mother nudged her aside and leaned out the window, disregarding the rain. She waved. “Mr. Johnson! Harald!”

  A nurse tapped Mother on the shoulder. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to close the window. We’ve discovered another case of measles aboard, so we’re going to keep everyone in the train tonight until we’ve had a chance to check everyone again.”

  “Not again,” Cally and Polly whined.

  Terpsichore felt like whining too. Measles was plaguing them to death.

  The nurse slid the window back up. “You’re just as well off here anyway. The CCC—that’s Civilian Conservation Corps—crews are a little behind schedule and the tents for this group aren’t finished yet. At least here you’ll be warm and dry.”

  Mother snapped the window shut. “They don’t even have tents for us yet?”

  She continued to mutter through clenched teeth until Terpsichore pounded on the window. “There’s Pop!”

  He elbowed his way through the crowd and they shouted to each other through the glass, their faces inches from each other. Pop blew everyone kisses and Mother cried.

  Soon after that, a nurse came through the train car with blankets. Terpsichore leaned against her mother on the bench seat opposite the twins.

  Outside, campfires still burned in the eerie twilight that passed for a late spring night up north. Row upon row of white tents reflected the light of moon and stars and the top sliver of sun that still hovered behind the mountains. Snuggled up against her mother, Terpsichore finally slept to the hum of a harmonica and a few stalwarts determined not to sleep, singing “When it’s springtime in A
laska . . .” She was beginning to get sick of the song.

  Later the next morning the nurse was back again, checking for fevers and spots. They passed inspection and were free!

  “Yay! I can get Tigger,” Terpsichore said.

  Mother looked out the window at hundreds of fathers and families trying to find each other. “I don’t see your father yet, so you might as well get Tigger now. Meet us right back here at this passenger car.”

  Terpsichore darted out the door to the baggage car to fetch Tigger. The only other animals left were a family of ducks she’d heard someone’s family was saving for Christmas dinner if they didn’t get too attached to them.

  With Tigger’s cage banging her shins, Terpsichore stepped down from the car and inhaled. Besides new tent canvas and spring cottonwoods, she smelled mud. Acres of mud, with rough planks serving as make-do sidewalks through the muck. But above the mud, mountains tipped in snow bordered the valley on two sides. So this was Alaska!

  Over the noise of the sawmill and diesel Caterpillar tractors growling their way over the tracts to pull stumps, a thousand people were still calling out names, trying to get families back together. “Lars?” “Henry—over here!” “Rachel!” “Margaret!” “Agnes!” Tigger added her own calls, which Terpsichore took to mean “Where are we? When can I get out?”

  “Soon,” she said. “We have to get back to Mom and Pop.”

  Terpsichore was relieved to see both her parents by their railroad car. Pop held Mother’s hand, pointing out the freight yard stretched out alongside the tracks with piles of lumber, stacks of steel pipe, and heaps of kitchen sinks.

  “We’re going to take this wilderness right into the twentieth century in a matter of months, and we’ll all be part of it!” he said. Mother looked less enthusiastic as she tried to avoid ruining her shoes in the mud on the way to the huge map of the colony.

  Pop slid off the rubber band coiled around the slip of paper he’d drawn out of a box in yesterday’s lottery. Terpsichore bumped her father’s hand with her head as she leaned over to read the tract number and legal description that was their future. Seventy-seven. Did that sound like a lucky number?