Bering Christmas:
It was late December and we’d had a storm. This was not your average storm, but a storm driving freezing rain with hurricane strength. It came during the night and coated the north end of the school in a solid sheet of ice. The strength of the wind pushed the north side of the building causing the building to flex like a parallelogram. The school maintenance man braved the storm to ask us to come up to his place until it was over, we didn’t…we would now.
The wind was compressed as it passed through the Bering Strait. It produced a sound as it flowed around the building that I had never heard before, it was the sound of being in the belly of the beast. It was the experience of being inside a massive river of air at full song.
In the morning we went outside to survey the damage, we were greeted by the sight of our radio antenna in pieces on the ground. The ice had built up on it until it looked like a white coaxial cable, then it had shattered into dozens of pieces. It was our only contact with the outside world. We had planned to attempt a radio/phone patch to hear our parent’s voices at Christmas. It was not to be.
Our school advisory board has told us it was traditional for the school to close between Christmas and New Years. School shaped our lives as we lived upstairs over the school and kids would be with us all day and often in our quarters in the evening visiting. We were looking forward to the holiday, but we were feeling a bit isolated.
Our moods started to lift that afternoon when we had a visit from our maintenance man’s wife. She was painfully shy, having lived her entire life on Diomede. She had brought two pairs of gloves she had knitted for us.
“You must not dance with your hands not covered.” She said.
“Dance?”
“Yes, with the drums tonight.”
Becky and I looked at each other. We turned and thanked her profusely and each tried on our pair of gloves.
“How is the dance done?” Becky inquired.
There upon we received our impromptu dance lesson.
That night the people of the village, a little over a hundred people, gathered at the school house seated in neat rows, the men on the right and the women on the left. Becky and I sat at the back of the room, her on the left, me on the right. We’re fast learners.
In front were three drummers. Their drums consisted of animal skin stretched over a hoop wider than than a man. It had a single handle on the bottom. The drum was held up in front of their face and was played by striking it with a thin long rod.
Once the drummer had established a beat, the men would start the singing. It was ancient music used to tell the stories of their lives. Songs of celebration when they had taken a whale or played to mourn someone lost. They played as small tendrils of cold white air seeped in around the window frames like ghosts of midwinters past. Even not knowing the words it carried you away, connecting you with a past world.
After several songs set the tone, people began to dance and act out the music. The women wore fur lined kuspuk, a hooded over dress, and gloves. The men their best clothes saved for the occasion. The dancing seemed like it would go on for ever and we were starting to feel as though, thankfully, they had forgotten us. They hadn’t. The drums ended one song with the three rapid beats…and a room full of heads turned toward us. There was no option, we got up, gloves in hand, and walked up the aisle between the men on the right, women on the left.
The music started…we danced, keeping time with the music. As it rose, we danced harder..and as it grew softer, we slowed. Once more it grew louder and anticipating the three beats marking the end of the song we gave a small jump, landing on the last beat and then silence. Then laugher and applause. Apparently the jump at the end and getting the timing right had saved the game for us. It both amused them and ended the evening on a high note. They had saved the last dance for us.
We went to bed that night feeling more uplifted. We had taken part and given it our best shot and it seemed to have gone a long way into becoming a part of the community.
The next night was Christmas Eve and a pinocle tournament. They had saved one carton of cigarettes for this event and it was a prize beyond money. The last cigarettes had been smoked sometime in October. The village shaman morphed into heath aid informed me I was to be his partner. He figured I was about the only man on the island that didn’t smoke and after we won, the prize would be all his.
The way the game worked was that each pair kept their own score at the table. We would play four hands, the winners standing and moving to the next table. I began to notice a point gain between the standing up and sitting down again in our favor by a good margin. I started to inquire, but the shaman’s look told me not to bother.
We played hard, every trick taken a small triumph. Finally, it was all over and the points totals were being written on the chalk board. I knew that our score had been wildly inflated. It didn’t matter, we lost. The fact that we lost made me laugh inside. I think that being a “skilled” score keeper was just an accepted part of the game, and someone else had done better at it than my partner.
While I was playing pinocle, Becky was sitting on the floor with a deck of cards in her hand with all the other women of the village playing snerts. Snerts is like a community solitaire where you play on everyone else’s cards. It is a high speed game that caused a joyous cacophony of squeals and shouts ending in raucous laughter when someone played their last card and yelled “Snerts!”
After the games I dragged out the box of toys that Captain Mo from the North Star III had collected for the village kids and gave it to the village leaders to distribute to the kids. Each present had a kids name on it with a half a dozen spares in case someone had moved to the island since Mo had gotten his list from the BIA in Nome.
I don’t know if the village was aware of it, but they had driven away our blues by fully including us in their traditions. We went to sleep that night in good spirits, still completely cut off from the outside world.
The next morning we got up and got into the storage space under the eves and pulled out the box that had been patiently waiting for us since it came ashore from the North Star III. Our family and friends had gotten together in August and wrapped presents for us. Our friends Jon and Barb and taken a picture of them holding up a sign saying “Merry Christmas.” I have to admit my vision got a bit blurry.
One of the gifts had been a Hickory Farms assortment that we set aside to be eaten on New Years.
Later in the morning the women of the village gathered in the school kitchen to prepare the community Christmas Day meal. Their chatter and laughter filled the school while Becky and I helped convert the large school room into a huge dining room. There were a couple of frozen turkeys lovingly saved for the occasion along with seal and walrus.
These were the months where there was no alcohol in the village and that in itself was a blessing because everyone gathered together for the meal in warm friendship. During the meal people would stand and publicly give gifts. These gifts normally had some significance to them and were met with laughter and applause.
We were surprised when someone stood up and cried I need those two gussaq dancers. All the eyes turned toward us. We were the only two gussaq on the island. White folk. We went forward.
“No children” Andrew our cook cried out. “You are married and have no children. I have decided you need children so I am giving you this gift.”
He opened the package and took out a huge oosik. The entire room erupted into laughter. He handed it to us jointly. We had the good sense to have red faces as we accepted it. It must have worked because the next Chrismas Nathan arrived on the scene.
We were gifted several other things including ivory carvings, fishing sticks and Eskimo slippers, but the most poignant gift was to come a few days later.
Our men had met their cousins from Russia in the fall while hunting walrus, away from the prying eyes of the Soviet lookouts on top of Big Diomede. They had agreed to meet again at Christmas time on the ice between the two islands. When they returned from this holiday clandestine meeting, they brought with them a gift from the Russian school teacher on the mainland. It consisted of a few candies, like salt water taffy, a package of Sputnik cigarettes, some plastic clothes pins and some cards. It was what she could spare for those teachers she knew were living on that island on the American side.
I still have that gift today and have included a picture of it. We sent back that Hickory Farms selection we’d received.
The time between Christmas and the New Year were filled with Eskimo games, cards, and a warm sense of community in a world completely surrounded by snow and ice, totally isolated from the rest of the world.
After not being able to raise us on the radio for two weeks our boss send a message to us on the two Nome radio stations, KNOM and KICY, “Diomede, please come up on the radio.” Eventually we hauled out the National Guard radio and managed to get a message through that we’d lost our antenna in a storm. A few days later when the weather cleared an airplane flew low over the island and pushed out a box that dropped onto the frozen ice in front of the school. It has a complete antenna with the ropes needed to attach it.
It would be another month before the villagers would get enough of the ice in front of the school cleared for a landing strip so planes could finally land. We had been completely cut off from the rest of the world for almost six months. Yet in spite of that, we’d had the best Christmas ever.
