Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery. The Extraordinary Story of Alaska Musher Mike Williams Sr. онлайн

15 страница из 77

The Williams name came from a family in Akiak. My great-grandmother Lena got married to Waska Williams, who was from the Yukon. The village was a small place and sometimes cousins fell in love with one another. One grandmother, Elizabeth Kawagley, fell in love with her first cousin Peter Williams, but because they were too close in the same family the only way they could get married was to go out into the Gulf of Alaska. My mother’s name is Helena Lomack Williams. There are special rules if first cousins get married: they have to do it away from the community. They ended up going to Kodiak and from there they went out to the Gulf of Alaska and got married outside of the land and on the water. They were my grandparents.

I was actually born in a log cabin right next to the Kuskokwim River. It was our family home at that time that my dad built. He had some help, but he mostly built it himself. He got logs from upriver and hauled them to Akiak or he found other logs nearby. A lot of people did that in the 1950s and earlier. People built their own homes here. There was no housing authority and there were no houses around here like the modern kind you would see now. People just made them out of logs.