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

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I was fifteen years old and I had spent my whole life in Akiak. I was in a close family with all of those brothers and sisters and I had to say good-bye to them. I had grown up hunting, fishing, and berry picking and gathering and then I was by myself in Wrangell. Not completely by myself, though, because there were other kids at the school from villages who were just like me, who were in the same situation.

When we got to Wrangell, though, right from the beginning our joke was that we had been sent to prison. This was all to thoroughly prepare us for high school somewhere else. It was the next level of our education. We had a good math teacher and a good language arts teacher. Something else they did at the Wrangell Institute was to show us how to use a telephone. In those days there weren’t any telephones in the Alaska Bush, never mind cell phones. We didn’t have landlines in the Bush. We didn’t really know what a telephone looked like when we first got there.

Learning things was the good part, but there was a lot about being sent to Wrangell that was not much fun. Right away they gave us haircuts and cut our hair short, too. Then they sent us to showers to clean up. In the beginning it was all very unpleasant and a shock to us. We had to march around like soldiers, like little soldiers, divided into age groups and grade groups. We were supposed to march everywhere we went.