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

35 страница из 77

The same thing continued at the Wrangell Institute for a year. We looked at pictures of Dick and Jane and we knew we didn’t look like that or act like that. I’ll never forget an instructor teaching us what a “curb” was. We didn’t have paved streets in Akiak, never mind sidewalks with a curb. It seemed like a long year. I didn’t really want to be there. It was not something I had expected to do. There was some value in the curriculum. The math skills and working on the English language, I got something out of those. They helped me. That was definitely preparation for secondary education.

But there were also long periods of homesickness. You cried. I was a teenager in 1968. My family didn’t have a telephone in Akiak so I couldn’t talk to them. We never spoke. We communicated by letter only. We were completely cut off except by letter. They were far away. Wrangell was a hard place to be for a lot of kids and we lost out on parenting. They deprived us of our loving parents and our way of life. I missed hunting and fishing. It was different to have to follow all of those rules and regulations in boarding school and having to march around.