Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman
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is a small place with only about 350 people. A lot of the people are interrelated as cousins because in the beginning there were four Williams sisters who were here and got married. Not very many people have moved out, but they always stayed here and existed here. So we’re interrelated to a large extent and we have been helping each other survive over the years. It is not a transient community. The door is always open in my house and my relatives come in and out and they stop by for lunch and eat whatever we have.
In a small community like this everybody helps everybody. If we see people that need help we give them help. If they need food or they need water, if they need shelter, we’ve been able to prevent problems in our community for a long time. There is a sense of family, a sense of being together and supporting each other.
People might be surprised by this, but in summer it can get up to eighty or ninety degrees. Not every day, but it can. That would be June or July, not usually August. Temperature year-round averages about fifty degrees, so it is pretty cold in the winter. Winter comes early compared to what the calendar says in other places, but it used to come earlier. Over the last fifty years I think I have seen climate change. When I was young fall was in early September and by the end of September we would see the river freeze. Now it’s like late October or mid-November.
I’d also say that about twenty or thirty years ago we used to see a lot more snow. We seem to be seeing less and less. Still, our winter is much more winter than most people around the United States get, for sure. When it’s really cold in Akiak it can be between minus sixty and minus seventy. It does get that cold, but we still have to do things. I’ve got to put on my parka and go out and feed the dogs.
I know when the average person in the Lower 48 hears those temperatures they shiver. They wonder how we could function and do anything at all. They ask how we put up with it, why don’t we stay in the house. That’s the way that people think.
You have to have good clothing and some good protection for the dogs. You have to be protected from the cold and the wind. But we just can’t afford to stay home and not do anything. Maybe if it was for one day, but not more than that.
When it is that cold our snowmachines won’t start. Before we had snowmachines when it was extremely cold, we went out by dog team. They didn’t mind going out at any time. And they never broke down. Even when it was so cold we had to go out to chop wood and haul it. We went between five miles and twenty miles from home to chop spruce. It was very dry.
I was seven years old when I started going out with someone in the family to chop wood. Then I went on my own with my friend Willie Lake. In the winter we had a team of five to seven dogs and a saw. We went out, cut the wood, filled the sled, and came back. I learned about Alaska huskies from an early age. When we wanted to go visit someone in another village the dogs were our mode of transportation, not snowmachines, at least not in the 1960s.
Snowmachines started showing up in the 1970s and that’s when our life changed. Everybody in Akiak had dogs then, but after the snowmachine arrived they got rid of a lot of them. There are probably four families in Akiak now that still have dogs. We have a kennel of about fifty or sixty dogs. We have always, consistently, had dogs. My family has had dogs as far back as I can remember. Now it is me and Mike Jr.
Another chore that I had as a kid was to haul water. It came from the Kuskokwim River. My dad made a kind of well and we’d pump out the well. We also got blocks of ice from the river and melted them.
When I was a kid sprint mushing was a big thing in the Alaska villages. Everyone had races and it was the biggest thing to do in the winter, the best entertainment. There were a lot of winter carnivals—there are still some—and the featured event was always the dog races. They included kids, so when I was a little boy my first races were with three or five dogs in the villages. Akiak held them, but there were races all over the area in Bethel, Tuluksak, Kwethluk, everywhere. They took turns each winter.
CHAPTER 2
When I think back to early in my life I think of a lot of good times. One thing we did when it was break-up and the ice was melting was go swimming. It wasn’t in the river, but in these giant puddles. I remember playing with friends every day, going hunting and fishing. Sometimes we chopped wood for the Elders and just hung out.
John Egoak was one of my best friends. He was the oldest one and he knew more things. We were actually three best friends, me, John, and Willie Lake, but John showed us things. He showed how they made the log cabins and how they filled in the cracks with moss from the tundra. He also showed us how he built his strength. He was really strong. He teased us, I guess. He took some of the moss and rolled it up into a cigarette. Then he lit it up and smoked that moss and said, “This is the reason I am so strong. What I am smoking makes me strong. If you smoke this, you will become strong, too.” And we believed him. So we tried it and coughed like heck. It did not make us strong. We got very sick.
John has passed away. Willie works in Bethel. He’s an optician who has been doing that for over thirty years.
When I started elementary school in grades kindergarten through fourth grade, we had a teaching staff from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was a two-room school, one for those grades and one for fifth grade through eighth grade. We had another room for that. There was one teacher in each room for all of the grades. It was an interesting setup. I think there were about ten kids in my class all of the way from kindergarten through eighth grade. That was my group.
One boy, John Jasper, was born a day after I was, so we basically grew up together and I became really close with his parents. John grew up in a traditional Eskimo family where his parents did not speak any English and he grew up in a traditional way. I stopped by his house every day to walk to school with him. He was sort of a quiet guy, but he was very bright. John was not a very big person physically. He could think things through and he was very smart.
I always cherished his parents, especially his mother. She would tell us the rules for living and to have a strong faith in God. His dad was a quiet guy, Willie Jasper. He was always driving his dog team. He also taught us about how to set fish traps under the ice in November about four or five miles from Akiak. He was an expert and my brother Walter and I would hang around with him. He would hitch up his dogs and we would hitch up our dogs and we took off after him. The fish traps were three feet by three feet by ten feet in size. The real name of the fish we trapped is burbot, but we called them lush fish. I don’t know why.
I learned how to hunt by going out with my dad and brother Frankie. They were hunting for moose and took me along. They always got their moose. Mostly I was traveling with them. We had a canoe that we used on the lakes when we were trapping muskrat and hunting ducks at the same time.
From the beginning I was a good shot with a rifle. I had to be. You have to learn and you have to gain experience, but I was a good shot. Maybe it was because Frankie taught me. He was the best shot. When I was a young boy the best part of it all was being able to go out on a hunt with my father and older brother. It was a good feeling that they trusted me to come along. It meant a lot. They made me confident in myself. Doing those things built confidence. I learned how to set up camps and about survival. Once I knew how to hunt I knew I was going to be able to survive because I would have something to eat. It was a case of knowing that I could always go back home with something.
It was also a good feeling to understand that they were preparing me to survive on my own and teaching me how to provide for the family. My dad was with me more than anything on these trips, especially on fishing trips. He showed me how to fish, where to fish, and what the best times of day were to fish. It was the same with hunting. You had to get up really early when we went hunting, about four o’clock in the morning. Boy, it was hard to get up. A lot of kids don’t like that, but I always woke up. The smell of coffee was good and maybe we ate pound cakes.
I had learned about those lush fish traps with Willie Jasper. He showed us exactly how to do it, how to set it, how to make the trap. That was a big help to me and Walter. The Jasper family also came to the same spring