Page 63 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

I had taught myself to play. A few of us airmen gathered at a girl’s house after church
where the family had made an ice skating pond in the backyard by placing boards
around it and flooding it with water. This had been done a month earlier, and it was
now solid ice.

For our second week of training, we went to an Arctic Training school. It was much
like our basic training at Lackland, but it was much more timely considering the part of
the world we were now located. We started getting a little snow nearly every day in
mid-November. It was just enough to cover everything with a coat of white. Prior to
that, the whiteness was only from frost forming on all the fir trees. Around November
20, the temperature rose to 46 degrees and melted most of the snow, but at night the
temperature dipped into the 20’s and everything was coated with ice. The days were
getting shorter and it started getting dark around 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

For my third week at Elmendorf, I was assigned to guard duty. We got our guns and
went to our posts for an hour of practice. Sometimes we wore helmets, canteens, and
weapons to keep in shape in case of attack. One night I was issued a nice stuffed parka
with long nylon “hairs” protruding forward around the hood to keep the frigid air from
freezing my face. The temperature had dropped to around 5 degrees, barely above zero.
Two days later, I took a hike in about two feet of snow and took a picture along a creek
that was frozen, except for a thin blue streak of water in the middle. On the next day, I
had 14 hours of KP duty. The work was not too hard, and I enjoyed eating hot dogs for
lunch, and roast beef for dinner. I always loved the ice cream bars for dessert; in fact, so
much that I even bought a couple more from a few guys that didn’t eat theirs.

The best food we had here in Alaska was fish! I loved the Red Salmon and Trout. The
Rainbow Trout was seldom smaller than 10 pounds. They say you don’t even need bait
to catch them. Just attach a piece of bright colored cloth on a hook, and they’ll bite. On
the first day of December, the sun went down at 2:35 in the afternoon. It didn’t come up
until 9:35 the next morning. The sun stays so close to the horizon that it looks like a
sunset all day. We only had four more days of schooling and finally, it didn’t seem
unusual to walk back from school at 4 PM in the dark.

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