Moving from the Arctic to the Tropics
Going South
Through the latter portion of my elementary school years, and on up into high school, I got to enjoy the amazing and rather extreme weather conditions of living in the interior of Alaska. My parents were moved to Fairbanks, a small city about one hundred twenty miles south of the Arctic Circle, to take on the pastoral role of “Commanding Officer” for the local Salvation Army church. Since we kids were all in junior high or elementary school, my brother, sister, and I got to tag along for the six year ride. As the summer of our arrival was both pleasant and warm we figured this whole “frozen arctic” thing would be no big deal. Then it got dark, and cold, and we found out that the summers of twenty-four hour sunlight came at a pretty steep price! One year we had so much snow that most houses were completely buried in it! My last year in Fairbanks saw the temperature looking up to see sixty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The day I left, five months later, the temperature was ninety-one.
As challenging as life was in the arctic climate, I really did enjoy myself. I had a lot of fun at school in Fairbanks. When there is very little to do for a very long time, education and the associated extracurricular activities become incredibly easy opportunities to take advantage of. Academically, I was on pace to have my first two years of college completed by the time I graduated from 12th grade. In my first year of high school, the last time my siblings and I would share the same school, I found myself taking the same English Composition class as my brother. My sister and I played in the schools Symphonic Band, and got to compete in the Pacific Basin Band Festival in Honolulu, Hawaii! In the spring I was encouraged to submit two of my pieces of artwork to the states Scholastic Art Competition, where they placed well and were forwarded to the National competition in New York! I was king of the world at the top of the world!
The spring of my heady freshman year brought me the news that I was about to be moved again. This time we were not going elsewhere in the United States, as had been the case previously. My parents had requested the chance to go overseas, expecting perhaps a school or orphanage in Korea, or some exotic location where we would have to learn another language, or live in conditions my arctic acclimated mind could not comprehend. Our marching orders had us heading one hundred eighty miles east of Florida, to The Bahamas. Not what we were expecting. We were going south, but not to far.
In the heat of an mid-August morning my parents, sister, and I anxiously disembarked the first propeller driven airliner I had ever flown, wearing our slightly flight-disheveled Salvation Army uniforms. My brother had enlisted in the Navy, and was making his way through a new adventure of his own. Nothing around me looked familiar. The trees were different. Gone were the tall pines and white birch trees I had seen for years; gone the quiet forests of the North. Now from the distant tree line of unfamiliar Ironwood, fat coconut Palms, and spiky palmetto's there roared a distant drone of angry buzzing that I could not place. As we stepped across the hot tarmac of Nassau International Airport towards the covered walkway leading to the airport concourse, a portly gentlemen, also garbed in the familiar Salvation Army uniform, strode out to greet us with a large open-toothed grin and a friendly squint against the morning sun. Give him a red suit and he could have been Santa Clause on his summer vacation!
“'ello, 'ou mus' be Mai-jor Gilis!” I could not understand a word he said. “I'm Bert Malone, you' Corps Sargent Major.” OK, so his name was Bert. After that I was lost.
Bert stood roughly 6 foot 2 inches tall, was balding and round. He strode through the airport taking us quickly and deftly through the Customs and Immigration kiosks with the air of one who does not have to worry about such things. He gracefully handled the baggage inspector to wave us through with only a cursory examination of our bags. He seemed to know everyone, and they knew him. Bert was a magic key taking us through doors that the tourists in line behind us could only anxiously gaze at as they awaited their four days, three nights in “paradise”.
Quickly out the airport doors, we stepped into a sea of black faces all awash in white teeth and the crisply starched Salvation Army uniforms! Our greeting party was there with smiles, hugs, handshakes and words I did not understand. What they were saying sounded like it could be English, but their accents were a cloud of dropped consonants and fuzzy vowels I could not penetrate. Pretty soon I was overwhelmed by the chaos of our welcome, and wished I could go back home.
Through the crowd we were led, and introduced to more people than my mind could handle at the moment. The tall man named Donnie, with his gleeful laugh. Sarah, who looked right through me with eyes that saw how uncomfortable I was and deemed me unworthy. Round Everette with the silky, smooth voice, and his white Canadian wife, Karen. Karen, Bert, and Major Drummond, my dad's new boss, were the few white faces I saw that morning. This was strange to me, having spent so long a time in the land of the Athabaskan natives of Alaska, and mostly crazy or drunk white people. People in Alaska usually were running away from something, and I wished I could join them again.
Those first weeks have become a blur in my memory. Hearing voices and accents that I could not pierce made me feel isolated and alone. Having a pink cinder-block wall around my pink cinder-block house simply reminded me that was not my home. The coconut palm tree in the front yard that graced each tepid evening with the heavy thud of a falling, green, rugby sized coconut was nothing like the snow-laden trees up in the hills whose branches cracked like gunfire beneath their load.
One evening in that first week my family decided to take a stroll through our new surroundings. We pointed our path towards the bridge to the tourist island across the channel, turned left at the main road to walk along the waterfront, then back up the hill towards our home. As we moved through the quiet, damp night air I kept a few yards ahead of the rest of the family. Passing a man sitting atop a stone wall, blending into the shadows cast from the yellow streetlight a few houses down, I heard him utter a single word that caused my mouth to fly agape in surprise and amazement! He quietly inquired of me, “Cocaine?” Before, drugs were something they talked about on TV, not a thing that some guy down the street offered as I walked by! I did not know this place, and I did not want to.
Nighttime was awash in peculiar shadows cast from the buzzing halogen light outside my bedroom window. The banana trees behind the house sheltered little creaking frogs that sang an off-tempo chorus each night as I sought respite from the heat and humidity. It was hurricane season, and the weather got nasty. One night the thunder and lightening shook every pink brick of our house as we heard the sound roll across the island from south to north like a massive train passing within our walls! Excited and frightened, the crack of lightening exploding through every window of the house made my mother yelp! This was not like anything I had ever known.
For a while my classes were miserable. I could understand my instructors since most of them were British ex-patriots, but for several weeks my classmates were beyond my comprehension. I do not know exactly when it happened, but after a while I began to hear the individual words my classmates were saying. After that I started to understand what those words were. By the time I finished my second month of school I could again communicate with the people around me!
I learned a lot that first year in Nassau. I learned that my misery existed because I didn't want to let go of Alaska and accept what The Bahamas had to offer. I learned that my classmates were more aware of color than I was! Terms like “high yellow”, or “milk chocolate” took on meanings I never knew before. My friends were painfully aware of how white I was, and constantly berated me to get a tan! When I tried, I came to school looking like a lobster instead of like George, who grew up on the beach and was darker that I have ever been.
Pretty soon I began to make my place in the school, to place my stamp on the world around me. As time went by I slowly began to thaw in the warmth of the people surrounding me. I found that I did not have to lose everything simply because everything around me changed. I joined the soccer team, and we toured England. I helped start the band, and we got to participate in several concerts. I was allowed to redesign the school logo and refresh the crest on the wall. Anything I wanted was mine for the asking.
As time went by I learned a thing or two about life. Now, I often think back to those weeks of waiting to figure out what I was going to do in the new land where people spoke funny. I learned that just because I was going South, my life did not have to. And even though I can see how that fork in the road so many years ago changed my life so completely, I have no regrets. That I'm running late doesn't bother me: hey, I'm on island time!
