Moose Oversized Mud Bag

CHAPTER EIGHT: POTATOES: TEN CENTS A BAG

When my family returned to Anchorage, Alaska, after several years in Seward at the Jesse Lee Children's Home, we bought the house at 730 East 15th Avenue. I must have been ten or eleven at the time and the setting of the house was, for me, idyllic: East G Street lay nearly a full block to the west, and there was nothing but a garden and woods between the house and the street; 15th Avenue ran directly in front of the house, perhaps twenty-five feet away and separated from the house by a gravel driveway; to the back of the house was forest that extended nearly a hundred fifty yards straight back from the house, then dropped down a long, steep hill and ended in the muskeg of the valley known as Skunk Hollow; and two hundred feet or so to the east our closest neighbor was the house occupied by the Prator family from whom we had purchased our house. Some few other houses were interspersed amongst the trees along East 15th, but we were very much "in the sticks". East G Street, in 1952, was a dirt, two lane, road that was tarred or oiled gravel in the summer, plowed snow in the winter, and deep mud at all other times. This was our main north/south thoroughfare into downtown Anchorage, some twenty-five blocks away. East 15th Avenue was anything but a main thoroughfare and was even less passable at all times of the year than was East G! Heading north on East G would take you to the main street of town, 4th Avenue, just a little west of the city airport, Merrill Field. Heading south on East G took you down the long hill into Skunk Hollow - so named by the city's white kids because this was the shantytown area mostly occupied by the city's black families - across Chester Creek and up the other side of the hollow to Fireweed Lane. Fireweed Lane ran parallel to 15th Avenue, both of which met, on the far west of town, with Spenard Road. Continuing south past Fireweed Lane, East G Street became the Seward Highway. My brother Ernie, nearly four years older than I and seemingly able to do all the things that I wanted to do, but couldn't, one day brought home the most beautiful weapon I had ever seen: A fiberglass bow that stood a full foot longer than I. Accompanying the bow was a quiver of arrows: Not just ordinary arrows with typical, blunt target points, but hunting arrows with heavy steel tips that had three razor sharp fins designed like the backside of a fishhook.

Boys' Life

Backpacker

Field and stream

Backpacker