For a Pribilof Unangan, sickness was always serious business in a remote community in the Bering Sea. The only clinic is far from the nearest fully equipped medical center in Anchorage, eight hundred air miles away. When I was a child, our parents had to cope by themselves with the myriad of diseases we contracted in the village, as most formal health care was reserved for white people. Impetigo, an infectious skin disease, was one of the worst experiences I recall. My sister Rinna and I, and most of the children in the village, suffered from unbearably itchy sores covering most of our arms, legs, torso, and faces. The treatment involved bathing in a tub of salt water, but, with open wounds from constant scratching, the bath was excruciatingly painful. We also suffered from mumps, measles, body and head lice, flu, polio, smallpox, and otitis media or inner ear infections from too much exposure to the incessant winter winds. The government-run clinic took in only life-threatening cases among our people. One day I was such a case.
I remember my mother, father, grandfather, and sister sitting down to the lunch-time family meal, the biggest meal of the day when the men weren’t slaughtering seals. Instead of joining them I walked into the living room. I wasn’t feeling quite right. My mother always kept this room immaculate. The living room was home to the Russian Orthodox icons, and it was where the priest and local choir would come to say prayers and sing when they went from house to house during the Christmas and Easter holidays. My left arm was hurting so fiercely that I began to cry. My mother came into the room and asked what was wrong with me. I told her how bad my arm hurt and that I was getting dizzy. She felt my forehead and cheeks. I was burning up.
She told me to put my jacket on because she was taking me to see the government doctor. I did as instructed, and we began the short half-mile walk to the clinic. As we walked, everything began to spin wildly. I had severe vertigo. My mother grabbed my hand and pulled me along as I cried, terrified. She was young, and had been a mother only for the six years of my life, given that I was her firstborn. She had never had to deal with something like this before as a mother and she was scared.
No one liked to go the clinic because only really sick people went there, and villagers associated it with death. It was an austere place and smelled of ether and rubbing alcohol. The local practical nurse took my temperature: 106 degrees. Another degree and my brains would have begun to fry. “Doctor, you better look at this boy; he’s really sick!” the nurse said, somewhat insistently.
The doctor, a white man, was a federal employee brought to the island from the lower 48. Most of these imported employees wouldn’t associate with Unangan outside of their assigned responsibilities; those who did were then strongly discouraged from doing so by the other government employees or agents. All the government doctors I had encountered before had seemed cold and distant to me, and this one was no exception.
The doctor looked at the thermometer, a frown appearing on his face. He shook it down and placed it back in my mouth. Then he put a cold stethoscope underneath my shirt and listened front and back. “His lungs and bronchial tubes are congested,” he said to no one in particular. Ignoring my mother, worry etched all over her face, he told the nurse to prepare a bed for me because I probably had pneumonia, and both my lungs were engaged. “Put him in a tub with cold water first, to lower his temperature” the doctor ordered. He then turned to my mother and informed her that my condition was very serious and that I might die. Hearing this, I became terrified.
“Don’t leave me, Mama! Don’t leave me!” I pleaded.
The doctor looked at me sternly. “You have to stay here and your mother can’t; it’s against the rules!”
Crying, nauseated, dizzy, confused, and terrified, I went with the nurse to what was to be my bed for the next six tortuous weeks. “Take all your clothes off and put this on,” she said as she handed me a white gown. “I am going to set up your bath and come back to get you.”
When she left, I struggled to get my clothes off. I was feeling so sick that even the simple task of bending down to take my socks off was difficult. Bending down seemed to make me dizzier and more nauseated. By the time the nurse came back I was too weak to get out of the bed. It was all happening so fast. That morning I had felt perfectly fine. Now, a few hours later, I was immersed in cold sweat and barely able to move.
The nurse carried me from the bed to a large tub, though barely large enough for me to fit in. She set me into shockingly cold water. I cried even more as I gasped for air at the shock of the coldness. Huge goosebumps rose on every inch of my body. At that point, everything started to go dark as I began to lose my vision. I couldn’t understand what was happening and no one bothered to explain it to me, but the doctor’s words that “I might die” were stuck in my head. I was beyond terrified, but I could not give voice to the terror anymore. Then everything went black. I remained mostly unconscious for the next two weeks.
My first recollection of brief consciousness during that period is that of waking up alone in the darkness. I looked around and could only make out strange and sinister outlines of the only ward on the second floor of the clinic. I was the only person in the entire building, and to a little boy, the room I was in felt huge and ominous. The nurse’s station was located somewhere downstairs.
I still felt horribly sick and nauseated and leaned over to vomit on the floor as I went unconscious again. Actually, this was the moment I began to choose unconsciousness as, in my child mind, I told myself I didn’t want to be there. “I’m going back,” I said to myself. The place I would go to was comforting. It is difficult to describe this place I went to; it was something like an infinite void, where there was a peace beyond anything I ever experienced. I felt like I was connected to everything in existence and yet maintained my own sense of being. There were no physical or energetic boundaries of any kind. I could connect with anything past, present, or future and go anywhere on Earth or outer space with just my intention. It was a glorious experience and a place I far preferred over my current physical reality. As a child, I had no sense that this place was unusual, just familiar and welcoming. Later in life, the vivid memory of this “no-place” or void would haunt me.
I had no sense of time whenever I gained consciousness intermittently, except that I knew it was night when it was dark and day when it was light. I do remember sometimes waking up in the dark and wondering if I had gone blind again as I had the day I arrived at the clinic. I knew what it meant to be blind from movies I had seen and comic books I had read.
I recall the consistent sense of terror that I was going to die and die alone. I wanted my mother, my father, my uncles, my sisters, anyone, to be there with me. Where were they? Unbeknownst to me, the government doctor, possibly worried that Unangan people would steal things from the clinic if they were unsupervised, prohibited visitors in the clinic. Not knowing this, I could not understand how my parents, siblings, and relatives could all leave me there alone. I felt completely abandoned in a state of abject terror and did not understand what was happening to me.
One day I awoke startled by a pinching pain in my rear. The doctor was administering a penicillin shot with a long needle. I turned so abruptly as I awoke that the needle broke inside of me. The doctor looked irritated. “You have to stay still while I give you this shot; it will help you get better!” he said brusquely. He asked the practical nurse to get a pair of pliers. I tried to read his face to get some idea of whether or not he was worried about my condition. His face was stoic. The nurse returned, and the doctor proceeded to remove the broken needle with the pliers. “Now I have to do this again, so you have to be still, understand?” he asserted. I nodded, braced myself and bit down on my lower lip as he proceeded to stick the five-inch needle into me. It hurt a lot. It hurt more when the needle hit bone.
After these first two weeks, I was no longer drifting into unconsciousness, only fitful sleeping bouts. Nevertheless, my days merged into nights and nights into days for another four weeks in the clinic. Sometimes I would wake up in my own urine or excrement. I seemed to be exhausted all the time, and every bone and nerve in my body hurt badly. And still no visitors and no other patients in that building. I was alone.
The night nurse would come up to “check on me” or to see if I had wet or pooped on myself. One night, after she cleaned me up, she began fondling my private parts. “Does that feel good?” she asked. I didn’t know what to say. I knew she wasn’t supposed to be doing what she was doing. Then she said she had to check my temperature and had to stick the thermometer in my rear end. I felt her finger go up me. She said this was to make it easier for the thermometer to go in. I didn’t know any better. She did this routine several times over the course of the following weeks. Every time I just lay there quietly, not saying a word. I was confused and afraid she would not bring me food or watch over me if I didn’t let her do what she wanted with me. I learned later that she had a rumored history of sexually abusing children.
Finally, the day came when I was told I could be checked out of the clinic. I don’t remember being elated. It was more like extreme relief that I would leave this place of horror. My grandfather came into the room at around noon, and my mother arrived later. My father was hard at work for the government.
“Aang laakaiyaax,” my grandfather said, greeting me in Unangan Tunuu. “Aang, Papa,” I retorted. My Papa was good and kind to his grandchildren. He would always give us special treats, and this day he reached out to me with an orange in his hand. An orange in those days was very special. Islanders were given a sack of oranges once a year during Christmas, but only white people got them anytime the supply ship arrived. It wasn’t Christmas, so this was really special.
In my little child mind, however, I blamed him and my parents for leaving me alone in this place of hell. I turned my head away abruptly, shaking my head, refusing to take the orange. My Papa, looking to the nurse, said, “what’s the matter with him?” The nurse said she didn’t know. He left, and the nurse and I were alone.
“I won’t let you leave the clinic unless you give me that orange,” she said nonchalantly. I didn’t know if she was teasing me, and I felt terror rising in me once again. I quickly handed the orange to her, and she proceeded to help me dress. I began to feel extreme relief that I finally had my “outside” clothes on—I knew I was leaving. The nurse didn’t give the orange back to me.
My mother arrived to take me home. I said nothing and didn’t look at her.
After I checked out of the clinic, I determined that this would never happen to me again. And I was beyond anger at my parents and grandfather for not protecting me and for leaving me alone, not knowing that the government doctor had prevented them from seeing me for six weeks. I closed myself off from them and adults in general. The only adults I still trusted were my aunt, Sophie, and her husband, my Aachaa. I did not even trust my own body. I felt it had abandoned me. It was years later that I understood how this experience had kept me from trusting any adult, including myself.
When I returned home, I secluded myself in the bedroom and limited my interactions with my family. When we had lunch, I would take my food into the bedroom to eat alone, every day. I became a loner and had only three friends: Nicky, Victor, and Peanuts. They were to be my only consistent friends through the ninth grade, except for two white boys I befriended over those years, Roland Doe and Craig Euneau.
The traumas I experienced in that clinic set the pattern I was to live out for decades. Every single morning, for much of my teen and adult life, I actually re-created my pneumonia symptoms and experiences in the clinic. I would wake up in abject terror, and I would sneeze five to ten times until my lungs and bronchial tubes filled with phlegm. In cold sweats, I felt like I was going to die. It was not until tens of thousands of vets started coming back from Vietnam with similar symptoms that a name was given to what I had: post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
I lived a life of not trusting anyone. I would escape into the “spirit world” to get away from what I felt was the ugliness of humankind in its violence, disconnection, and separation. The spirit world felt like my “real home.” I shielded my thoughts and feelings and became secretive. I trusted no one to touch me, and I became supremely suspicious of Western medicine’s abilities to help anyone. Subconsciously, I carried a deep sense that I could not trust my own body to keep me well. Until I got sick again, to the point that others were concerned about whether or not I was going to live, I did not fully tie this experience at six years old to patterns I carried through life. Even after losing my first and then my second wife in divorce, it was only mortal illness that made me realize that, to prove my point that others cannot be trusted, I had put my loved ones to impossible tests until they left me.
I isolated myself from others to the point that I could have been a monk or hermit. I spent much of my childhood years, beginning at six years old, seeking the comfort and bliss of nature. Daily I would connect with the island. I immersed myself in the wonder of the passing clouds, pushed by the mysterious winds. I loved to lie in the tundra by myself, listening to the bumblebees and blowflies buzzing around, the sound of the wind, the rustling of the grass, the song of the Lapland longspur that sang only when it descended in flight, the chirps of the snow bunting we simply called “snowbirds,” and the call of the rosy finches that we knew as “muskies.” I would take in the wonderful smells of grass and the fresh salt air and the feel of the life that surrounded me. It was here that I felt protected and embraced.
Other times I would go to the shoreline to wander through the intertidal zone, exploring the myriad of living things I came across—the green spindly sea urchins that we called “aagonin,” kelp, snails we called “chimkaiyoon,” starfish, tiny rockfish we called “kundoolin,” sea anemones, the occasional octopus, and sand fleas we called “kootmies.” Unangan had words for every creature around.
I walked inland over grass-covered basalt boulders to sit atop the highest hills on the island. From this vantage point I could see most of the island and surrounding Bering Sea. The island is only twelve miles long and five miles wide at its widest point. Occasionally, hundreds of reindeer would pass below, grunting as they moved with incredible ease over the rocky hummocks. In the early evening I noted how the clouds descended, first only over two hills that later I came to know as the masculine and feminine aspects of this ethereal island, then later the rest of the hills. The masculine aspect is known as Bogoslov. This Russian name means “the voice of God.” Bogoslov is a dormant volcano that prominently extends its rocky form upward in the center of the island. The feminine aspect is called Polovina, which means “halfway” in Russian. Its emerald-colored grassy profile appears like a pregnant woman with rounded breasts.
Beginning at age six, I began walking the three miles outside the village at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning to get to the many seabird nesting sites on cliffs sprinkled around the island shoreline. I wanted to get to these cliffs before sunrise when, by the thousands, the seabirds would stir and begin their circular flight in front of the cliffs.
I came to love the soup of smells along the island shoreline and the wonder and mystery of all this life that, intuitively, I knew was somehow beautifully and seamlessly intertwined. I floated with it, losing all sense of separation to the point that I could not tell where I began and where it ended. This experience was so profoundly familiar, like the place I found when I was sick and unconscious with pneumonia.
The deep connection to nature I had discovered would sustain me through the many trials and tribulations that lay ahead.