ALASKAN GOLD

ALASKAN GOLD 

In the summer of 1964, a few months after the 9.2 magnitude earthquake hit Anchorage, I got to visit my Uncle John and Uncle Jerome in Juneau, Alaska before heading east to Philadelphia to enter the tenth grade.    

Jerome worked for the US Postal Service and John had a researcher's job staying on a pristine remote island monitoring all the animals, insects and plants.  Fish during the day and hang out with the other guys in the evening for a week in a remote cabin eating grilled fish, drinking beer, and playing cards, among other things.  Then go home by boat to your wives for the weekends.  What a life!

Jerome took me into the mountains panning for gold in streams where the tailings had washed down from some old abandoned gold mines above.  We did get some gold dust worth $30.00 or so but no nuggets.

While panning, I noticed several teenage girls and boys working their way up the trail toward us.  They had pick axes and were hammering on rocks with little veins of quartz, hoping to find gold.  I had a candy bar wrapped in gold foil so I ate the bar and pushed strips of the gold foil into a long crack in the rock wall so that it would look like a vein of gold.

When the kids got up to where we were panning and started picking at the rocks, I heard one of the girls excitedly call out to the rest of the crew, "Hey, come here! Check this out." 

I could sense the anticipation building as the picking and hammering increased into a frenzy with hushed voices not being able to hide their excitement.

Jerome and I, squatted at the stream's edge with our backs to them, could hardly control our urge to burst out into peals of laughter.

No telling what kind of thoughts about us ran through the minds of those kids when the disappointment of finding out that they had been duped set in.  But, they quietly left back down the trail and Jerome and I giggled and guffawed on and off for the rest of the day. 

RODNEY GOES TO JAPAN WITH HIS FATHER 

World War II Revisited

My father, Theodore Hard (Ted), was an Orthodox Presbyterian Missionary in South Korea since right after the Korean War in 1954.  Dad helped Christian colleges and seminaries organize and stock their libraries as part of his mission overseas.   In 1965, my older brother, Sterling, was already back in the United States.  So, Dad took me, son number two, on a trip with him to Japan.  It was sort of a working vacation and sight seeing week. 

Dad and I booked passage on a small Japanese ship.  The ship was actually a converted LST (military designation for Landing Ship, Tank, since they used it for beach landings to divulge tanks and troops) left over from the Korean War.  When we boarded in Pusan, Korea, I found out that we did not have a room on the ferry to Japan.  Everyone just sort of claimed a spot on the floor in the hold of the ship (where the tanks and jeeps used to be stored) and set up camp with sleeping bags and personal belongings for an overnight trip. 

While chatting with some of the Japanese crew members top side in a mixture of some Japanese I knew, broken English, and the little bit of Korean they knew, we were able to carry on a friendly conversation about various things.  Eventually, the conversation moved into World War II territory and Dad ended up telling them that he had been a navigator in the B-29s that bombed Japan.  The crew's friendly smiles subsequent to that conversation seemed a little forced for the rest of the trip.  Needless to say, I did not sleep well that night out in the open in the hold of the ship.

When we arrived in Japan, we traveled by train to where the seminary was where Dad would be helping out.  We had a nice dinner at the home of a professor with his daughter (shown in picture) and his wife.   

Now, it happened that the wife had one side of her face all scarred up.  During the course of the evening, near the end of the meal, Dad asked the professor what had happened to his wife's face.  The professor proceeded to tell us how his wife had gotten severely burned in an air raid on his town during World War II.   Dad asked him what town he lived in when it was bombed.  The professor told us (I don't remember the name of the town) and that is when it got interesting. 

I really don't know what is up with Dad's total honesty thing, but there are times when it is best to just leave well enough alone.  But, NO!  Dad proceeded to tell the family that that town had been bombed only once near the end of the war and that he was the navigator in one of the B-29s that bombed that town.

I guess Dad relied on the Christian forgiveness thing and let bygones be bygones.  But, I figured that the Japanese Ninja retribution thing may trump the Christian forgiveness thing in this situation.  

That night we stayed in a dormitory room at the seminary.  It was a hot summer night with no air conditioning and against my better judgment (or perhaps, unfounded fears), Dad wanted to sleep with the windows wide open to let in the cool night.   I told him that I thought it was a bad idea that he had told the professor and his family about the bombing raid, and I told him I thought it was a bad idea to leave the windows open in case the Ninja came to assassinate us.  Dad laughed and poo-pooed the whole notion.  After all, the war was over.

I did not get any sleep that night because every little sound I heard fueled my fears of us being in mortal danger from assassins that were about to burst through the windows with Samurai swords drawn.

I remember this story very clearly because of the impact of the fear I suffered.  Dad, on the other hand, does not remember any of it.   The last time I saw Dad before he died, Sterling and I were retelling a lot of our memories.  Dad still denied that this happened.  

 A HIGH SCHOOL PRANK
The Girls' Nap Rudely Interrupted

I attended boarding school for my 9th grade, 11th grade, and 12th grade.  Korea Christian Academy was about 125 miles (as the crow flies) away from home on the outskirts of Taejon City.  I travelled by steam engine train for six hours to get to Taejon and then took a bus outside the city to O-Jung Dong.  Every six weeks or so, I took the train back home to Pusan for a weekend with the family.  There were only two English speaking missionary high schools in Korea and KCA was the closest one.

You can see from the senior yearbook picture of me lighting a fire in the stove under my girlfriend Pam that I was definitely a mischievous young man.  I loved pulling pranks on fellow students and teachers.  The best prank of all was during my Freshman year when both my older brother Sterling and I were both at KCA at the same time.

One Sunday, after church and then lunch in the school cafeteria, the girls all went to the dormitory to take a nap.  Some of us boys, including Sterling and me, went hunting for mice and rats.  We used to have contests as to who could kill the most rats and mice in one week.  We would even get up before daybreak, several hours before school started, to go hunting in the fields and ditches.  We collected the tails and kept them on a string hanging in our dormitory room windows.

This particular Sunday afternoon, we were in the field to the left of the red brick dormitory (which is behind the school building in the foreground of the picture) combing through a large compost pile for nests of mice and rats.  We found several nests of baby mice on one side of the pile and a big bundle of baby garter snakes on the other side, coiled together, warming themselves in the sun.

Several boys in our group took the snakes to the front door of the girls' dormitory and let the snakes loose in their hallway.  When the snakes hit the cold cement floor, they became very active and started scattering  in every direction down the hallway and under the doors to the girls' rooms.

In the meantime, the rest of us went to the side of the dorm (where you can see the windows of the red brick building facing you) and shot the baby mice out of our slingshots at the girls' windows.  The girls woke up when they heard the mice splattering against their windows.  Seeing the mice hit the windows and slide down the windows in bloody streaks, they screamed and jumped out of their beds.

To our sheer delight, we heard the second series of even louder shrieks and screams when the girls went running out of their rooms into the hallway filled with little writhing snakes. 

We all got in trouble with the principal and, of course, the girls, but it was more than worth it. 

PIG FEAST

While attending high school boarding school at Korea Christian Academy, we took a Junior/Senior trip to Jeju Island off the southern coast of Korea.  There were only five of us in my Senior class and only a few more than that in the Junior class.

We took a train to Pusan and then a ferry boat to the island.  After a day of sightseeing as we made our way around to the south side of the island, we stopped at a small village and checked into a small inn. 

The inn had a small courtyard lit by one little 60 watt bulb.  The rooms had sliding rice paper doors with no latches or locks and all opened onto the porch facing the courtyard.

We all went to a little Chinese restaurant, the only restaurant in town, for dinner and feasted on pork egg rolls, sweet and sour pork, and several other pork dishes.

After dinner, back at the inn, my friend Steve Linton and I asked the inn keeper where we could find the bathroom.  She pointed in the direction of the rice patties next to the inn.  It was a moonlit night with no ambient city light to obstruct the view of the vast array of stars, but walking along the one foot wide mud dikes between the water filled rice paddies in the dark was still a challenge. 

We found the outhouse which had a hole in the floor you had to squat over to relieve yourself.  I went first but, before I squatted, I realized that something was awry.  There was a four foot long stick leaning against the corner, which was so unusual that I decided to investigate first.  

Steve and I discovered that the outhouse was built over a pig pen.  The pigs had grown up to full size now, so you had to use the stick to poke the pigs' snouts to keep them away from your underside as they fought for positioning to get their next meal directly from the source.  That is about as delicately as I can explain the situation.  The irony of me having just pigged out on pork hit me hard enough to make me sick at my stomach.

After relieving ourselves, Steve and I went back to the inn.  Two of the girls asked us where the bathroom was.  Steve and I looked at each other, hesitated a moment contemplating whether we should tell them about the pigs, and then pointed in the direction of the outhouse without any further explanation.

We waited with baited breath listening for a reaction from out in the dark and were rewarded with the most blood curdling screams we had ever heard.  Needless to say, those girls did not talk to us for the rest of the trip.  

ADDENDUM:  My younger brother Nelson found a book about Jeju Island, an island off the southern coast of South Korea which I wrote about in the above story.  The New York Times Bestseller by Lisa See  called THE ISLAND OF SEA WOMEN starts with these words on page 11, "April 1938.  My first day of sea work started hours before sunrise when even the crows were still asleep.  I dressed and made my way through the dark to our latrine.  I climbed the ladder to the stone structure and positioned myself over the hole in the floor.  Below, our pigs gathered, snuffling eagerly.  A big stick leaned against the wall in the corner in case one of them became too enthusiastic and tried to leap up."

VAMPIRE SCARE

Steve Linton was my best friend in high school at Korea Christian Academy in Taejon, Korea.  We did everything together.  One of our favorite pastimes on weekends at our boarding school was to take a bus into the city and catch dinner and a movie.

One weekend we decided to watch the Dracula movie at the local theater.  The Koreans are very superstitious so Steve and I decided to pull a practical joke and scare some young ladies.

I had a pair of vampire teeth with the elongated fangs that I had purchased at a novelty store in America when I was on furlough the prior year.   As we were walking out at the end of the movie through the lobby, some young couples walking out were staring at us.  So, I opened my mouth and flashed my fangs.

One young lady just keeled over in a dead faint and the other girl screamed and took off running.

While Steve tended to the girl who had passed out, wanting to let the fleeing girl know that it was just a joke, I ran after her to show her the fake teeth.  When she looked back and saw me chasing her, she screamed and ran that much faster.

When I caught her, she was wide-eyed and shook in abject terror.  I didn't want her to go through life with garlands of garlic around her neck carrying a large crucifix so I showed her the fake teeth and told her it was just a prank.

She was still bug-eyed and shaking like a leaf when I left her.  I felt bad about what I had just done because I had no idea that the girls' reactions would be that severe.

It was still pretty funny though, and being an inveterate prankster, I got over the feelings of guilt pretty fast over dinner at a good Chinese restaurant.