One would have thought that experiences such as this would have bred in these men a deep distaste for the wild relentless North Country. A curious thing happened. Scores of them who had frozen and sweated in the numbing cold and the clammy heat of the Arctic mountains and tundras and forests and waters now, with their GI college rights in their pockets, elected to come back to the Territory to gain an education at Baranof College. School of Mines, they said. One of the best in the whole country. Engineering. Agriculture. And—I don’t know—it’s a kind of a free feeling. What I like, there’s nothing coming at you, know what I mean? It’s busy, but it’s quiet. No dodging, the fishing is great. And hunting! Boy, is this the happy hunting ground! Moose. And bear! Browns thirteen feet high on their hind legs. And polar bears, their hide would cover the whole floor of this room. I’m going to get me a bear if it’s the last thing I do—and it ain’t going to be the last.

They came, unbelievably, from California, and from Oregon and Nebraska and Illinois and the Carolinas. They never talked of the War, you would not have known they had been snowflakes, if you had not seen in their young faces certain deeply etched lines which ordinarily are found only in old faces.

They added fresh life to the town of Baranof. Some of them stayed and became Alaskans and bred Alaskans. Army bases ringed the town. Gay-hued private cars and drab army cars and trucks swarmed the pavements, and pretty young mothers and vigorous young men and perambulators and strollers and toddlers imparted to Gold Street a virility that hit you with the impact of a blow.

Perhaps Bridie’s maternalism stemmed from those days when she, a young, frightened, homesick girl, had come to Baranof, alone and lonely. She knew and understood about some of those men—scarcely more than boys—surrounded by thousands at close quarters at Morgenstern or Kinkaid Air Bases, who knew loneliness such as only a mechanized society can produce. On leave they washed, shaved, dressed with extra care; boots were shined, uniform brushed. They lounged around Baranof’s Gold Street, they dropped in at the juke box joints, they slipped coins in the slot to be lulled or soothed by the tranquilizer; artificial music. A mechanical sound hammered out “You’re a Livin’ Doll,” or the whining self-pitying ballads of the day—why did you leave me … was it to grieve me … you in my arms … you have those charms. They sat in the USO big room listlessly reading an Outside newspaper a week old. The colored boys huddled in a corner watching TV. You rarely saw them standing on a street corner, these boys, surveying a passing Alaska world in the dim cold, calling out an unconvincing and unconvinced “Hello, Gorgeous!” to a bear-like female figure so muffled in hood, parka, mukluks, mittens, that it was impossible to tell whether she was fifteen or fifty.