Broward Community College - Silver Sands Yearbook (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

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to be, but if you're sent, you have to make the decision whether to live out the year with as much activity as you can find or to sit and do nothing at all. Hunting, for such game as fox, caribu, and ptarmigan, and fishing in the streams and bays for trout. bass and the huge salmon gan ease the pains of being stationed. Outdoor sports are limited by the weather, but football and baseball .-.4-igiiiseiiwfv. i 'r survived. Skiing can be interesting on a mountain with deep gorges and sledding can also be risked by the brave. ln the bottom of the recreational building was the base's indoor swimming pool. Pollution has no meaning in Adak's vocabulary. The Water is clean enough to drink right from the mountain streams. The pioneers had a yearning for wide open spaces and I believe many people in our present society do also. advocate Adak as a spot for colon but Adak is for the individualist person who wants to think and t who is not afraid of isolation, the who still believes that the conjeste of this world are doomed. Text and photos by Bob Pearsall

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When I visit a new place I try to pnstruct how it might have been in its . When I did this on Adak, a kind real and penetrating experience lpened. The weather had been cold and idy, naturally. A friend and I had n tracing a series of Quonset huts fthe semi-cyclindrical metal buildings ted by the Armed Forcesl which lay bling into ruin on one of the many s overlooking the base. 'Ihey had led us to a hill into which eep gorge had been etched by many ons of erosion. In the gully lay two is which looked in good condition. ng careful not to fall on any pungy :ks Qmetal stakes planted so that a rp point protrudes about three inches we the groundj I made my way down the hutsg They were in better shape LTI any of the previous ones we had lored. The huts had been swiftly tndoned in the period between the end World War Two and the early fifties. the rush, objects were left and gotten to be discovered later. I opened what appeared to be the door fthere are usually three openings on these huts, not all doorsj and carefully stepped inside. As first impressions are said to be the best, I looked around very slowly, studying each hall and corner. As my eyes traced the outline of the hut I saw what appeared to be a piece of paper stuck to a wall. Floors in the old huts were weak and dangerous if traversed quickly. Gradually, by inches and then by feet I moved closer to the paper. The edges were gone and only a thin shred of tape held the paper to the wall. As I got closer, I saw that it was a photograph. As one rummages through these huts, it is hard to realize that they were at one time inhabited. So little remains that without an imagination they appear to be old dirty pieces of wood and rust. I carefully removed the photograph and walked back to where the light was better, What I had found was the picture of a girl, smiling brightly surrounded by a rose garden. I imagined what a fantastic effect this picture once had upon the inhabitants of the hut, stationed in a land that nobody really cared about. Sick call was a time when men would come in to be checked over in hopes that they would need treatment in Anchorage. Some tried reading up on diseases in our library and then playing the faking game with the doctors. Most were tumed dovm for the Anchorage trips but a few actually went and enjoyed their free trip back to the real world. Navy doctors came up with two major problems: one was the lack of available women for unaccompanied men and the other was the stress placed on the individuals being stationed in isolation with weather that was completely unpredictable. But I believe another problem existed on Adak. Most guys called it the Adak Stare. Commonly referred to as a one-thousand foot stare in a five foot room, it actually went much deeper than the eyes. Objects of fascination might be a cockroach or a piece of wood skewed in some direction. Anyone who stayed on Adak for a year got this psychosomatic disease. But thank God, it passes very quickly once you leave the rock. Adak, the island of snow, rain, wind, and fog is no paradise. It was never meant Y i 'D' , . 1 - A ' I ancric ocEAN l 'F f if X I ' -N D- g l ' , t 1 ',,'g jCA ,51f!5' , , 77? . f . ,fl I If ,. ', A' t ff' I -- .. c SOVIEIT UNION 1 1,77 fjp fff Xg ff, ,. p i I f I 1 i Q, T -J, .Z . .4M,4faz,.,,2 'X . - 7 02 l Je . I, ,,, . X ,Q . - a vm I- if ' . lLf '..' V 1 - ' T an 4 fgi - Q -,KY num 5 t - .:?:..,f . .X F X Q, Og ' auf'

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CRGGDCDIYI RID-GRI l 4 ll 1 me tions more l text and photos by Dave Patrick s l I I On the radio some guy was talking about 200,000 or so already in attendance at the festival. Then he played side one of Sgt. Pepper. Before the turntable crossed She's Leaving Home we were gone. It was after dark before we stuck out our hand-lettered sign and headed south, but it no longer mattered exactly when or if we got to Atlanta. By leaving, we had already arrived. We ran into some bad weather around midnight and tried to get some some coffee at a nearby Union 76 Truck Stop. The rain had stopped for the moment, but the storm was far from past. A few minutes later, the lights went out in Halifax, North Carolina. Around 1:30 a.m. some guy with a flashlight and a wet cigar told us the station was closed and asked us to leave. The only available shelter was the leaky overpass on the highway, so we crawled underneath and made attempts at getting comfortable on some newspapers and broken glass. A few hours later we quit trying and worked at rubbing the newsprint off our hands. It was almost daybreak when we walked out on the interstate and waited for the first passing car. At least it had stopped raining. It eventually took us nearly twenty-four hours to cover six hundred or so miles to the festival. Duane Allman and Dickie Betts were busy with Statesburo Blues, while a group of fifteen bikers tore down a ticket booth. The Second Annual Atlanta Pop Festival had become the Second Annual Free Atlanta Pop Festival. We stretched out in the later afternoon sun, and enjoyed a couple of peanut butter and corned beef hash sandwiches. There was a good feeling about living on the road. An illusion of independence that almost seemed real, and very definitely habit forming. That's the way it started three summers ago, when a friend and I, both airmen apprentices stationed with the Navy in Norfolk, Virginia, decided to attend the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival. At ther time we didn't have tickets or leave or a ride either, but that was the least of our worries.