Carl and Elsie Seaman

Excerpt from a Redoubt Reporter article, April 22, 2009:

Not far down the North Road toward Kenai is Miller Loop, from which Bernice Lake Road can be reached. In 1952, the Alaska Road Commission punched in the route to Bernice Lake, and a small group of hardy families moved out there to set up homesteads. Among those families were the Seamans, whose driveway ended in the area’s worst mud hole.

Carl and Elsie Seaman set up their home down a road that for years, Elsie said, was “mostly just a Cat path,” and was therefore particularly susceptible to the vagaries of freezing and thawing.

One day in the early 1950s, when her three children were all under the age of 10, Elsie and Carl decided to head into Kenai, 11 miles away, for Easter Sunday services. Services were often held those days in Louis Miller’s ice cream parlor, where Father Thompson held Mass from behind the counter while the coffee was perking.

The drive out in their old Army surplus truck was somewhat rough but uneventful because the temperature Saturday night had dipped below freezing and firmed up the roadway. However, the sun was out and strong, and by the time the Seamans were on their road heading home, traveling smoothly was not possible.

“We were dressed in the best we had on the homestead, and that old gumbo was like a quagmire. Our truck did its best, but it couldn’t quite make it. It finally bogged down. We were within sight of the homestead, so the only thing we could do is get out and walk. And when I got out of the truck, I stepped down in the mud and both of my shoes popped off. So I had to pick them up and walk home in my stocking feet.”

“Stocking feet” for Elsie was actually a good pair of nylons, which she promptly ruined as she tromped the 200 yards or so up to her front porch — while her neighbor, Wally Van Sky, stood at his front door “just laughing his head off” — where she and the rest of her family laid their shoes out to dry so the dirt could be banged off of them later on.

Like the Thompsons, the Seamans had no running water. All cleaning and washing had to be with water hauled up from the lake. Elsie did laundry by heating water on the stove and rubbing clothes briskly over a washboard before hanging them to dry.

CLICK HERE to view the entire Redoubt Reporter article by Clark Fair