I found something that was lost a long time...

It was a letter I wrote to all my friends and family in January, 1970. I had made "carbon copies" (literally, with carbon paper) when I typed the letter with my manual typewriter.

Years went by and I lost track of my copy of the letter. Many times I wondered about it, especially over the last year or so when I was writing stories of my memories on this blog.

Finally, I was cleaning out boxes of old papers, cards, and letters that belonged to my mother. She passed away in 2009. It speaks of my laziness that I was just recently cleaning out all her keepsakes. There were so many papers to sort through that I was tempted to just toss it all without looking. I'm surely glad I didn't yield to that temptation, because deep in the pile I discovered many, many letters that I had written to her over the years, including her carbon copy of this letter written in January, 1970.

I will post this letter in segments, as it was 12 pages single-spaced.

Here is the story of the Goins Family (Dave, 33, me, 25 and Rachel, our babe-in-arms) and our move to Alaska from San Diego in November, 1969, through December, 1969.

...
January 9, 1970
Dear Friends and Relatives,

I'm going to try to sum up the main events of our move to Alaska. It would take a book to tell it all, so I'm trying just to "hit the hi-lights."

First of all, for those who don't know, we were pulling our house trailer which was very heavily loaded with everything we own, and carrying about 250 gallons of gasoline on a truck in 55-gallon drums, which we had to refill five times.

We left Bakersfield Tuesday, November 18, after spending a few days with my folks, (and after David supposedly fixing the truck which had given us a lot of trouble between San Diego and Bakersfield). We only got 100 miles the first day, because the truck still wouldn't run right, but he finally figured out what was the matter with it and fixed it, and it ran perfectly after that. I shudder to think what might have happened going up some of those mountains we climbed if it hadn't been running right.

Through California we had wonderful weather, but a few rather steep mountains in Northern California. Not far from the Oregon border we were driving before daylight in those mountains, on one of the few two-way traffic roads before Canada, and we ran out of gas and stalled on a narrow bridge. We had gas in the drums, but we had let it get too low in the truck's tank, so it was our own fault. Dave got as close to frantic as I had ever seen him, trying to signal traffic, and get some gas in the carburetor. I was sitting in the driver's seat, turning on the headlights every time an on-coming car's lights came in sight, and trying to calm Rachel, who had just decided it was time to wake up and have breakfast, and Dave would climb up under the hood and start pouring gas in the carburetor out of a beer can, and I would yell, "A car's coming around the curve behind!" and he would jump down, the flashlight in hand, race back behind the trailer and shine the light right in their eyes so they wouldn't fail to see us, and they would ease around us (there was barely room to pass) and then Dave would try to start the truck again, and the battery was getting low from having the lights on so much. Finally a bus (on-coming) stopped down at the curve behind us and put out flares, and stayed there flashing his emergency lights so cars would slow down before they got to us, which helped. But Dave still couldn't get the truck started.

Then an empty semi, also on-coming, saw our "plight" and turned around, came back, and hitched a chain to us and pulled us on over the bridge and to a pullout about half a mile up the road. There, it only took Dave about half a minute to get the gas running right and the truck started (and me to pull myself together), and we were on our way again. Thanking the Lord, of course.

Oregon was really beautiful country, and mostly good roads. We did hit a few spots where big bumps made us feel like we were riding a bucking bronco, namely, a little stream called "Jump-Off-Joe Creek", where for a space between the bridge and the road there was nothing but a hole, which we hit going about 40 mph, and the trailer went so wild that the next time I checked inside I found a light fixture had fallen and shattered all over the kitchen floor, and the "unbreakable" (don't you believe it) bottle of dish soap had fallen out of a cabinet we forgot to wire up and I had green Palmolive all over the kitchen floor. And if that stuff isn't a mess to clean up!

It rained in Oregon, though, our first experience with bad weather. From there on the trip became one little detail after another which didn't go as we'd hoped. The windshield wipers didn't work right. When it started raining there was absolutely no place where we could get our rig off the road to fix them. So we just went along in the rain, and Dave reached his arm out the window every minute or so and manually moved the wiper. But the visibility was so awful that we stopped in the first town we came to and spent the night, and the next morning it wasn't raining.

In Washington they have the most beautiful evergreens that just grow so green and thick and perfect that you think you're riding along in a Christmas card setting, except there was no snow, but I'm used to no snow at Christmas anyway, so we went along singing "Sleigh bells ring; are ya lis'nin'...?" In Washington we had our first "rest stop" where we really refreshed ourselves and I went to a laundromat and got all straightened out for the next leg of the journey, which proved to be far more difficult than the first.

To me there was a strange feeling about entering Canada. I felt so far from home, and like I was in a strange country, though Canadians are really similar to us in most ways. I guess it was the customs office. We had to pay a little over $12 duty on the gasoline we had with us, and the change they gave us was, of course, in Canadian money, which looked like play money to me. And they asked if we had any side arms, and they wanted to see $50, I suppose so they could be sure we would get all the way through Canada, and wouldn't get stuck there and have to get on their welfare. (Ha) We spent the night in the customs office parking lot, and left at daylight.

The Canadians seem to prefer BLUE houses, or three-toned ones. The typical house we would pass was black roof, blue gables, white sides and wood-colored trim. I never saw so many blue houses in my life.

That first day in Canada we finished the last of the divided highways, and we crossed some steep mountains that were barren and brown, in contrast to the cool, evergreen-covered slopes in Washington. We crept up most grades in first gear at about 15 mph, and only once or twice hit a grade so steep we had to get in "Grandma" gear. The second night in Canada we spent just outside a little town called Clinton. I was a little sick, had a headache which led to nausea, etc. Dave was so tired he went right to sleep, and slept right through a visit we had from some of the young male citizens of Clinton, who drove right up to the door of the trailer and yelled obscenities at us. They stayed out there laughing and carousing and hollering unrepeatable things for about half an hour, and I was so scared I didn't dare make a peep, and I thought Dave must be just quietly lying over there listening, too, and the next morning when I mentioned it, he said he hadn't even heard them. (Boy! I guess if they'd torn down the door and dragged me away, he'd have awakened the next morning and said, "Hmm. Wonder where Jean went...?") Oh, well.

That was Saturday night. Sunday was cold, the beginning of snow. The road was unspeakable, I suppose because over the years the snowplows had torn it up trying to scrape the snow away. We had to go slowly, we thought, but found out that night what going slow really was. We had supper in Prince George, BC, in a restaurant. I was nervous and couldn't eat very well. We decided to drive on, though it was dark, because it was getting dark so early, and we hadn't made much time that day. Out of Prince George we got into really big mountains, and the light little patches of snow we'd been seeing became total whiteness everywhere.

I guess it was about 9:30 when we came to what we later learned was Pine Pass. We had been noticing little patches of ice on the road, and had been climbing for several miles. Then we came to a grade so steep we had to creep along in Grandma gear. It was worse than any grade on the Grapevine, and the cliff on my side was straight down. They had a concrete curb about 20 inches tall all along there. I stopped looking. I just closed my eyes. Rachel was asleep on my lap, and I drifted off, too. I couldn't stand to look anymore at that white road and white bank creeping toward us. I woke up when Dave said, "Boy-oh-boy! We'd never make this one early in the morning icy as it is now." And about that time we weren't going forward anymore, but backward, slithering back down that mountain, wheels spinning. The trailer brakes held then, and we got to where we could let ourselves backward, but we couldn't go forward. I prayed.

Naturally, Rachel woke up. Maybe she sensed the tension in me, or got cold or something, but she started crying. Dave put some logging chains on the wheels, and still it wouldn't go forward. So inch by slippery inch we let ourselves back down to a place where there wasn't so much ice. Meanwhile, the tail end of the trailer got hooked on that 20-inch curb as the trailer rolled and the truck slid, sort of jack-knifing us, and we thought we'd never get the trailer unhooked from the curb. But I prayed, and finally with the help of the Lord we got enough traction to start forward again, and went on up that mountain, chains clanking. It was about a mile to the summit, but the steepest part of the grade only lasted a hundred yards or so. There was a lodge-ski resort at the summit, and we pulled in there to spend the night. They told Dave they had just had five feet of snow in the past two weeks... That's 60 inches. And I believed it. There were deep drifts on the tops of cars and other flat places. And it was mighty nippy....

...to be continued...