My summer vacation was filled with camping, fishing, cutting fish, babysitting and trying to dodge the mosquitoes. The first week of June my family, grandparents and I packed up our camping gear to move for a month upriver to dry fish and commercial fish. We didn't have to pitch a tent because a tent was left through the winter. My grandparents' house was being built, but the first night it wasn't finished. So everyone had to squeeze into the 12 x 14 tent for the first couple of nights.

My dad, grandpa and I would go out subsistence fishing almost everyday to catch king salmon. Finally, we got lucky and caught about 95 king salmon. After tackling the net load of fish, we had to conquer the job of cleaning the fish. I had to wash the slippery, slimy fish and try to control myself from not dropping them back into the river. During the next few days, I was trapped into babysitting my niece while my mom cut the fish. The fish took about three days to cut because there are a lot of parts you have to cut and hang on the poles.

During the next few weeks we watched the fish, smoked them and kept them out of the rain. We took trips back and forth to Marshall. We also went to the Gold Mine trail to gather some plywood and some sheet iron to build our own house. My dad had to build our own house because a couple of nights we had experiences with black bears behind our tent. Our tent was right below a hill, so we could hear the bears coming down the hill and trying to get to the river. While I was sleeping in my grandparents' house one night, we heard my mom, Anna and Mary Jane Shorty knocking on the door. They were saying that a bear was trapped in the bear trap, and they could hear it breathing really loud behind the tent. My dad retrieved his gun from the boat, and my grandpa got his gun from his house. I wanted to go out and see the bear, but my mom held me back.

We heard about four gun shots. A few minutes later, the two men came back satisfied that the bear was killed and we could get a good night's sleep. The bear experience made my mom and the others sleep in my grandpa's house. Since the bear wasn't skinned and cut up right away, we had to give it to someone else's dogs.

The days stretched into weeks, and the day came to put all the dried fish away into buckets and the freezer. We had to sort the fish, cut them into pieces and put them neatly in the buckets to make as much fish fit in the buckets as possible. We put away about five or six buckets and a lot of dog salmon which I had to put into the freezer because my sister, Anna, and I only eat dog salmon dryfish. When we were done putting the fish away, we moved back to Marshall. I had to get packed for my trip to Germany. I didn't know where I was placed in Germany. That worried me a whole lot because I thought I was going to be put on a farm out in the middle of nowhere. My dad and grandpa brought me down to St. Mary's by boat. I left St. Mary's on a Beechcraft airplane and reached Anchorage about three hours later. After locating my baggage, I went to Continental Airlines. They were closed until half an hour before the flight. While I was waiting I visited with my aunt and her husband. I then checked my baggage all the way to Dulles International in Washington, D.C. My flight had two stops in Seattle and Denver. I reached my destination at Dulles around 4:30 P.M. the next day. On July 18, I met the other 39 students traveling with me to Germany. One hour before departing for Germany, I found out where I was going to live for the next four weeks. I was placed in Altenburg, Thuringia, (East) Germany. I was shocked, amazed, scared, nervous and a lot of other things. Arriving in Frankfurt, Germany, we waited for over an hour for our ride to Darmstadt. That's where my summer vacation officially ended, because the following Monday I went to a four week orientation and language course.

Flora M. Evan