Cloud Over Kodiak

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30278, 2 November 1963, Page 3

Cloud Over Kodiak

Katmai. By William Fiske Erskine. Abelard-Schu-man. ?23 pp. On June 6, 1912, 800 men, women and children living a hard-working happy life as pioneers in the island community of Kodiak had the terrifying experience of seeing the sun blotted out by a huge black cloud. They knew not whence the cloud came, or of what it was composed. But soon an ash-like substance was rained on them, pitch darkness set in, and the township was buried feet deep in a whitishgrey precipitate. The deathly downpour continued for 48 hours with only one abatement, Roofs collapsed under the weight of it, and some buildings were buried to the eaves. Mingled with this curious rain were sulphurous gases that blistered the skin, smarted the eyes, and with every breath seared nose, mouth, throat and lungs. Yet not a life was lost. Men and women covered their heads with wet towels,

forgot pain and hunger, and went about the work of rescue in the blackness. Afterwards they learned that 100 miles away on the Alaskan mainland the volcano Katmai had blown off its upper half, and that the

wind being tragically right, the fragmented material had been carried aloft in vast mass to fall on Kodiak. This is the story of the heroic things done to save the population, and of tthe part the United States revenue cutter Manning and her officers and crew had in them. And it goes on to tell how the community, originally started by the Russians in 1894. rehabilitated itself over the years, although at first it thought itself as irretrievably lost at Pompeii. The book is liberally illustrated with photographs, line drawings and maps, and is written by a man who was a baby during the eruption. Using his mother’s letters, official documents, articles written at the time, and firsthand accounts given him by his parents and others, he has set out the story in narrative form. Dialogue has obviously been imagined, and much of it is naive and sentimental. In this reviewer’s opinion the facts, thrilling though they are, would have been more telling if divorced from the mushy private en-

dearments of Nellie and Billie.