Stranded on an Arctic Island:
Coming of age on an Aleutian military base

{Note: In an attempt to capture my entire 13 month experience on Shemya from March 1990-March 1991, I am writing one story at a time, as I remember them. This is an example of one such story. Names are changed.}

Fried Green Tomatoes

The Base Exchange, or BX, was a bit of a diversion when it wasn't providing us with the supplies we needed. Don't get me wrong; we did buy stuff there. Me especially, because I attempted cooking more often than others. About half the store was dedicated to food. The BX was located on the first floor in the center of Building 600, across the hall from the administrative offices. It was twenty by forty feet or so (the size of your average coffee shop really), and carried essentials like boom boxes, eggs, greeting cards and Alaska souvenirs. There wasn't always something we needed in there, but sometimes we went in just for something to do.

I guess its main value was in the food. It was the only place on the island to purchase the staples necessary to cook our own food in one of the community kitchens in the dorms. Meals were provided for us at no charge at the chow hall for a good part of the day, but that didn't satisfy me. Besides the fact that the chow hall food wasn't any good most of the time, I love to cook. I kept a small supply in the fridge in my room in case I needed to whip something up. Josephina didn't mind that I used more space than her in the tiny fridge because she usually got to help me eat what I made.

The BX wasn't like a variety market I'd seen before though. Using this place was more of a game, or a gamble. Sometimes the food you wanted would be there, sometimes the food wasn't expired. Milk was almost always bad. We chalked it up to the long flight out in the belly of a C-140. People argued that it wasn't warm enough to spoil the milk on a flight out the Aleutians, so others thought it must sit on the tarmac at Elmendorf AFB for a day or two before it left. Whatever the reason, I was only sometimes brave enough to buy the milk. The expiration date didn't usually correspond to whether or not the milk was sour. After a shipment came in on the Reever, I would ask around to see if others had bought the milk yet, and whether it was good. I'd ask Beverly behind the counter. She and her husband Frank were two of the permanent Shemya residents. Beverly learned long ago not to get in the middle of a gamble. She would lean forward with a big smile and her hands on the counter over her single rack of paperback books, and would tell me she hadn't heard, but she thought it would be fine. Half the time I wanted milk, there was some in the cooler. Half the time there was milk in the cooler, I was brave enough to buy some. Half the time I brought milk back to my dorm, it was drinkable.

There was other food though. Eggs and cheese were usually ok. There was orange juice too. And dry stuff: flour, sugar, baking soda. There were canned beans and pears, tuna, bread and peanut butter. A row of glass jars filled with olives stuffed with pimentos, the glass fuzzy with dust. There was pop too, and beer. Fake stuff: Eggbeaters - egg-type products in a carton - and soy milk that was in cartons out with the dry goods. Apparently it didn't go bad. Some of the guys swore by it, but I just couldn't bring myself to purchase and use milk made out of beans that was warm on a shelf. Blech.

In the very back of the store was the electronics section. This was a corner dedicated to TVs and stereos that we bought because most of us didn't bring any with us. There was a weight limit on what we could ship with us when we came, and we left our expensive gear safely in CONUS, the Lower 48. There were also a few cassettes and CDs. Mostly country, a little rap, and some top 40. Luckily, in 1990, top 40 was decent. We found Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode, and Jane's Addiction in the rack. Not too much later we could pick up Blood Sugar Sex Magik from the Chili Peppers. I was still getting Rolling Stone delivered to me (a month late each month, but it kept me in the loop), and inside I read about this new band making headlines: The Gypsy Kings. I browsed the BX just for the hell of it, and was delighted to find their Mosaique for sale. I bought the box set of Rod Stewart's greatest hits while I was at it.

There were a couple of racks of clothes - for men. There were hardly enough women there to warrant stocking a women's clothing section. We got a small selection of tampons, which was more important, as far as I was concerned. There were unisex crew socks. We could always mail order better clothes anyway. The most popular clothing rack was the famous Shemya T-shirts with an oval in the middle showing a map of the northern Pacific, the Bering Sea, Russia on the left and Alaska on the right. A string of dots through the middle mapped out the Aleutians. Off to the side, a star was obliterating the island of Shemya beneath it. Above the oval stated resignedly: "Shemya, Alaska. It's not the end of the world." The rest of the joke was below the oval: "But you can see it from here."

The obligatory souvenirs shared a rack with the greeting cards, stationery, and toiletries. There were tiny silver spoons in tiny silver spoon cases, slices of logs with paintings of Alaskan scenes on them like sharp mountain peaks, bears, eagles, and leaping salmon. There were magnets of moose and totem poles, and coffee mugs with jokes about ice fishing and shellacked brown lumps made into dangle earrings. They were supposed to be moose turds. Basically, everything a solider could want to send home a little bit of their experience at the Rock. In truth, a souvenir that really represented our life probably wouldn't have been a welcome gift.

Greeting cards were a joke, and rarely served their intended purpose. Sort of like the milk. Now and then an occasion and a card would magically come together. A loved one would get married, someone knew somebody celebrating Hanukah or Kwanzaa, someone would graduate and we would have someone to mail one of the graduation cards to. But for the most part, we were safer just sending a postcard. One of those ones that was a reproduction of the oil painting of the entire island which still hung in the Base Commander's office across the hall of Building 600.

When Josephina's sister had a birthday coming up, the birthday cards available were "To a father who was always there," and "For my loving husband."

"I got one anyway," she said.

"Oh yeah?" I asked.

"My sister knows what it's like here, she'll understand. I thought I might as well embrace Shemya for what it is. Here, take a look."

Josephina handed me the card she had picked out. It said "Happy Halloween Nephew!"

"I'm just going to sign inside like usual and tell her it's the best I could do. I think it'll be funny."

The weirdest thing about the BX was that every so often we'd get a case of produce. You understand, of course, there was very little fresh produce to speak of at the Rock. Even the salad in the chow hall was made with cabbage because lettuce couldn't survive the trip. We were like a pen of chickens on the farm, I guess. Every now and then in order to feel better about themselves, the farmers toss in a pile of weeds and compost for the poultry to scratch through. In this case, I'm not sure who the farmers were, but I was one of the chickens for sure. Our treats came in the form of one solitary box of produce on top of the trash can across from Beverly's counter.

I worked at Shaver's Grocery Store in New Meadows, Idaho when I was in high school, so I was familiar with cases of produce. The population sign on your way into New Meadows put us at 576 folks when I lived there. Basically, Shaver's served the same number of people that the BX served. When I worked produce on Wednesday mornings at 5:30 am before school, we hauled in eight to twelve cases of produce. Every Wednesday. The BX pulled in one case twice a month. Sometimes it would be a case of oranges, or potatoes. Once it was cabbage. They sat there a long time because we were getting plenty of cabbage at chow. Finally Beverly and Frank decided to serve canned corned beef and slightly old cabbage as the meal for the weekly church fellowship meeting they hosted.

Needless to say, these produce boxes were a hot commodity. News spread quickly at chow and in the post office, and those were the places someone generally heard about a new case of produce. "Hey, d'ja hear? Bananas at the BX." Once there were kiwis, and I was surprised to see they made the journey without a scratch. A person had to get to the BX early the morning after Reever brought produce, or it would be gone, or nearly as bad - they would be left with only the produce rejects. An apple deformed around a brown scar made by who knows what. Cauliflower going black on the tops. Usually even the bad produce was scooped up after an hour or two, and by early afternoon the case would be empty. That was our farmer's market: one item for a few hours.

I stopped in around noon for toothpaste one day, and there was a case half-full of tomatoes. Tomatoes! A delicacy for certain, but the reason these were still there was because they weren't really ripe. More precisely, half of them were ripe, Beverly told me. That explained why half the box was empty.

"It's hard to get produce at all," she complained in her good-natured way, trying to laugh it off. "Then sometimes when we do get it, it's not even good produce."

However, I saw something different. I saw a feast in my future, and my mouth was already watering. I picked up a one-pound bag of flour just in case I didn't have enough in my room, grabbed my toothpaste, and put them on the counter. I dug through the box to pick out eight of the greenest tomatoes I could find. I was gonna fry me up some green tomaters!

The fruit in the box wasn't all green. They were green-ish, for the most part. Not tempting if someone's hankering for a tomato, but not altogether unripe. The problem I had was that fried green tomatoes require green tomatoes. Pink tomatoes will mush up. It's best even to avoid those ones that are green on the outside with pink seeds and juice inside, even though those will work. On the other hand, you can't fry up a hard green tomato - that'll be sour and bitter. There is a range of acceptable green, and that's what I was digging for.

I told Beverly with excitement what I planned to do. She smiled with a "That's nice, dear" look on her face. Maybe fried green tomatoes were only something my family liked. I always assumed it was a common dish since several families in New Meadows would eat it in September when we were trying to suck the last bit of life out of our gardens. I didn't know it then, but soon there would be a movie in theaters back in the world about the very dish I was coveting.

Because of Beverly's reaction to me, I changed my plans from inviting all the weather guys. I would just fry them up and eat them all myself.

In the kitchen on the second floor of Building 599 I pulled out a communal use frying pan from the cupboards below and used a spatula to scoop out a glob of Crisco, which I dropped into the pan. While that was heating on the stove, I found a big plate and poured a pile of flour into the middle. I shook salt and pepper on top of that, with a little extra pepper. I mixed it all up with a fork then tasted it with my finger. Just right. I then washed up the tomatoes and sliced them thick. I pulled out another big plate to hold the cooked tomatoes on and set it on the other side of the stove. When the melted Crisco started sizzling, I threw on slices.

It took awhile to cook them all up. Once a crisp crust formed on one side, I flipped them to toast up the other side. After awhile they had a dark brown crunchy crust and the inside was tender. Cooking green tomatoes changes their flavor. Maybe it's some mystical chemical reaction triggered by the heat, causing the sweet and sour flavor capsules inside to open up and mature into a taste I can't find anywhere else. Add that crispy salty flour crunch, and I practically swoon. If they are cooked just right, the inside remains firm enough that you still need to cut it up with a fork, which I did. As new tomatoes were frying, I'd blow on a cooked tomato wedge stuck onto the end of my fork. I can never seem to wait long enough. Those tomatoes get so damn hot and take too long to cool off. I blow awhile, but burn my mouth in the end anyway.

I stood there an hour in front of the stove, frying and blowing and going, "Uhnnnmmm" with my eyes rolling back into my head in pleasure.

At one point, I heard a voice outside the open kitchen door exclaim something in the hallway. I didn't understand it. Then I heard a woman's voice say, "Is that fried green tomatoes?" A head poked around the doorway.

"Oh," she said, and I clearly detected surprise. "I thought you was a sistah."

"Oh," I said back to her. Not exactly sure what response that remark called for.

"Yeah, I was just walkin' by, and I coulda' sworn I smelt fried green tomatoes. What is it you're cookin'?"

I flashed a big smile. Validation! Here was someone who liked them too.

"Fried green tomatoes!" I announced. "They were in the BX this morning. I love them so much I couldn't resist frying them up right away."

"No kidding. Where you from?" she asked, genuinely interested.

"Idaho."

"They cook green tomatoes up there? I thought the South's the only place they eat those. You got family in the South?"

"Not that I know of."

"Huh. Ok. So they know about fried green tomatoes in Idaho too, then." She grinned, letting me know that her estimation of Idahoans had just gone up a notch.

"Want some?" I asked her.

"Ahh, no, I just got back from the chow hall. But damn, they smell good. Take care," she called, and she went back into the hallway.