Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
When we first arrived in Nome I picked up the “Historical Walking Tour of Nome, Alaska” brochure down at the Carrie McLain Memorial Museum and oriented my sons to the town with some of the historical locations included. From the Sandspit to the Old Federal Building, we walked the streets of our new town. The Detention Hospital for the Insane was one of the brochure’s more colorful descriptions. Mary McBurney wrote, “…originally used as a detention home for individuals arrested on charges of insanity. People held at the detention hospital stayed there until after going to trial. Then they were either set free or sent to a sanitarium in Portland, Oregon.” The “set free” part was a little unsettling to my children as they carefully scrutinized some people walking into the GTE building next door.
“Andy Ellis was a miner from Hastings Creek who was judged insane and then put in jail back in 1900,” I told my boys, using some new found knowledge I’d come across from the composite replica newspaper I’d picked up at the Nome Visitors’ Center. “They probably built the Detention Hospital for guys like him.” I kind of forgot the history of the place as the weeks wore on in our new home on the Bering Sea.
But my nine-year-old son Ed did not.
The Music Mart has turned into one of Ed’s favorite haunts. It’s the kind of place you want to be when a blizzard hits town. Their store looks a lot like their brochure I found in my postal box recently: jam-packed. With electric keyboards, photo albums of Nome events, sheet music, a giant wall of cassette tapes, and knick knacks from around the world, even if you were trapped inside for a week, you’d never run out of interesting things to examine in Leo and Erna’s store.
Nome doesn’t have street signs at every intersection. You’ll see “Bering Street” and “Seppala Street” and “Steadman Avenue” on a few corners in town but not in my neighborhood. Since you have to find things your own way on your own terms in this world, I asked Ed how he finds his way to The Music Mart. He didn’t say, “I go to the corner of East First and Federal Way” or “I head for Milano’s Pizzeria and look east.” He said, “I go down to the Hospital for the Insane and turn left.”
I explained that poor old people like Andy Ellis no longer go to that house on East First Avenue. I told him that regular sane Nomeites live there now and feel lucky to find housing these days. I also cautioned him that Leo might care to have his store linked to such a place. “Well,” Ed said, “it’s just that I’m still afraid that the ghosts are there and so I always remember where it is.”
It’s a beautiful thing that I can let my kids travel Nome by themselves. They’ve relished the chance to go to the library alone, buy a comic book at A.C. with no parental intervention, and to run the occasional errand for milk, eggs, or chocolate syrup. Nome is a place a kid can wander and walk and ride a bike and orient himself. And even though you may have to avoid the ghosts of the insane at the old hospital, you can still find your way to the wall of cassettes by yourself.
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