Swimming? Not a topic you would expect in a story from the Alaska Highway Project, but here it comes…
Near the end of June, with the critical task of getting the 340th to the Teslin River behind them, Headquarters moved up to Squanga Lake. One day, when the air temperature climbed to 80 degrees the lake actually looked inviting.
Everywhere along the path of the Highway, soldiers worked endless hours. Like gypsies, they moved their bivouac every two or three days, losing all sense of time. Life boiled down to bone-tired exhaustion—levering a dozer, swinging a sledge or axe, slogging through knee deep mud or wading through icy water carrying pieces of a bridge or culvert. They snatched food and sleep wherever and whenever they could fit it in. They had all washed faces, and some had taken sponge baths, but over the last month most of the soldiers, given a rare chance to rest, had fallen onto their cots wearing the road.
One joke that made the rounds… “Rumor has it that mosquitoes fell dead after biting certain members of the officer corps.”
More on Getting to the Teslin River
On the rare day when Squanga Lake looked inviting, Captain Boyd, commander of Company C decided he’d been enduring the smell of himself and his men long enough. At the risk of polluting Squanga Lake, Boyd ordered an “all-over” bath for all hands.
The soldiers stripped and gingerly entered the water. And in a few minutes the air around the lake shore rang with the sounds of young men having a good time–yelling, laughing and splashing each other.
Captain Boyd filled his helmet with water from the lake, let it warm in the sun, then stripped and poured the water over his body; soaped and shampooed. As he approached the lake to rinse himself off, his men turned to watch their commander jump in. His feet plunged through six feet of water and his feet hit the bottom—icy and frozen solid. Boyd swore in his memoir, Me and Company C, that in the frigid water he turned a “dark blue–darker than about half of my soldiers.” Accompanied by boisterous laughter, he “tried his damnedest to walk on water back to the warmth of the sun.”
