The slippers are the personal counterpart to the typed messages for rescuers — one is a document addressed to the institutional future, the people who might come with a ship, and the other is an object addressed to the personal future, the child who was waiting for his mother.
## After the Rescue: Nome, and the World She Returned To
When Ada Blackjack returned to Nome in the late summer of 1923, she returned to a city that had been following, with considerable interest, whatever news came out of the Wrangel Island expedition. The Nome community knew that the expedition had been launched from their city, and they knew some of the people involved. E. R. Jordan, the police chief who had recommended Ada, was still in Nome. The network of Alaska Native families who had declined to join the expedition were still there.
She was arriving back into that community as the sole survivor of something that had killed four men, and she was arriving under the control of Harold Noice’s media strategy, which had sold the exclusive rights to her story before the ship reached port.
Noice’s instruction that she and the crew were not to speak to the press created a specific kind of public silence around her arrival: she was present, she was visible, she was clearly the person who had survived, but she was not talking. The silence served Noice’s commercial interests — the newspaper that had bought the exclusive rights needed the story uncontaminated by other coverage — but it also established a dynamic in which the person with the most direct knowledge of what had happened was the last one to speak about it.