Last Wednesday night, Geoff and I left school to meet a late flight. We were stoked – it was a good surprise, an unexpected extra flight from Fairbanks that was carrying the rest of our gear from break. We arrived at the airport and hopped out of the truck into the -20 degree evening air expecting five or six boxes and a backpack. Geoff wasn’t even wearing a coat – it was supposed to be that quick. What we got was a backpack, five or six personal boxes, and about eight-hundred pounds of freight for the school. A lot of it was perishable.

We’d had no idea this stuff was coming. No one from the district called, and the airline hadn’t notified us. The maintenance guy, who usually picks up freight for the school, had gone home for the day (after making sure that nothing was coming in on the plane – the regularly scheduled, dependable morning flight). We couldn’t leave that stuff up there – the tomatoes and lettuce were already half-frozen.

We did what we had to do, lifting box after box into the back of the truck until it was overflowing: we lost boxes a couple times on the ride back to school, but frozen chicken patties don’t suffer too much from that kind of treatment. When we got to school, we unloaded and put everything in its place – the frozen stuff in the freezer, the fresh stuff in the refrigerators, and so on.

This wasn’t according to plan, and it sucked.

Evenings are precious. They are for skiing and working on snowmachines and cooking and playing games and preparing for a weekend in the woods and watching movies. They are also for planning and grading and doing dishes and other necessary chores that allow us to ski and eat and camp and relax.

We powered through the stacking and unstacking, packing and unpacking and went home to eat leftovers. Thursday and Friday passed as all days must eventually pass. When the last kid left the building on Friday, we each heaved a sigh of relief.

That night, in the middle of cooking dinner, I heard a plane. “Plane?” I said, surprised to hear one coming in at 6:30. “Must be a MedEvac,”

“No one has called for the truck,” Geoff replied, sharing my thought. Sometimes we get called when an injured person needs a ride to the airport because the school has the only working truck in the community and the injured person needs to lie down or can’t be transported by four-wheeler. Now that there’s snow on the ground, though, the community should be using a sled.

The call came fifteen minutes later. A whole planeload of freight for the school, mostly canned goods, which will explode if left outside.

Did we…

1.  Pretend we never got the call and swear never to answer the phone again, leaving the cans to burst on the runway?
2. Give up our Friday night and go haul freight until our fingers froze off and our backs buckled?
3. Quit our jobs and move to Iceland?

Geoff put his foot down. Evenings are precious, but weekends are sacred. We have a right to use our weekends as we see fit, to go camping or just choose to not answer the phone. They can’t rely on our being on call every minute of every day.

For the next hour, Geoff negotiated with the agent up at the airport, the maintenance guy, and the Superintendent. It still sucked, but somehow it got taken care of without our ever leaving the house.

There is so much on a teacher’s shoulders already, and I’m witnessing firsthand the toll that added principal duties can take. We’re struggling to find a steady Gwich’in teacher, and we’re down from four classroom aides to two. Our copier is broken, we’re almost out of paper, and we don’t have enough computers. We can’t get sick because we don’t have any substitutes, our kids’ attendance is at about 75%, our special education students haven’t received services for years… Add to that some late-night emergency deliveryman work and you’ve got a camel swaying under its burden.

There’s no easy solution, but there is this:

The sky was gorgeous this weekend, and I actually managed to go out skiing yesterday. I went as far as a creek thick with overflow, then turned back toward the fiery pink mountains and the warm home lights and warm chimneysmoke of town.

Geoff has finally got his snowmachine fixed, and we’re ready to start breaking trail toward Venetie. We’ll pack up the tent and the rifle and load the sled, then spend the weekend working our way south, keeping eyes out for caribou and good campsites. I am so ready.