Off on Another Small Plane

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Keely

I accepted a job in Huslia yesterday.

I’ll start December 13th. Grade 6, eleven kids. I couldn’t be more stoked to get back into a classroom. I’ve missed children a lot these last two and a half years, and 6th grade is a great fit for me.

I also feel weird about it. I want to start finding my way to someplace settled and permanent, and starting over in a new community where I don’t know if I’m likely to land for keeps feels like a step in the wrong direction. It also feels like a betrayal of the kids. Teacher turnover is such a huge problem in rural Alaska, and I hate to go someplace knowing that I’m likely to eventually leave. I guess that’s the nice thing about 6th grade, though: I’ll be with these eleven kids through the end of the year, and they’ll move on over the summer. If I do too, it’s not as big of a betrayal as it would for students I’d work with again next fall. Still.

And who knows? Maybe it’ll be just the ticket. Maybe I’ll never want to leave.

Here’s what I want, long term: I want to live in an Alaskan community that has more use for snowmachines and four-wheelers and boats and planes than for cars. I want to be surrounded by people I can love and who can love me. I want to live in my own home, not in teacher housing or a rental cabin. I want to have babies and to believe that they are safe in the homes of their friends and my neighbors. I want trees, caribou, mountains and rivers. I want to work hard for the things that sustain me, and in working to offer my gratitude.

Tangent: Speaking of gratitude, I have decided I’m going to be a gort — a meadow vole — (the one in my yard is named “Gort” so therefore all meadow voles are gorts) for halloween. I can make a costume with my brown overalls and my grandma’s mink stole and some bits of fur from my sewing box for ears. I’ll draw on whiskers and add a short tail and voila. DIY Halloween. Down with capitalism and plastic from China.

Here’s what I need, short term: a job that pays better than a graduate assistantship, health insurance that doesn’t suck. A dentist appointment.

So there’s some tension between what I want and what I need.

And maybe these aren’t the right questions to ask anyway–what do I want, what do I need. Maybe I should be asking who needs me. The sixth grade job has been posted since summer, so that’s an easy answer. And who wants me? Well, I interviewed as a backup in case they couldn’t find a substitute by the holidays (I figured I’d feel less bad about subbing, so I put myself on the list), and by the end of the interview YKSD was ready to offer me a contract. So.

So I’ll fly out in December and stay until the beginning of break, getting to know kids and families and the staff at the school. And then I’ll come back to Fairbanks, put my treehouse-home to bed for the time being, pack my things, and fly back to Huslia with Alan and Silna just in time to go dance at the hall for New Years. Alan will stay a week or so, and then he’ll come back to Fairbanks.

I’ll bring the Bravo. At first I thought maybe I’d leave it here, but when I mentioned that idea to Geoff he laughed out loud. “You’re just going to want to borrow someone else’s sno-go then.” And he’s probably right. And maybe in the summer, if I decide to stay, I’ll make a trip of it and take Lyra down the Yukon. She’s never been downriver of Tanana, and it’s a fine thing to have a boat in the fall.

Use Every Part of the Spruce Tree

Posted on July 1, 2020 by Keely

Yesterday, I slept in a little past nine. Silna spent the night curled up inches away under my cot, stirring now and then, while the light dimmed behind the hills to the north, then brightened again.

Alan showed up while I was still tucked in. “Brrrr. It’s in the low forties this morning,” he said

“No wonder I’m still in bed, then,” I said, “It’s chilly outside the covers.” But I flung them off anyway. We had plans.

Some weeks ago, I felled a really big spruce. I was super thrilled; there isn’t much that makes you feel more awesome than all that weight hitting the forest floor and rebounding into your boots and knowing you did that. That is your boom.

Nicole, Reggie, Alan, and I peeled it with a drawknife and a hatchet, using the blade of the hatchet like a spud knife to take off huge, wet strips of bark and cambium. Our pants and gloves became soaked with the watery sap and the slick blond logs slipped through our hands like fat salmon. I loved it, that joy of messy work that feels so clean, somehow.

Some of the middle pieces of the tree went to a raised garden bed, notched, log-cabin-style. I learned then that notching is not as easy as you might think and that chiseling wet wood is much easier than chiseling dry. I broke my first chisel working on that project, but I got my tomatoes and squash in before they busted free of their pots.

Some of the smaller-diameter pieces I left long. Those, in company with some lengths from another tree, will make the posts for the loft I aim to build later this summer.

The remaining pieces, cut into six-foot lengths, have gone to the mill.

Milling is hard, dusty work. The Alaskan mill mounts on the bar of the chainsaw and steadies it as the chain rips down the length of the log you’re milling. The posts are marked with measurements, so you can cut the plank to a preset width. Alan has been helping me, which I’m extremely grateful for. It is not a one-person job.

When we start a new log, we set the mill to three inches, nail a 2×6 flat along the top, then slide the mill along that to create a straight first cut. The resulting pieces of “siding” are an inch and a half at the thickest point, and structurally useless, but Alan made a cute planter-box out of some of them, and I’ve been saving others to dry and use as paneling on a future project.

While you are milling, the chain digs out a cut the width of the bar through the log and sawdust flies thick. It mixes with the hot exhaust from the saw and tickles in your nose when you inhale it. It smells like a paradox – clean, fresh spruce shavings and fumes from burning petroleum. Even through the earmuffs, the saw roars too loud for any overhead jet to cut in. You don’t look up. The mill and saw vibrate in your hands clear up to the wrists. You are fully absorbed, physically, back bent, nose, ears, hands busy. Your mind is free for a while.

I love that.

After each cut, one of us shovels the sawdust into a sled. I’ve set some aside to mix with wood glue to fill the cracks in the floor, and the rest I’m using to mulch the muddy parts of the trail. With all this rain, I’m glad to have so much of it.

Milling takes a lot of gas and a lot of time, and it’s amazing how quickly your chain dulls, running long rips like that, but you end up with great lumber. I’m drying some of the widest pieces, hoping they’ll be straight and wide enough to make a countertop. I’d like that, to be able to say that I sourced my kitchen counter on-site. So far, though, most of the planks have gone to the boardwalk.

When it was half-finished, I let the test-walkers try it out.

Geoff freehand ripped an incredible set of bog boards for my wagon to roll along last year, then constructed a notched-log support system for them. It was a really magnificent feat of chainsawing, and they’ve worked perfectly, but it’s always been a goal to plank them over, and as of tonight, it’s done.

This summer has been a lot of that: planking the bog boards, finishing the deck, finding permanent solutions to the problems I had to figure out as I went along. There is insulation yet to lay in, a retaining wall to build, and a mosaic to create in the hearth-pad, but I’m chipping away at it.

From my very clean chimney to (hopefully) yours,

Keely

P.S. I ate some really tasty spruce-tip scones recently. Shoutout to Nicole for her culinary stylings.

Mosquito Bites on my Mosquito Bites

Posted on June 11, 2019 by Keely

Five days ago, after a wonderful but unexpected two weeks in Trapper Creek being a badass with Alison and Matt, I went to Yukon Title and signed all of the required paperwork with shaking hands. I became a (slightly wobbly) property owner, just like that.

The lot was forested, accessible by road or trail but with no parking. I say was because it is all changing. As of today the lot features stacks and stacks of drying spruce, a clearing just the right size for a twenty-foot diameter yurt with a large deck, a cleared area ready to become a driveway, and a long trail connecting the two. Geoff, John and I have been earning our pizza (like ninja turtles!).

A plan!

Ripping logs for the trail

The deck site yesterday

The deck site today

We are cutting and stacking firewood as we go. With luck and planning, it’ll dry well. We’re piling slash to run through a chipper and use to mulch the trail as needed.

At the Fairbanks North Star Borough Community Planning office, I told the woman at the counter that I wanted to build a deck with a yurt on it.

“You mean a yurt with a deck on it?”

“No, that’s not really how it works.”

She looked at me like I was nuts, but she issued a zoning permit and a street address for me, so that’s something.

I guess what I am doing is a little different. Most people build where they have vehicle access for logical reasons. The neighbors up the road are building this summer too. Their lot is all dug up like a donut with a big hole in the middle, pretty much the opposite of mine. I like the privacy of my forested lot, and the mind-shift that will always be evoked by leaving the vehicle behind and walking through trees covered in snow or through horsetails and wild roses to the yurt whatever the weather – rain or cold or mosuitoes – I think it is important, so I am incorporating it by design.

Geoff, ever practical, points out that I will need a very long extension cord to plug in my vehicle when it gets cold. He suggests I get a generator in a locked box at that end of the property, warm that up with a cordless heat gun, then use it to heat up the engine block. Smartypants. I’ll figure that all out later I suppose.

This whole project is challenge after challenge. I went to the electric company yesterday and inquired about getting a hookup. Now I need to figure out how we are going to get a thirty foot power pole in there. And then how do we stand it up?

Then there’s the driveway. I went through a fear period where I was terrified that if we tried to do it ourselves, we would rent the little bulldozer thing, drive it off the trailer toward the driveway, hit the ditch, do a header, and everyone would get squished.

“Have you ever driven one of those things before?”

“No, but I have driven a tank.”

Helpful, Geoff? I don’t know.

There is a culvert to place and gravel to pack in. After we clear the organic layer, should we use that geotextile stuff at the bottom where it’s a little mucky? I am trying not to sweat it. It’s not a twelve-lane highway. We need the driveway, and soon, to stage the rest of the project. Besides, I’m sure the neighbors are getting tired of our truck (with attendant dog chained to the hitch and parts snowmachine crash-landed in the bed) being parked on the road. Everyone’s been nice about it, but it’ll be good to get out of the way. And to have a place to unload that dang sno-go.

Overheard in the saw shop: “you might be Alaskan if you’ve got a sno-go and a mountain bike in the back of your truck at the same time”

(Dude didn’t even comment on the goofy husky or the three chainsaws).

Passing bicyclist in a parking lot: “you still riding that skidoo? Hardcore!”

I am unexpectedly glad to be done with this phase of Project Treehouse. Most of the clearing is done, so there won’t be too much more cutting of live trees. I have cut and hauled plenty of loads of mostly-dead, dry firewood out in ANWR, but there’s something different about live trees in the very greenest weeks of spring. It’s a little sad. I don’t know what it is, exactly. Maybe it’s how they seem to fall so slowly (except when they go down wrong and they’re heading for your noggin). Maybe it’s how much the light in the forest changes with each felling. Maybe it’s just that they’re in my custody: my trees. I am glad to not have to do too much more of it, and I am glad we saved the lovely birches.

I am exhausted. We did laundry tonight and after all the sawing I could hardly lift the laundry bag. I have sap up to my elbows and across my face. I feel naked without my safety glasses and hearing protection. Thank goodness Carhartt was on sale at The Prospector for Father’s Day, because I am living in work overalls this summer. I have mosquito bites on my mosquito bites and bruises all over. I should be getting Geoff to help me clean and tune up my Stihl, which has been acting up a little, but I am grateful to have the following excuse: my dad, who is absolutely right, reminded me to write; there’s a lot I’ll want to remember.

Occupational Hazards

Posted on February 7, 2019 by Keely

so much more than just the cold!

1. Parasitic Arthropods

Our cabin is currently sitting empty with the windows open. Last time I checked, the temperature upstairs was about -5. I never actually saw a bedbug, but I have a distinctive line of bites along my ribs.

Kids bring bedbugs to school, along with head-lice, pretty frequently. A few weeks ago, I had a kid raise his hand in the middle of read-aloud. I glared, and he put his hand down. A minute later he threw his hand up like Arnold Horshack and waved it in the air. All it took was a raised eyebrow and he burst:

“I found a zhii!”

That is one of my hundred or so Gwich’in words, so I did what most people would do if someone loudly announced that they’d just picked a louse out of their hair- what everyone else in the classroom did – and stared slack-jawed.

He looked back, totally ingenuous.

“Umm. Go to the office.” He left. I tried to play it cool and get back to read-aloud, but he came right back in.

“Um, where’s the office?”

“Katie! Go tell Katie!”

Katie’s our administrative aide and she’s worth her weight in gold. She quietly arranged a school-wide head check and called parents.

After a while my student came back into and helpfully notified us all that “nobody should sit there. [He had] dropped it.”

All that is just to say that parasitic arthropods are just part of classroom teaching. What are you going to do? It’s really a wonder we’ve never had bedbugs before.

We threw the mattress in the yard last week, and a day of forty-below took care of that. Freezing the house at a temperature of zero or below for a few days will kill any bugs or even eggs that are left inside. We had to move the canned goods and perishable food out of the place, but there are no pipes to freeze. It’s a perk of arctic living.

ice on the windows so you know it’s cold: bedbugs begone!

2. Trauma

I realize I am just beginning to understand trauma: it’s the dread I feel with the coming of dividends and holidays – times of heavy partying; It’s the sick feeling I get when someone who doesn’t usually visit the school shows up in the middle of the day. So often those visits mean that someone – a student’s cousin or a parent – has died.

This fall, I taught for two hours with the knowledge that two of my students had lost a parent that morning. They had no clue, just went about business as usual. I held everyone in my classroom, escorted kids to the bathroom, made sure no one snuck a device under the table and got on social media. I tried to keep it light, have fun, not let on. It seemed to take years for the kids’ grandma to come and get them. That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

meanwhile, the sun is rising again, a little longer each day

By the time these kids hit middle school, they’ve seen far more tragedy than I saw in the twenty-five years of my life before Alaska. I have only been around for a few years, but already my gut is twisted with it all.

Trauma clouds the vision and tragedy is what happens when someone gets backed into a corner and can’t see a way out. Tragedy is what happened to both these boys, one of whom was my student. I try not to let myself dwell on it, but I have had a hard time letting it go.

3. Polar Bears

This is Not a Polar Bear

Jim is my neighbor, the father of a whole pack of young Arctic Village girls. He came by the school to pick up his daughters and I got to hear this story firsthand while the girls got their winter gear on. I just about lost my cool when I heard about this: it was the same weekend I was out thinking I was so badass for patching up the Bravvie all alone in the wilderness. I would have felt a lot less badass if I’d known there was a polar bear prowling around the area.

And after I fixed it, practically under the nose of a ravenous bear, my ride found the strength of ten Bravos, plus two! (this is how we haul school trash, these days)

**Polar bears aren’t really an occupational hazard. I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea. This is just a ridiculously nifty story.

Field Repairs

Posted on January 12, 2019 by Keely

It was twenty-below or so when we rode out from camp, and the ride was smooth. Geoff broke trail ahead of me, the Skandic plowing up a bank on either side of the trench it cleared in the tundra snow. The sun still hasn’t come up since November, but we’re getting alpenglow that creeps a little farther down the slopes each day, and the cold blue light that filters over the ridgeline to the south lasts a few hours. We headed north toward the mountains, breaking the trail that we hope will take us up toward the divide.

When we reached the river, I decided to take Daazhraii and turn back to camp. I didn’t want to push the dog too hard – large as he is, he swims in the mire of a fresh trail – or be out after full dark. It was only a few miles of backtracking, and Geoff planned to be right behind me after pushing the trail a few miles more across the Chandalar, so I wasn’t worried about riding alone.

I turned and took a long detour through the extra-thick buttercream tundra just to revel in the way the Bravo seems to lift up and ride on plane like a flat-bottomed skiff. The dog bounded behind, wallowing a little in the deep powder, but grinning and glad. It was just after that, maybe only two miles from camp, that my sno-go came to a halt, headlight dimming and then dying, the insulation of the engine’s roaring suddenly vanishing, so that I became, all at once, a part of the landscape rather than a traveler just moving through.

I tried to start the Bravo – no dice – then lifted the cowling. The spark plug boot had popped off, taking with it the little nut that screws onto the plug itself. It was wedged up inside the plastic cap that connects to the wire.

Shit.

No Geoff, so no tools.

Oops.

I know I should carry some basics, but I don’t. This situation is so improbable: Geoff is always with me, fully-loaded down with probably fifty pounds of good stainless steel, and, when he’s not, we carry a pair of UHF radios.

I pictured the second yellow hand-held, tucked under feet of snow blanketing the riverbank just south of Chandalar lake where we left it in an airhead moment on a packrafting adventure this summer.

Shit.

Dismounts are not elegant in full winter outerwear. I plunked into the deep snow beside the trail and opened the seat compartment of my Bravo: plastic bags, spare spark plugs, no tape, no tools at all, not even the scrench that had been in there for weeks. Definitely no needle-nosed pliers, which is what I really needed. What did I have? My emergency box, behind the seat, was full of dry clothes and firestarter. Not so useful. In my pockets I carried a lighter, some hand warmers, a headlamp and a knife. Bust.

I waded off through the deep snow to the lake’s edge where a few dead trees stood bare and raggedy. My feet were cold already, even in my bunny boots, and I needed to keep busy and warm if I was going to have to wait for Geoff to show up. I broke off low, dead branches and kicked down a few scraggly dry spruces. Winter outerwear is like chain mail: you can just throw yourself at a tree, or half-climb it and try to pull it down on top of you without worrying too much about taking a branch to the ribs in any serious way. The small branches burned quickly, so I had to keep at it. I hung my neckwarmer and hat by the fire to thaw out while I worked to gather more fuel. The moisture of your breath condenses on your outerwear in the cold, so you wind up with ice buildup, which eventually gets uncomfortable.

As I was dragging an armload of twigs back to my fire, something clicked in my brain: sparkplugs. I hustled back to where the Bravo waited, open like a clamshell in the trail, and tried unscrewing the nut from one of my spare plugs so that I could use the plug itself as a tool to remove the jammed nut from the rubber boot. Gloves on, I couldn’t loosen it. I tried taking my glove off and got nothing but a cold-scalded hand for my trouble.

Frick.

I gave up and went back to trudging heavily through the sometimes thigh-deep snow on the perimeter of the lake, wishing for snowshoes and gathering fuel while I waited for Geoff to turn back around.

When I got cold, I’d squat in the snow by the fire, then get up again to gather more fuel when the fire burned too low.

For two hours, maybe, I fed the fire, waiting. He didn’t appear. I did jumping jacks and added a bit of wood.

Night began to fall from the north and there was no sign of a headlight in the distance, no whine of an engine.

In the near-dark, I reevaluated my assets. I thawed the ice out of the elastic band on my headlamp, thinking maybe I could use it to clamp the rubber spark-plug boot to the engine and hold the nut in place long enough to make the short ride back to camp. Failing that, I could start walking. It wasn’t far, but the trail still hadn’t set, so it would be slow, difficult going, like wading in the surf, and I didn’t want to have to come back for the Bravo later. I took the spare spark plug out of my pocket and heated it, too, thinking maybe if I warmed it up the nut would come loose.

Not wanting a tongue-to-the-flagpole incident, I waited until the spark plug was really warm before sticking it in my mouth, then gripped the nut between my back teeth. I turned, and it came loose.

Just like that, I was back in business.

I screwed the spare plug into the nut jammed in the cap, popped out the nut, returned it to its rightful bolt and fired up the bravo.

Just like that.

While the Bravo muttered and churred in the trail, warming up, I threw the last of my wood on the fire. I was hoping it would burn long enough for Geoff to see it and realize what I’d pulled off all on my own. Night came as I drove away, turning my head to watch the live blaze of my campfire recede into the darkness.

(Geoff arrived at camp thirty minutes after I did, rimed with frost. He’d broken trail almost to the mountains, maybe another ten miles, and gotten stuck for a while in overflow.)