Tag Archives: aurora
Shattering white in the sun
Drip, drop, drip.
Drop.
It was warm today. Chunks of snow hurled themselves over the eaves and hurtled past my classroom windows at startling intervals all day long. Icicles drizzled melt water into the pitted snow below.
Yesterday, Shannon and Terri shanghaied me after school and took me to Big Lake on Shannon’s new snow-go. I was sandwiched between them, my cold face buried in the fur ruff on Shannon’s jacket. The narrow, icy trail slipped and skittered under the roaring snowmachine, and I felt my knees grip harder, skittish and too-cautious as always.
When we got there, I looked up and around at the expanse of white and blue and space in every direction. I could feel the mountains yarding on my heartstrings across the ice. I have to get up there, once at least, before I leave the village for good. I should have taken pictures of the mountains: If I had, you could probably see the words “come hither” stenciled in the sky by their ridges. I did, I think, or maybe it was just a whisper from inside the part of me that loves to want just for wanting’s sake, and lingers, grinning, on windy precipices, tasting salt.
I took only one ridiculous snow-go selfie with Terri, but in my defense, Shannon was in front of me, I was in awe, I had no gloves (abducted, remember?) and those machines can fly.
I opened the window over my sink wide today and let the sound of the ice and snow, first slipping and scraping on the metal roof, then falling in white sheets to smash on the ground in a snow-cone splash, slip into my kitchen over the log-deep sill.
It’s been an exhausting week. The shattering ice confused with the chattering of the girls and made a little white noise for me rummage in to find a smile. They mixed their own cookies while I made a pot of curry and arbitrated disputes over who would get to choose a cookie first. They laughed and left their wet snowpants in puddles on the floor and hung their grubby socks to dry on the ledge of my open window and tracked muddy prints all over the floor and made me happy.
Yesterday evening, C came by to tell me that her sister wouldn’t be able to make it to school today. P would have to stay home and babysit the four-year-old so that their auntie could make it to work. We walked over to the school in the dusk light and got P’s math book and independent reading so that she wouldn’t fall behind. “I will never have kids” said C. “It isn’t fair”
The village is grieving and drinking and grieving. A young man passed away last weekend, and everyone is reeling. I knew the man, who used to cook for the school. He played country music too loud and grinned and danced along when I’d bop by in the middle of my crowd of kids, mouthing the words and playing mini air guitar. One of my boxes wound up at his house, and I met his newborn baby and his wife on one of my first days in the village.
The kids have been sullen and sleepless. No one is taking this well, and those whose families live hard have retreated into silence to bear the living harder.
Today, the body was returned to the village. Nearly everyone met the plane at the airport. My class chose to go, and we rode packed in the back of the red school pickup, bending our heads against the wind. We hopped out of the truck and joined the crowd of people standing in the melt-glittery white light of morning. Everyone looked up as the fat plane ripped the blue sky open overhead. When the long wooden box was lowered out of the plane, the young men lifted it and began to walk the mile or so back to the village. The rest of us followed on foot, the fourwheelers and snow-gos growling behind. As one man tired, another stepped in to take his place bearing the dead. A skin drum beat time all the way to the village, and a man’s husky singing voice rose above the footfalls and engines and quiet talk of the crowd. Halfway home, an obviously intoxicated man stumbled into M, a severely autistic high schooler. M looked at me with silent, confused, helpless big brown eyes and tried to step away. Another boy dodged behind me until the man fell behind us.
The men of the village carried Earl right up the steps of the church and through the front door. Everyone stood inside in winter coats. After a few short prayers, a murmured amen, everyone left. I took my students back to class.
Yesterday, one girl wrote in her writing journal that the brilliant, multicolored northern lights of this past week have comforted her. She feels like they’re a message from her uncle on his way to wherever he’s going, a silent promise that it will be okay.
For steel-eyed sixth grader, C, it’s not enough. She’s angry and righteous and pained. She blames alcohol. Drinking has been ripping up the village like a wrecking ball these past few weeks. She wants the council to get together and stop it. “They used to check planes and raid people’s houses that did it, but they don’t do nothing now.” I want so badly for her to have the voice to scream it all someday and be heard, but for now she can’t, and it’s ripping her apart. She is so small and her feelings are so big. This place puts awful burdens on children.
Tonight, Terri, the lower elementary teacher who lives next door, banged on my window. “Come look!” she shrieked, “it’s incredible!”. I gathered my robe around my legs and stepped barefoot onto the porch. It was warm today, and the night was bearable for a long moment.
I stood slackjawed until the cold bit too hard into my toes and my bare knees had goosebumps.
Moments later, I was flinging pants and a coat and a hat on.
Have you ever laid back in a spinning playground tire swing and watched the northern lights ripple and unspool from green to pink in the sky? They unwind across the velvet stars like skeins of acid yarn. They flutter and shimmer like handlebar ribbons in the summer. Night lights for people in the cold.
Making a life in the enchanted forest: Country Living Challenges, bush edition
I couldn’t sleep last night, so I went for a walk and found the sky fickle with its watercolors. Green first this way, then a wash that way, then washed out to start completely fresh. The aurora feels eerie and sentient, like the synchronous fireflies in the Cataloochee Valley. Maybe I am just easily bewitched by things that glow in the dark.
The row of glowing windows is the community hall, down the old airport runway from the school. This is the very center of my village, just a pool of light that doesn’t even touch the sky.
When I told Jake that I’d gone for a night walk, he looked dubious.
“If you’re walking at night, don’t go too far” he warned
“I was just out front here,” I gestured to the airport.
“Well, don’t go beyond the last house, anyway, even on the old airport” he said. “These ice bears won’t hesitate. They’ll just come at you and there’s nothing you can do. We’ve got one near the village right now. Big, nasty sucker.”
“I won’t be going far, no worries. I’m too chicken to really get out much, even in daylight”
Jake laughed and slapped my shoulder.
I guess ice bears are bears that don’t hibernate. Horrifying.
I’ve been walking in the village as often as I can, and, yesterday afternoon, I found myself out of school with daylight still burning low in the sky. I strolled down to the community hall and around by the washeteria. I saw C unfastening a harness from her blue plastic sled. She introduced me to her dog, (“he’s a hunting dog, but he fits the harness, so I have him pull me around sometimes. He’s pretty fast.”) and her auntie stepped out of the log house and said hello to me. We chatted for a minute, then I walked on, waving goodbye to C and grinning. Later, an older fellow called me over to chat about the weather. He was standing on his porch, watching a little girl play in the snow. I walked on, and they soon passed me on a 4-wheeler, waving, “just looking after you, to make sure you stay out of trouble” he teased as the rumbled by. On the surface unremarkable, these bits of chit-chat marked a turning point in my life here. Until yesterday, I hadn’t spoken to a non-teaching adult in the village (outside of business at the store or the post office), even about a child. I want to be a part of life here. I want to be invited to dinner or on adventures, and to have people to talk to who aren’t my students. I want someone to show me around and to tell me stories and to explain how things work. I don’t want to feel like the last, lonely dodo in the zoo, just sitting on my rock, serving my purpose while everyone waits for my expiration date.
This morning, one of the school board members approached me in the gym. “Do you like it here?” He looked directly into my face. He has dark brown, crinkly eyes that laugh easily from the shadow of his ball cap.
“Yes.” I said.
“Good.” He said. “I’m on the school board. I wanted to hear it straight from you.”
“I like it here. I love my kids, and teaching here, but It’s hard,” I said, meaning the dodo thing, wanting to say more.
“To us, it’s just our way of life,” he said, doing the laughing eyes thing, “you’ll get used to it.”
I suppose he thought I meant the climate and the geography and the ice bear threat and the price of butter. Those things are just awesome or appropriate, depending on your outlook.
I love this place. I love those things. I love my kids. If someone would just ask me to dinner or in out of the cold for a cup of hot tea so that I could love them too, I’d be almost sure I want to stay in Venetie next year. I know, without a doubt, that I will be teaching in the bush, but I don’t know if I can commit to spend next year here if the social tensions within the school and between the school and the village don’t ease up, at least enough for me to slip some thin roots through the gap. I don’t want to rust away from emptiness.
Schoolteacher Snapshots
Right now I’m lurking in the other secondary classroom while the kids play on the internet. Every Monday the P/T (principal/teacher) opens up the internet for the kids to surf freely. They come in to download music and movies and to play games that they can’t usually play. Wednesdays are gym nights, and, on Fridays, we project a movie on the smartboard and make some pizza or popcorn. With only 30 kids in secondary, it’s no big deal to make snacks for all of them and to cram them all into one room for a reward.
I like that. It’s something I could never have done in Arkansas. Sometimes at P-dub, I had thirty kids in one room for instruction. Here, it’s unusual to have more than ten.
Last Friday, I filled in for Jake and ran movie night. I had to turn some kids away at the door for bad behavior during the week, and I swear they spent two hours banging on the doors and shining flashlights through the windows. They wouldn’t leave us in peace. If we’d been anywhere else, I would have called the cops just to scare them, but here there are no cops, and I didn’t have parent contacts for any of them. I gave up on chasing them off every few minutes and went with ignoring them, which worked after a while. They left the deck trashed and me steaming mad, but I guess it goes to show how much that one little privilege means to them.
When it’s fifty below, attendance is optional for kids. Preschoolers don’t come, but most of the older kids show up, which has a lot to do with free hot lunch. They always come bundled up, but when it’s this cold out it’s kind of comical. Nowhere else in the states would you find the majority of fifteen-year-old girls willingly wearing snowpants all day at school. They wear snowpants and boots in gym class.
When we talk about land use and industry in social studies, they always think creating jobs is a stupid reason to develop wild land.
“Can’t they just go hunting? A moose can feed a whole village!”
I swear my sixth grader said that. I try to play the other side, so, for the first time ever, I’m teaching students who think I’m some kind of oil baron tree-killer.
I got on a seventh grader’s case one day for slacking during writing. “I’m not one of your Arkansas city girls!” she said, and burst into tears.
NOWHERE else in this country would someone imagine that I’d taught “city girls” in Arkansas. I kept her during lunch and sat beside her to get a feel for what the real problem might be.
“I’m just a regular girl from a regular village” she sobbed.
She has no idea how unique her circumstances are.
In social studies, we’re studying Alaskan language revitalization. There are 20 native languages spoken in Alaska, but less than 5% of Alaskans speak a native language. The kids know that Gwich’in is a dying language, and it saddens them, but one my 7th graders is adamant that the best part of knowing Gwich’in is talking behind people’s backs. She’s not too hot to teach me. Other students like knowing Gwich’in because it allows them to connect with elders and to understand their ancestors. They found out that my name is an Irish one and asked me if I could speak Irish.
“Nope. My family hasn’t been in Ireland for generations”
“Huh. Can you do any irish dances?”
A woman pulled a wagon up to the school today, and instead of wheels it had little red skis. I asked her about it.
“Oh, in the spring we’ll put the wheels back on.”Brilliant.
Take a comfy temperature and subtract it from freezing and you’re looking at the temperature in Venetie today. My fingertips spark visibly blue on switchplates and doorhandles and the cold spills in under the door, liquid thick. The world is all cotton candy pink and blue, and the air is perfectly still (frozen stiff?) so the mountain looks close enough to touch (like the aurora last night looked like chimney smoke: I’d never believe it’s so far away) and the chimney smoke floats straight up in a pink plume and then falls back down.
Nothing that floats in the sky over teacher housing could possibly be a normal color.
chasing piggens 