First Week

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Keely

Yesterday was the first fine day all week. We went outside to write in our journals. The kids ran ahead, tripping down the path they use in winter for sledding and in summer for flying on bikes.Because they are silly, they wouldn’t sit on the ground. All eleven of them crammed together at the one picnic table. A little less work got done than I might have hoped, due to the natural consequences of having eleven kids at one table, but everyone wrote at least a page of sensory details. On the walk back, B borrowed my camera. It has been an awesome first week of school. I had to fight to get B in my class, but he’s thriving so far. He likes the book we’re reading and the activities we’ve done in science. I have a handful of kids, like B, that I didn’t know well last year, and they’re still wild cards, but so far nobody has been bored enough to make trouble just for fun. It bodes well.

We’re going to do algebra for real this year. I’ve taken the kids who are ready, regardless of their grade, and Jake has the kids who need another year of preparation. Ready means, in this case, mostly okay on basic math. I’m starting with a good long pre-algebra unit, then jumping into the good stuff. We’re going to take it slow, but I think we can get there.

I have half the class reading The Mighty Miss Malone and the other half reading Homecoming. Both books deal with damaged families and poverty and kids who carry more than their share of the burden. So far, both books are hits, and it warms the cockles of my heart to sit with my kids and talk about literature. We’re getting there.

The anemometers have been mostly successful. They got a little lost converting RPMs to miles per hour, but we’ll keep hitting it until it comes easy. We’ll get there, given time. And distance. ha. ha.

First Walk

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Keely

on the riverbank, a straw wind sweeps raw the gutters of my heart
and leaves me clattering outside with cold ears and a futile wish

I want a few more sunny yellow days, or just one sweet afternoon
to hang my hammock on the porch and love the sky with gold arms

but the wish drifts and falls and sticks flat to the wet of the river
and leaves me clammy on the bank with cold ears

School started yesterday, so I’ve been flying around with my hair on fire for a few days now, getting everything in order. I’m really trying to be a good science teacher this year, and that’s taking a lot of effort. We built anemometers today, and we’re going to talk about how to use them to calculate wind speed tomorrow or Friday. For right now, we’re just looking at RPMs, which is plenty complicated. I want science to be something that the kids can look forward to, a part of the day where they can count on doing something with their hands or getting out of their seats. It should be that, but I’m not good at it yet. I will be. I want to be. I love this time of year because I don’t have any bad habits yet, and nobody is behind. Everything is possible, and everyone’s intentions are good. And man, I just love my kids. They’re awesome, and I’m so glad to be back here with them.

Administration is putting some pressure on Jake and me to rethink how we’ve divided our classes, which is a little frustrating since we’ve started school already. Jake’s about to blow a gasket, since he’s dealing with the lack of a 3-5 teacher and a cook on top of everything else.

I took a walk this evening to clear my head and realized I hadn’t been to the river at all since coming back. There’s been a lot of rain, and I’ve been busy. Fall’s here already. It’s melancholy and gorgeous, replete with fresh breezes that sweep through me when I stand outside long enough to feel the cold through my sweatshirt. I want something to happen before winter, but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s just the usual heartache of autumn.

I’m collecting mugs, postcards, and international currency for my class this year. Send us stuff!

Camped out at inservice

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Keely

By sheer luck, I got invited to camp out on an island in the Yukon this week instead of staying in the dorms at voc-ed. Geoff, who teaches in Arctic Village, had set up his camp on Sunday, and when Terri found out, she fished for an invite. I distinctly remember, while packing my stuff in Belfast, thinking “how much camping will I be doing during inservice? Pah!” and boxing up my gear to mail to Venetie. Whoops. Fortunately, I had my sleeping bag and pad, and Terri brought along an extra tent. It was perfect last night: no bugs, no bears, no people. The sun dipped below the horizon for a while, but it never got truly dark. I slept with the tent unzipped and pegged open to let in the mist off the river and the sound of the water lapping the hull of Geoff’s boat in the night. Perfect.

seasons are sudden

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Keely

Maybe if I’d been here all summer, I wouldn’t be surprised, but it’s early fall in the Yukon Flats now. I stepped out of the peak of summer, August in Maine, and stepped into cold evenings and clouds and lightning orange trees interrupting the purple and green landscape like easter eggs. The fireweed is going to seed already.

I was in Venetie just long enough to move my stuff into a new apartment (more windows, a bathtub, a south-facing porch, and less cupboard space) and write and mail a letter. I walked through the village with a wary eye on the trees: there have been bears in town. One of my students visited with me while I unpacked my boxes. She’s off to boarding school on Wednesday, so I may not see her again. I told her I’d send cookies every time she sent me a letter of at least one page, and wished her well with a hug. I’m so proud of that girl.

Yesterday, just before I had to hop on a plane to Fort Yukon, my freight came in. I had to unpack all my frozen and refrigerated groceries in a hurry, then hop on the plane. My kitchen floor is covered in cardboard boxes and non-perishable foodstuffs. So much for leaving the place neat and tidy. Inservice is a little frustrating this year: we’re in Fort Yukon, so grocery shopping in our free time is out, and there isn’t really time to go back to Fairbanks, shop, then come back and set up the classroom and the house after inservice. I hope my bananas and lettuce are still good when I get home to Venetie.

The first time I got on a small plane to fly out to Venetie, I thought I was going to die. Now it’s become routine, no more strange than riding a bus. The landscape is still beautiful, especially now as it fades subtly into a fall purple with rivers winding through it like silver foil ribbons, but I’m starting to recognize lakes and mountains along the route. The magnitude of everything seems less when the landscape is speckled with landmarks. It feels like the way home, now, which is always shorter than the way out.

We’re staying in the dorm at the voc-ed center in Fort Yukon for the week. I spent an agonizing while reading on the couch last night until Jake and Terry showed up on borrowed four-wheelers and carried me and another young teacher out of there. We rode up by the army base (you know, because they used to/still do spy on Russia from here) and into the woods a ways, looking for the Yukon and a teacher who should have come in by boat last night (no luck, but he’ll be here today, everyone is quite sure). We saw bear tracks in the river mud, and a snowshoe hare with his heels already white. Jake drove me down to the river and I stuck a hand in, just to say I’d done it. The brisk evening air felt good on my face and I saw a lot of the village fast. Fort Yukon has stop signs and street names and two stores and a radio station and a bed and breakfast! There’s a tour bus! It’s downright strange.

We’re still looking for a 3-5 teacher because for some reason (aaargh!) the job was never posted. Anybody interested? I’m not on facebook anymore (the district has it all blocked up), and I don’t have a working phone connection at the moment, but you can get me by email: keely.m.oconnell@gmail. You’d get to teach across the hall from me and we can play games and go hiking on the weekends! yay!

In which I vacuum seal some chocolate cake

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Keely

It may look unappetizing to the uninitiated, but that is what is known in my neck of the woods as The Chocolate Cake. After you’ve tasted The Chocolate Cake, you can never eat other chocolate cakes without regret. It’s a Cook’s Illustrated recipe for “Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake” if you’re interested. Sean made it for the first time on my 20th birthday, and I shamelessly hid it from all of my friends and devoured it in secret. It’s that kind of cake.

It’s smooshed up in that baggie because we decided to go backpacking to celebrate Sean’s birthday last week, and the vacuum sealer was (er… is) still on the counter from all of the bacon-processing. We took the cake, took Friday off, and took to the woods with our friend Morgan (we were later joined by friend Andrew) to have an adventure on the Sylamore Creek section of the Ozark Highlands Trail.

By the time we reached the trailhead on Friday, it was 2:30. We’d had to de-mildew our gear and take care of the critters and run a few errands before we could leave, and the drive took nearly three hours. We planned on camping out and meeting Andrew a mile or two from the next trailhead (he’d hike in from that direction a little later in the afternoon). That afforded us a six or seven mile hike for the afternoon. Satisfied with the plan, decked in blaze orange, and full of chicken-salad sandwiches, we set off.

The trail is mostly well-marked with white blazes, though it clearly sees little use. We did the crunchy-leaf shuffle for miles, the rustling so loud that we couldn’t carry on a conversation. The leaves on the ground sometimes obscured the path, and we once lost the trail completely and had to just aim ourselves north until we hit a jeep road that we recognized from our map. Getting lost in the woods spiced our afternoon with adventure, but it also cost us some time, and when it started getting dark we still had miles to go. The moon was huge that night, and it broke the horizon orange like an egg-yolk, but not until much later. For the last hour or so, we walked in full dark, navigating from bright blaze to blaze along the trail and then following the wide swath of a jeep road. At one point Morgan stopped, turned off her light, then turned it on again. “It’s spiders!” she said, “there’s hundreds of them! Their eyes are glowing.” She handed me her headlamp but I couldn’t see it, no matter how I tilted the light.

We reached a wide-open feed plot at around 6:45, but it felt like midnight. The stars were bright on the sky like I’ve heard the eyes of spiders are bright on the forest floor. We built a fire in the middle of the jeep road and set up camp. We roasted home-made venison sausages and baked sweet-potatoes in the coals. Andrew joined us later that night, ready to hang out by the fire, but by then we were all half-asleep, curled up in our nests around the coals.

I got up just before dawn, chilly beside the ashes of the fire, and lit my stove to make myself some tea. When I sleep out, seeing the sunrise is a priority for me. I feel like a sunflower, smiling at the sky, getting my bearings for the day. I loaded up a bottle with hot tea, stuffed it into my sweater, and grabbed my camera. I found a nice corner of the woods and let the world light up with me in it.

When I got back to camp, dragging some dry wood, everyone else was still asleep. I re-lit the fire and built it up a little, then crawled back into my sleeping bag with my hot-tea-bottle to warm my toes. I pulled out Harry and read a little by the breaking light of the sun and the flickering light of the fire.

Too soon, everyone else was up, hustling to get coffee ready and start breakfast. We had bacon and eggs (ain’t nobody does deluxury backpacking like us folks) cooked in paper-bags over the fire. You rub the bacon on the bag to grease it, then make a bacon-nest in the bottom. You crack an egg into the nest, fold the top of the bag over, then spear it on a stick and hold it over the coals. To tell you the truth, a foil-pack works better, but the paper-bag scheme has a cool-factor that foil packs don’t offer, plus you can burn your cooking implement when you’re done, instead of packing it out. At one point, my bag caught fire and burned down to the bacon, but we slid the charred remains of the bag into another bag and I cooked on with great success (and at great length, this took something like an hour)

As you can see, my egg is seasoned with paper bag ash

We spent Saturday on the trail and came across our first hunters only a short walk from our camp. Saturday was opening day for deer season in Arkansas, and we’d been concerned about hunters coming upon us early in the morning, especially sleeping as we were in the middle of a feed plot. I heard four-wheelers and some shots in the early morning, but there was another feed plot down the road a stretch, and our sleep had gone undisturbed. The hunters we met looked bemused to see us tromping through the woods, all decked out in orange and with heavy packs and no guns, but they were friendly and chit-chatted with us a while.

We filtered water twice in some cold pools in the bottoms. They weren’t flowing (trickling at best) but we pushed our concerns back and drank up. We’re still fine.

We looked a little smurfy in our bulletproof hats, but our ears were damn warm.

Sean quite liked these funky formations.

We were forced to abandon our filtration mission at this pool with the cool rock wall when Andrew went for a swim. Brrr!

We camped the next night on a north face, and I pointed my hammock east. I didn’t have to break my cocoon to watch the sun come up: I just basked under the pink sky and read about Harry’s adventures at Poudlard (that’s french for Hogwarts, it seems). After a time, we all got up and reluctantly stuffed our aching feet into our frosty shoes and boots and set off down the trail to the next road crossing where we dropped our packs, hitched up our pants and stuck out our thumbs. A young man, unsurprisingly in a pickup loaded up with hunting gear, stopped for us, and (surprisingly) he didn’t make us ride in back but allowed our stinky selves into the cab. We chatted about spray-foam insulation and pheasants as the red hills swooped by, and he left us at Andrew’s car, ready for a pizza.