Two-Step in Boots

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Keely

put some miles on my boots
this week past
maybe some fifty miles
the same and same trails
In snow and slush and mud and dust
and a sun that throws daily different shadows
It’s fast, this business of spring
And I have made fast miles to keep up

slip-slush-splash and a few miles in wet jeans
That chafe and tug
what of it? It’s ice and mud
and laugh it off and welcome the sun
Did it again the next day, too
and again and again with sore feet and
giggling like the white goose flying
the first one shot
a hundred bucks to the gun

blue lake ice and then the same ice pitted
caribou antlers bend like mossy rubber
and in two days the white slough buckles under the bank
and disappears and unveils the carcasses of salmon
lying glinting in the river like silver gold
And dried on the sand like paper cranes

girl prints and caribou moon prints
by the gravel bar where bears are
and wolf toenails and boot heels
cutting the sand on the driftwood bank
slush steps fast-sinking in the melting lake
and the moon fading in the summering sky
this hurrying business of spring
is dancing miles on my boots
this week past
maybe some fifty miles

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Too muddy for too many words

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Keely

Miss A wrote in her journal that “the best part of being outside is feeling the sun on my back. It feels so warm and good.”

This week is culture week, and the students have a half-day of music every day. They are learning fiddle, guitar and traditional dance. The program these folks run is amazing, and the kids are loving it.

For culture week, one community member invited us to his house to see the wolf he'd trapped. Black wolves are prized for their fur along the coast.

For culture week, one community member invited us to his house to munch on dry meat and see the wolf he’d trapped. Wolves are a significant threat to the moose population, which the community relies on for subsistence, so managing wolf numbers in the area is of real concern to the village. Black wolves like this one are prized for their fur by the people who live along the coast.

Some of the kids and I took the music instructors for a walk after the cakewalk last night.

The prom committee made another hundred dollars from the fundraiser, and I won back the lemon cake that had been making my house smell like heaven all afternoon. Only about a quarter of it made it home, though. You can’t not share your cakewalk winnings.

I had girls in the kitchen right up to the last second baking cakes, and there’s only so much giggling one can handle in a small space before fresh air becomes absolutely mandatory. I needed that walk, and the beautiful, silly kids just made it more refreshing.

M built the tiniest snowman! This is the only week of the year so far where the snow has been wet enough to make snowballs. They fly thick and fast whenever I take my students outside for journals.

Feet.

“I’d like to run through that puddle in the morning,” remarked A on our post-cookie walk through the village tonight.

Most of the walk was a game of tag and tangle with Gracious, C’s adorable dog.

We’re excited! The Cinderella Project of Maine is trying to help us get prom dresses, and we made the roll call (about three minutes in) on CNN Student News today! Between that and cookie night, it’s been a real red letter day.

I will never get tired of sunset

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Keely

Luck bestows a lot of twilight on the arctic, but it is migrating rapidly from noon to midnight, and it’s harder and harder to get out to enjoy it. I didn’t come home from this hike until nearly 10:30 on Thursday evening, but it was well worth the lost sleep.

January

Everything I thought I knew about time and space seems very muddled. Sunset in no way corresponds with bedtime, nor does sunrise align with waking. When I first got here, the sun very determinedly rose and then shortly set again in the south. Now it’s all creeping north, sliding along the horizon.The whole arrangement seems very unreliable for something so cosmic. My classroom windows face north, and my avocado is flourishing there.

April

It’s very lively, the way the shadows never seem to fall the same way twice.

One of the most fun and strange things about teaching is how it pushes you to do things you never had any interest in before. My students don’t want to put on a play or start a literary magazine or a garden: they want a prom. Consequently, I have been very busy with, of all things, prom planning. What will our theme be? Who can come? How can we arrange for the girls to get their hair done? How can we transport them through the muddy May village without soiling their shoes? Last night was our first fundraiser, a spaghetti dinner and movie night, and the girls carried it off with style: They cooked, they cleaned up, they announced the event over the radio, they handled disasters and complaints like pros. It was so much better than I expected.

I know what you’re thinking: It’s your first fundraiser?! How can you expect to have a real prom if all you have is $120 and a group of wishful teenagers? Well, dear skeptics, we can’t expect to have a real prom. For a real prom, you usually need more than five boys in school, and it doesn’t hurt to have a local band, or a caterer, or a florist and someplace to rent a tux. Oh well. We don’t, and we have to make the most of it. Because I am their sponsor, we are going to try to get karaoke and laser tag, and to hell with your preconceived notions. I have enough cardboard stuffed behind my couch to make some very respectable prom decorations that can double as cover in the likely event of a laser tag shootout. I’m very pleased with the idea. $110 should get us enough glitter, and the rest we can scrounge. It might not look much like a prom, but it will be all kinds of fun.

If you happen to be sitting on a couple of old prom dresses or bridesmaid dresses that you can’t stand to look at anymore, it might be that my girls could put them back in action.

P.O. Box 81153, Venetie, AK

Snowshoes and SnowCanoes

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Keely

After school dismissed today, everyone hustled to the spring carnival. I watched the start of the men’s four-mile snowshoe race with a few other teachers. Five of my kids crammed themselves onto a four-wheeler and watched for a while, then took off to sell raffle tickets. I bought two for a moose hide.We waited for a while, but soon realized that the pie-eating contest wasn’t going to start until the race ended. It takes a while to go four miles on snowshoes, so we headed home for a snack. The way things unfolded, we missed the pie-eating contest and the baby contest altogether, but it was well worth it. Three of us hiked out to Big Lake and checked out one of the islands.

I even found time for a paddle!

I swear I’ll make it to more of carnival tomorrow, and I promise I’ll take pictures at the princess coronation on Friday. I’m being bold and heading out to the dance now. I’m going to hide in the back so nobody asks me to dance, unless it’s a square dance, in which case I’ll tear it up. Who knows?

Two hours later:

Athabascans fiddle like folks in the Appalachians. I danced once with an elderly fellow who wore a necklace of bear’s teeth and caribou legskin moccasins. He told me that his sister had made them for him before she passed away. He also had on a particular sort of hat that I’ve seen here before, a slouchy black cap with a white bow on the front. He came up to about my nose, and his eyes disappeared when he smiled.

The second dance seemed to last forever: it was a line dance, but it wasn’t called like contra, so I felt pretty clueless at first. There were five couples, and one led. The pattern wasn’t too complicated, which made it easy to follow but not too interesting to dance. There was a lot of bopping in place, waiting to swing someone down the line, which was good because it went on for so long that I had to keep running to the seat where I’d stashed my stuff to strip off more layers.

As I was leaving, a fourteen-year-old girl I know was demanding they do a square dance next and grinning. Maybe I should have stayed, but it’s late and there’s school tomorrow. I walked home in my t-shirt, sweating from the long dance and giggling at the dancing aurora. Carnival is a good time.

Chickadee-dee-dee

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Keely

We hiked out to Big Lake last night and did not get eaten by an ice bear. Now that I have once ventured into the bush, fully out of earshot of snow-gos and yelping dogs, I do not think wild horses could keep me out. I prowled alone all over the outskirts of the village tonight, following tracks through the trees, hoping to spot a lynx. I felt wildly daring when I stepped off the snow-go-beaten trail and stalked through the deep, dry powder, following an intriguing set of prints down a trail no person had been on since last snowfall. I didn’t find the animal that left the tracks (they were old, but I liked their winding line and followed anyway). The only wild thing I met on my walk was a chickadee, singing his spring song from a spruce tree. I stopped at his tree to watch him cock his jaunty, capped head as he hopped, and to rub powdery pitch between my fingers until it became soft and sharp-smelling.

On our hike last night, Sean and I saw no sign of the rumored bear, but we saw a squirrel scamper across the trail and stop in the snow, flicking his tail. He looked at us for a long time, and let us get surprisingly close. The squirrels here are small and ferociously alert, nothing like the languid, fat squirrels of suburbia. I expected him to break for the woods at any second as we drew near, but he didn’t. Instead, he vanished. Poof! We walked to the spot where he’d staged this trick and, sure enough, found the trap-door. The squirrel had whack-a-moled into a tunnel in the snow. Sean and I peered in, incredulous, and the squirrel popped up at the base of a shrub some ten feet away. I shrieked with surprise as it broke for the treeline.

It felt good to have someone to walk with me. It has felt good all week to have someone with me, and now I think the engine of this morning’s plane must have deafened me, because the quiet is so complete and sudden. I miss Sean and his bounce and bright warmth, but I’m not letting go of the fact that I chose this independence for a thousand right reasons. Sadness is silly when there are tracks to trace through the snow and sunsets to race to the riverbank. There’s a mountain I want to climb this spring, and looking at it makes my heart leap up, quick and giddy as a hand catching a blown kiss.