Butter, Sugar, and Eggs

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Keely

At quarter to six last night, I realized I had only enough butter left in the freezer for one batch of sugar cookies. I’ll be in Fairbanks in two weeks, but, last night, I was looking down the barrel of a long two weeks without butter. I tucked myself into my gear and crunched my way over to the store, hoping they were open, hoping i wouldn’t leave the girls stranded in the cold, hoping they’d have butter at the store, hoping they’d be able to break a fifty.

The store is four short aisles of dry goods, a couple of coolers and freezers, and a half-shelf with some bruised and spotted and wildly expensive fruit. There’s always stuff for sale hanging from the low ceiling on coat hangers. This week, the gloves and hats were interspersed with hand made red and pink paper hearts. The whole store could fit easily in the house Sean and I shared in Arkansas. It feels like a miniature gas station and general store, the kind you find on the roads out of town back home in Maine, only moreso. I snagged a couple of pounds of butter and set them on the counter. “That’s fifteen dollars” the girl said. I handed her a fifty, and she had to clean out the register to make change for me. I felt like a jerk.

I made it home by six, and Shannon and Jake dropped by to leave the nine colors of icing that Shannon had made for us to decorate our Valentine’s Day cookies with. After they headed out, the phone rang: C, calling to let me know that the girls would be late. “Helloooo,” she said in a silly, squeaky voice, “this is Shelleeeeeyyyy”
“Hi Shelly, what’s up?”
“Do you have any coooookiieeeess?”
“Not yet, but I’m planning to make some later”
“Can I have some?”
“Sure, Shelly. There’ll be plenty to go around”
“It’s just me!” She said in her normal voice. A giggle dam broke on the other end of the line. “We have to eat dinner. We’ll be late. Maybe… seven?”
“Sounds like a plan. Get plenty to eat so you don’t eat up all the cookies – Shelly!” This clever comment brought down the house and their laughter bubbled up through the phone until C hung it up. Click. Silence.

The girls showed up at seven.

P is thirteen-year-old agony in full bloom: she’s experimenting with makeup, crushing on an awful boy, bending the truth badly, and dancing to Avril Lavigne in front of the (my) bathroom mirror. It’s painful and wonderful. This is the one who wears snowpants all day. I can’t get over that. Snowpants and smudged eyeliner.

S is new to the group. Quiet and reserved except when she’s not, like a braces-smile, she doesn’t get as silly or open up as easily as the others, but she’s cracking her cool shell a little, and I like her quirky teeth and honest questions. She seemed genuinely surprised that I didn’t mind their eating raw cookie dough, playing their own music, and lounging on my couch.

C is the youngest. She about peed her pants laughing on my kitchen floor when her older sister walked in with eye-makeup last night. She spent minutes screaming in gales of giggles, clutching her belly and rolling under the table. P looked stricken for an instant, then rolled her expressive eyes at the two older girls and sat down like a lady. C got up and rolled her eyes at me, then started making silly faces, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue and squinching up her nose. I made silly faces back, and she lost it again.

A is like cotyledons. She’s like toes dipping toward a still pond or a palm testing the air around a wood stove. “Ms. O, can you check this?” She’s my strongest student in math, and my most needy. She loses her cool when she has to be creative. She loves grammar, and hates writing. It’s like she’s on the cusp of something, and just needs a little push to get there. “Did you like the poem you made me write? Why did it have to be fourteen lines?!” “Listen to this!” Improvements. Her smile is almost as bright as she is. A is the thinker. “Did you notice?” “Oh, do you think he meant…?” I think she’d throw herself off a cliff for me. I’m going to push her, and she’s going to fly.

Pop music, courtesy of DJ P, bounced off the walls. The sisters created some sort of complicated partner dance and practiced it to critical acclaim in the living room. We mixed and baked and frosted cookies. The girls gave me some of the latest news from the village: One of my male students was punched in the face last night by a drunk guy while he was out Walking Around (that’s what the kids do for fun). “Poor Guy!” “Do you’ll think he’ll have a black eye?” We decorated dozens of sugar cookies (enough for the whole school) with sprinkles and candy hearts and nine colors of icing until the girls collapsed on the couch in a frosting-streaked heap. They’d have stayed there all night if I hadn’t sent them away at 9:30.

The days are longer, now, and full of full-sun. I can no longer see stars on my walk to or from work. Used to be I couldn’t see anything else. I miss the romantic twilight of January, but I like the feeling that the world is growing every day, and gaining speed: I see some new shadow, or something newly in full sun, every time I leave the house. Last weekend, I saw the sun touch the ground for the first time, like a spill of sugar on an off-white carpet, and now it’s everywhere, an eggshell world accelerating toward the limit of daylight, ready to crack and spill yellow on everything.

Cookies and Caribou

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Keely

The cookie girls came by tonight. We have a weekly deal, now, which brightens up my Thursdays. This Thursday was a little different, though. When one of them had called me at school earlier, I’d expressed my regrets: I had a dinner to get to and couldn’t make cookies with them. She was sad, but we agreed tomorrow would be fine. She asked if I could bring home the schoolwork she’d missed today so that she could swing by to pick it up, and I agreed on the condition that she not stay long, since I had a lot to do.

At around six-thirty, there was a knock on the door. I was on my way out, ready to tuck my cabbage salad under my arm and run through the cold night to the school building for the potluck, but when I saw the girls’ big brown eyes peeking out through frosty tunnels of winter gear, I had to let them in. I gave the young lady her homework, and she held out her hand in its grubby glove and offered me a wadded-up paper towel.

“what’s this?”
“Fry meat! You said you wanted us to bring you some” It was indeed meat, brown and greasy in its questionable paper towel vehicle. I popped a cube into my mouth and chewed. Tender. Sweet. Unfamiliar.
“What kind of meat is it?”
“Caribou.” This was my first caribou. I spotted a long, pale hair on one of the other chunks, smiled, and popped it in my mouth.
“Really! I’ve never had caribou before. It’s good!” I said, chewing.
“I’ll tell my auntie you liked it. Let’s go.” (this last to her sister)
“Wait, let me give you something.” I went to the cupboard and pulled down a treat “You guys will have to share, and this has to be a secret because I don’t have enough to share with everybody, but this is something special my parents sent me from Maine. You can only get caribou here in Alaska, and you can only get these in Maine, so it seems like a fair trade. It’s called a whoopie pie.”
“what is it?”
“Chocolate cake with frosting sandwiched in the middle”
“Yum. Thank you.”
“you’re welcome, girls. Thank you so much for sharing with me”

I should have said mahsi’. It’s the only word I know in Gwich’in, so I should start putting it to work.

They left and I finished throwing my cabbage salad together and flew out the door, savoring my last chunk of fry meat. It really was delicious, but that wasn’t the biggest reason for the grin on my face.

Luminous

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Keely

Isn’t it?

Guys, I have a real mailing address! If you want to send me a teakettle or a toilet brush or chocolate chips or a postcard, please address it to
P.O. Box 81153
Venetie, Alaska
99781
U.S.A

If you do send me a postcard, please write all the dirty jokes in morse code.

One of my kids told me yesterday that brown bear tracks have been spotted down the bank. “It won’t come up here though,” she told me, “It’ll stay down by the river.”

Schoolteacher Snapshots

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Keely

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.

In the Elephant Graveyard

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Keely

At the base of the bluff, where the willows get thicker as you near the river, there’s an aging collection of vehicles and heavy equipment. Covered in snow, it looks like it was just left behind, parked all higgledy piggledy, after some whopping demolition derby. How did it even get here to begin with? Was it shipped in pieces in small planes, then assembled, used for its intended purpose, and abandoned with unlocked doors? I have a long list of questions (lots about services like water, waste, power, phone, internet, television – things that people access here but in mysterious ways) that gets, somehow, a little longer with every answer I get.

The Elephant Graveyard at sunset, some days ago.

In the cab of an aging dumptruck.

I went walking in the elephant graveyard today, and explored a little on a snowmobile trail near the old airstrip and along the river. I’m pushing my comfort zone more with each walk, growing comfortable with my surroundings and making little dents in the vastness outside the village. I’m always surprised when I round a bend in the trail and find another log house, chimney puffing cozily. I haven’t grown accustomed to the idea that one can live without a driveway.

The sun hit the roof of the school full force today. The brightness of the colors took me aback. I’ve grown accustomed to the softness of the light, which hasn’t touched the ground with full strength in months. The angled light makes the world sparkle, and I think I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to the short days of winter. I like the dim-lit silence of the spruce trees and the deep, muffled silence of the snow. Sometimes, if I’m walking and I stop to look around at just the right moment, I can hear nothing at all. Usually there’s a chainsaw or a snow-go tearing into the quiet, but sometimes there’s an instant of absolute stillness. I think the light will whip the cover off the birdcage.

When I’m out hiking, I still haven’t figured out where to draw the line between too-safe and unsafe. I’m a bit of a scaredy cat when I’m walking on my own, and I don’t think that’s totally insane. I am in wolf and bear country here (yes the bears are hibernating, but I’ve heard that they sometimes aren’t, so there’s that), and I’m a small person, usually walking alone. A few years ago, a young teacher who went running in her village in southern Alaska was killed by wolves. Scientists ruled it predation, as the wolves involved were not starving, sick, defending a kill, rabid, or habituated to people. It was the first and only such predatory attack documented in Alaska, which is comforting, but only to a point. Large predators almost never attack people, and I know that, but most people aren’t hiking alone in winter in the wilderness. I don’t want to be kept close to the village by fear and miss out on everything (I’m dying to go further, but I haven’t found a walking buddy yet), but I don’t want to be foolish. The scary stuff is out there, but so is all the amazing stuff. Close to the village, you hardly see tracks in the snow – so far, I’ve only seen rabbit tracks once, and, on another occasion, marks from where a raven touched down, each feather leaving a perfect imprint. It’s no fun to be stuck between fearful and foolish with so much out there to explore. I need to find the trail between and zip through it into the open country.

Zzzip! A snowmobile trail that led me from the airstrip through a couple back yards to the post office (closed as usual – school teachers only get mail on Wednesdays in Venetie, due to inconvenient scheduling).

This picture is the closest I’ve been able to come to documenting the glowing thousand-colors-in-one-ness of the snow and sky. The world isn’t white, just crisply prismatic, dramatic it its starkness and its luscious depth. The arctic is white like dark chocolate.

We’re gaining daylight in heaping tablespoons now. I don’t have windows in my classroom, and I think it’s for the best. I don’t get to see daylight much, but I will soon. In the meantime, I’m opening the door a few times a day to suck in the sweetness of the buttery, luminous snow and to stare at the mountain, agog. I grin when the cold washes through the open firedoor and the students look up. I still get a rush when I place myself on the map, a vanishing spark of a needle in a haystack of dark wilderness.