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.”
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.
For some unholy reason, they made me the middle and high school P.E. teacher. If you’ve ever known me, and especially if you knew me in middle or high school, you know this was a horrible mistake. P.E. is first thing in the morning for thirty minutes. The kids troop in late in snowpants and boots, and they want nothing but to play kickball, so I let them. I don’t want to pick a fight first thing in the morning, and I don’t care what they do as long as it’s somewhat physically active. I’ve resigned myself to kickball for the time being.
Kickball was a thing at my school, too, and throughout every spring there was a constant dread in my mind of the hideously embarrassing moment when I’d come up to kick and everyone would move in close, chuckling. It sounds like such a cliche woe, but it happened every time we played (and we played a lot) for the five years I attended that school. I was such a joke in all things sports, and rightly so. I really did suck. It hurt though. I definitely have some organized sports ptsd, and here I am a gym teacher. Blah.
Venetie kickball is a little different from what I was expecting when I tossed them the ball the first time. Because they have to play in their pintsized gym, and often with very few players, who range in age from twelve to twenty, the rules are modified. It took me a few days to figure out what was going on. It’s actually pretty genius: I’ve seen the kids make it work with as few as two players.
Venetie Kickball
When it gets hot, instead of taking off their sweatshirts and snowpants, the kids open the fire door and let the cold air into the gym. Sometimes, since the door is in the corner with third base, someone will wing the ball at a runner and it will fly through the open door into the still dark schoolyard. Inevitably, half the kids will run out and track snow all over the gym floor when they return. I saw one really great wipeout, but the girl got up laughing.
That’s pretty much it. It’s fun to watch because there are these big, athletic high school boys playing with these tiny, gangly sixth grade girls, and it somehow comes out pretty even. There are built in mechanisms that make the game work for the funny situation we have out here. I like that. It’s modified and unique like so many other things in this place.
Speed limit sign on the old airport runway. At what sort of vehicle is it directed? Who is supposed to enforce it?
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.
I just sent four of my kids out the door, still sticky with chocolate fingers from the cookies they devoured.
This morning, my scintillating sixth grader marched up to me. “What time should I come to your house for cookies tonight?”
“This is the first I’ve heard about making cookies for you”
“So what time should I show up? 8?”
“I’m not making any promises, but if I let you in and I make cookies, you have to read to me while I make them.”
“OK. See you at 8”
She brought her sister and three friends, and they took turns reading Ella Enchanted to me while I whipped up a batch of Fannie Farmer’s chocolate chip wondercookies with oatmeal. They’re pretty cute.
chasing piggens 