Making a life in the enchanted forest: Country Living Challenges, bush edition

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Keely

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

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.

Venetie Kickball

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Keely

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

There are six bases: the four corners of the gym, plus the two halfway marks on the long sides.
The pitcher rolls the ball from anywhere. When the pitcher has the ball, the runners can’t run.
You (almost? I think I saw it once) never get an out by tagging a base. You have to hit the runner with the ball. No head shots. They throw viciously hard, but the risk is understood. No injuries yet.
If the offense runs out of kickers, the runner closest to home is forced to run. Since the defense can’t tag bases, they have a pretty good chance of dodging the ball and making it home to kick. This is how they manage with only two players.
If it hits the ceiling, it’s an out.
If it doesn’t cross halfcourt, it’s a reroll.

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. Wonder what sort of vehicle it's directed at.

Speed limit sign on the old airport runway. At what sort of vehicle is it directed? Who is supposed to enforce it?

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.

Saturday Ambling

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Keely

I haven’t spoken to another human being in the flesh today. Right now, I’m digging the peace and solitude.

Around noon, I went for my first solo walk around the village. Wednesday, the staff went to get mail and I got the grand tour in the school truck, but I haven’t been able to go see what there is to see on my own two feet on account of the darkness during my off hours. The sun was low, as always, and spilling blue and pink puddles on last night’s thin coat of white snow. I followed my old footsteps toward the school, then walked down the old airport runway toward the Chandalar. Folks on fourwheelers and snowmachines zipped by, and dogs yipped and yowled from across the village. Ravens floated like improbable lead gliders in the still air, so black in a world of pale pink and blue, their voices crackling as they chatted among themselves about some loose garbage near the community hall.

Sound carries differently in the cold. Everything pops and snaps, louder, sharper and closer than it should be.

I picked my way along the thick tracks left by the fourwheelers and snowgos, wondering if there are rules I should know about where I can and cannot or should and should not walk. There are a lot of trails, but there’s no system of roads and driveways that I can identify and understand. I didn’t want to invade anyone’s space, so I smiled at everyone who rolled by, looking bemusedly at me, and stuck to the wider paths away from the houses.

The cemetery is at the end of the old runway, and I explored a little, hoping there’d be no disrespect perceived in my paying a visit to the dead. The markers are mostly wooden, carved with the names and dates of the deceased, and many of the graves are surrounded by waist-high wooden fences. Most had some sort of weatherbeaten garland of plastic flowers. I’ve always felt comfortable in cemeteries. I like the quiet, and I like wondering about the people and their stories, hinted at by the headstones. At home in Maine, graveyards are often in some of the prettiest places, overlooking the ocean or tucked away in cool clearings in the mossy pine woods.

I spent a moment standing in silent company with all those carved names, looking down the bank at the flats where the sun was peeking over the horizon. I didn’t stay long. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Instead, I strolled down the bluff, a little nervous to be leaving the village proper, but enchanted by the empty flats and the frozen river, and willing to take up my courage and have an adventure. I’m sure I’ll soon feel silly for being unsure. I never stopped hearing the village dogs and the snowmachines, and I wouldn’t have been out of sight except for the bluff. Everything is new now, though, and I don’t know what’s safe and what isn’t. How far is too far to venture alone?

The village used to be located at the base of the bluff, but there was a huge flood and the community moved up onto the plateau. I rounded a corner on a snowmobile trail and came across an old church, open at all its doors and windows, empty except for an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. I ventured a little beyond it, but felt too timid to go out onto the ice alone, even with the reassuring vehicle tracks to mark a safe path.

I turned back to walk home, this time cutting a new path closer to the buildings, more sure of my place here and of the conventions for passersby. I saw the daily plane come in to land, a noisier and stiffer hunk of improbably airborne matter than the ravens, and thought about going to meet it, but decided to save that adventure for another day. I was ready for a hot lunch, a book, and a cup of tea, my fingers were stiff from taking pictures in the cold and my eyes, the only part of me exposed, felt sticky.

When I got home, I wiped my eyes, realizing as I felt the chill dampness on my fingertips that my lashes had been frozen together. That accounted for the sticky feeling. When I went out again this afternoon, after another turn around the village and a short exploratory walk in a new direction, I took a picture. The moisture from my breath freezes on my lashes and the fluffy wool of my hat. I look pretty glamorous, don’t I? Frosted eyelashes are all the rage these days.