We’ve Discovered an Abbey!!

I am sure that, should I want to, I could go back onto Netflix (it IS still called that, right?) and determine the day that my husband (I love him–I love you, John!) and I “discovered” Downton Abbey.

But what would be the joy in that?  Because, apparently, it existed before we discovered it (difficult to imagine, but we give it a marginal shot).  Seems that it was even in our “queue”, though who knows how it got there.  Mice?  Munchkins?  Pish.  Could even have been the Beeb.  But I digress.  No, Downton Abbey is now “our” little show and anyone who professes to have “known” about it before we got to it–I beg your pardon, but our world didn’t exist before then.

So, now you see my point, I’m wondering why it took us so long to stumble upon them, those Crawleys and Granthams (is that the way they spell those?  It’s just terribly difficult to determine from speech only, and often v. v. proper speech, at that), those below stairs and those beyond the walls of Downton.  Where the heck had we been?  I mean, we read the Internet, for goodness’ sake, and we peruse Facebook every so often.  We even sit down to respectable dinners with cloth napkins and no MSG and still!  Not a hint of it.  Nothing drove us in the direction of gorgeously talented Hugh Bonneville and wickedly snide Woman Who Plays O’Brien until lo!  In the midst of a lull in Pedro Bay activity (30 hours of silence, commence now), we threw caution to the wind and–tried Netflix!!

To understand the gravity of that statement, not to mention the fact our experiment worked (!!!) you must understand distance.  Pedro Bay is so remote that we don’t even have a store.  No paved roads, about a dozen total miles of those unpaved roads, more pieces of heavy machinery than actual cars, and more than not, no cell service.  It is an hour’s flight via small plane from Anchorage.  But we do have Internet!  Well, WE don’t, not exactly, but it does exist up  here and the one place we’re lucky it exists, is the library.  And the library is within sight of our house. And when the weather is particularly cooperative and the satellite link outage isn’t out, we can communicate with the outside world RIGHT FROM OUR LIVING ROOM!!

Exactly.

So all this talk about Season 2 and hype hype hype simply must stop.  John and I are just getting started and we don’t want any of you hoity-tots to spoil it for us.  We’ve got this Abbey thing perfectly under control and no question. Understand?

So.  Who’s recording all of these on DVR?

 

All Growth

All growth requires a temporary loss of security. –Madeline Hunter

For a village as deeply attached to its particular ways as the Village of Pedro Bay is, even small change can cause enormous amounts of anxiety. And when the change revolves around land use practices, water use practices, and waste or disposal practices, all of which have roots in Native tradition and way of life, results are likely to come with resistance and doubt.

The first concern to address when proposing a change of this nature is a loss of convenience and/or personal pride. Some residents, though not all, may find that the proposal of trash pick-up (for example) is a slight on their ability to do their own housekeeping—especially when a fee is involved. Other residents may find the service a great help and convenience. But those who resist change often feel it is a threat to their way of life, their livelihood, or even just their habits or practices, causing a disruption to the way things have ‘always been run’ in the past.

While it is important to take this kind of protection and resistance into consideration, it is unnecessary, even detrimental to allow it to halt or even slow the process of growth (or change), particularly when it concerns health and safety issues like this environmental plan does. People will always put up stinks and raise issues when they don’t like what you are doing, but I have found that those with legitimate claims often find a productive and honest way to approach you and inform you of their opinions. Often, I say, not always. But it is true: those with minor claims often make the largest fuss or the loudest cry and, when approached about their complaint, frequently find their voices muted—though physical gruffness and posturing still appear.

But others deeply want change, and want to see things improve. They understand that to build a better way of life, we have to give up the old way and live in that area of uncertainty for as long as it takes for the strong and new to become established. For those who have faith in God the Father, this becomes less of an ordeal because the strength required to wait comes from above, and is ever-giving, while our own strength and our own ability to give, is finite, it ends, and often lands us back in the throes of that fear and anxiety we experience when change comes.

The other thing I have found, and I believe this is very integral to change or lack of it, and also very deeply ingrained in education or lack of it, is that to become educated, one must admit that one does not know things. It is said that the aim of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one, and that is indeed one direction to take, but that assumes that everyone who begins a course of learning, or formal education, enters the fray with an empty mind…. And we all know that isn’t true.

In the Interest of Time and Place

I suggest we follow Becca’s advice.  Last week we were sitting around our living room, having just listened to a Podcast from our church in Seattle, Greenlake Presbyterian, and discussing the depressing notion of the two big empty buildings in our little village.  One of the buildings is the school and the other is the church, and I guess one could say they are both closed for the same reason.

Like most small towns and most extended families, lines get crossed, and so do people.  Misunderstandings take place, feelings get hurt (and one begins to speak too much in the passive voice), and soon what was once a simple solution turns into a feud of stark sentimentality and proportion.  Unfortunately, that kind of feud runs deep and, ironically, can really only be lifted by that which it has driven out: education and faith, or, more specifically, knowledge of the Spirit.   But when one is deeply or bitterly embroiled in a conflict of personal pride and worth of character, the last thing one wants to do is suffer humility.  Yet  humility is exactly what we must offer and exactly what we must gain.

Becca’s advice was not complex.  She said we ought to Invest in People, not in Things.  It sounded so precise, like A. A. Milne’s simplistic and wise Winnie-the-Pooh.  The words transformed, though, and their truth still lingers, echoing even louder two weeks later.  We have no church in which to honor or memorialize our dead, and yet we buried Dolly Jacko last Sunday after a heart-filled and close family service; we have no formal school, no building that is, and yet I sit here proctoring a math exam for four kids.  I think we are given second chances, and the chance to show our humility before not only God, but our village neighbors gives strength to our claims that we are interested in increasing our knowledge of the Spirit.

Lately I have been neglecting my morning readings from the Bible.  I had been consistent about it for several months, waking up and drinking coffee with my husband John, then spending time in Acts or Ephesians or Jeremiah before work.  But something changed; the days grew light in the morning and my cavern of scripture disappeared.  I’ve noticed a difference in my days, too.  I was not at peace the way I used to be, and so I took it up again, this time with John, writer of the epistle.  The work has already begun: In the interest of heart and mind, spirit and soul, let us invest.

Notes for a Science Project

The whole thing began with an umbrella. After testing today, Autumn, Audri, Riley and I sat around talking and Autumn mentioned wanting to fly her bicycle.  She told us what she and Riley had done yesterday, aerodynamically, and made me a drawing to illustrate their progress and their plan.  In her drawing she included her umbrella, a pink one we had seen her carrying from our window across the bay.

It was the umbrella she was hoping would help give them loft, but she realized they would still need some sort of lift, so she suggested building wings.  As we talked about it, I realized what she needed was a type of airfoil, an aerodynamic sail.   Last week she created a little boat out of sticks and straws and paper, see the picture below, and I began to explain how the principles were essentially the same: the shape of the sail and the shape of the wing both gave their craft propulsion.  It is why sailboats don’t need motors.

An Autumn Sail

So we began looking online at pictures of planes, wings, aircraft, from gliders to para sails, and it wasn’t long before we had half of the council building involved, including Floyd.  In fact, he gave the best science lesson on the topic, asking questions of the kids, encouraging them to do their own math and puzzle their own hypothesis and design.  Then Keisha heard tell of it and she came in to document the scientific method, recording questions, predictions, and materials.

Before too long I was downstairs looking for the Active Physics text and asking Claire what happened to our actual Physics book.  We never did find it, but we discovered so many other great resources that it may be moot to even look now.

The table in the conference room now has wire, tape, a D battery, a styrofoam cup, and a few other odds and ends for the power cell we intend to build tomorrow.  What I found so great about this day was not just the project, but the fact that these village residents who have few reasons to really collaborate, were really collaborating, and we were all having such a good time, in the name of education.  Riley asked question after question and branched out of his comfort zone of homeschool to pester SJ and Floyd.  Floyd got into our project enough to search out wire and spools.  I know it’s all down there at the shop, but the point is that we all found a reason to bring it up here.

Tomorrow could bring something completely different, something depressing or discouraging, but maybe not.  I put two new experiments, new possible science projects, up on the bulletin board for future adventure.  One is a hand-cranked generator, and the other is a windmill.  There is a storm predicted for later in the week, and I can’t think of a better project than something drive the energy, from the ground level up.

Here are the sites where we found our experiments, just in case we lose them and just in case they work and we can credit the authors!

Thanks for reading, folks.  That’s all for today.  From Pedro Bay, Alaska, it’s the Dena’ina HomeSchoolers signing out.

 

Snow on the Lake

It’s been a battle between high and low this winter in Pedro Bay. When winter arrived it stuck around for barely a week before a strong low pressure system came along and melted all of our white.
At that time the lake was starting to freeze around the bays and along the shorelines, but it wasn’t yet willing to succumb to ice, seeing as how all this 40-degree nonsense kept popping up. It wasn’t until December that a thick enough layer had formed and ice fishing was again a reality for the winter fishers of the village.
Since then, the alternating highs and lows have flocked to Pedro Bay and our snow has appeared and disappeared, fallen and melted, arrived and left just like clockwork.
Right now there is snow on the ground and, out there in the bay, under the snow there is a layer of ice over one foot thick. This gives me great consolation. A couple of days ago a plane landed on it. Several planes, as a matter of fact. This is part of Bush Alaska. I would love to be able to walk out my back door here at Edna’s Bay and walk down to the plane that is waiting out there on the ice; to carry my suitcase just down the hill and not to the van or the car that we had to borrow to get us up to the airport where we normally wait. And by airport I mean gravel landing strip, of course. There is a structure up there, but it isn’t a waiting room or anything. The bathroom is a pit toilet. It’s fine, but boarding a little plane outside your back door simply lends itself to excitement, to the real thrill.
The snow has taken over now though, so it will be more difficult, if not impossible, for planes to land on the lake. The window has closed. But if the pattern of highs and lows, valleys and troughs, continues as it has, we will see that ice again, exposed for the lake it really is, revealed after weeks or, more likely, mere days of its white snowy layer.

Nothing Comes for Free

I am a teacher by trade; trained in the art of pedagogy and curriculum I am.  Ten years on the front lines I spent, creating Final Tests and Practice Sheets and Activities that would stimulate Learning.  I read more than my share of Bad Papers, those pathetic attempts to convince me that said student had read the assigned material and thought (even half-heartedly) about it.

Those halcyon days conjure up memories of early rising, late retiring, unquestionably stupid and long commutes, department and staff meetings dull enough to cause one to begin seeing in gray.   Report Cards.  Grade sheets.  Parent-Teacher Conferences.

I do not miss them.

Health care I miss, as well as intellectual exchange with my students in a classroom, or even less formal, setting.   Student creativity and discovery, while not an everyday occurrence, do happen in my new life, but not the way they did while I was a teacher.  And I suppose there is something to be said for that discovery: that it would not happen regularly, scheduled-like, but it would happen often enough to serve as a type of elixir, a magic potion allowed to prolong a teacher’s career at least one day more, through one final semester, or one graduating class.

The year I left the classroom I decided I would head to grad school and seek my fortune as a Poet.  One month into the decision–resignation letter approved and on its way to the superintendent–I visited the school I hoped to attend and found, to the delight of all, that there was no way on Earth I could stand to live here even one full day.  As we pulled into the roundabout at The College, my six-year-old niece, whom I had invited along, as well as her mother, my sister, began sobbing rather hysterically.  I quickly jumped out to settle my appointment and, upon returning to the vehicle, experienced a strange and enlightened feeling of escape.

We never returned to keep the appointment I had made for the next day.  Instead, that first night we wandered around our hotel area, eating dinner, getting ice cream, swimming in the pool, and watching light-hearted movies on TV. The next morning, on our way to The College, we got lost.  Really lost.  So lost that we drove into Berkeley instead of…where we meant to go.

It was a fortunate mistake, but it did not come for free.  This reward came with so much doubt and, even now, as I recall that tumultuous long week-end, I cringe at having put so many people through the wringer of uncertainty as I did.  But to my present life, my family and my husband, I thank you for being so patient.  Had I decided to attend That College, I would never have met John, would never have found myself in Alaska, and never would have stayed away from the (formal) classroom as long as I have.

While I long to sip the elixir once more, my greater sensitivities know when to stop me from falling into the nostalgic abyss.  Even as I look about and see the fog: another day without mail, another day without groceries, and another day in the semi-frozen North, I am equipped with the hardiness of a ten-year veteran educator and the wry sense of place one can possess even outside of the school-room.

Still Life with Snow

Temperatures rose last night and the wind kicked up.  Today that wind was accompanied by snow, and the thermometer dropped a bit in the process.  Outside, we can barely see the hills, and Pedro Mountain is simply the white field beyond.  Closer structures, such as the shop and the new fire/EMT building are still visible, but the gusts of windy snow prevent anyone from working–or even being–outside for very long.

Meanwhile, inside, the little school is plugging along.  Today Audri is gone and so Claire and Brandon and Keisha and I made an even smaller group.  I can’t say it’s exactly cozy down here, but we do get by.  Our activities and our lessons make the time comfortable, or if not comfortable, at least profitable, by school standards.

Today Keisha and I did still lifes with items we found around the council building.  They were for an online art class she is taking, one of the electives each of them chose to undertake.  The assignment asked her to collect items that represent her, place them in a still-life situation, and then practice sketching them. As Keisha’s interests and activities around the village are wide and varied, it promised to be a fascinating sort of assignment.

When she described it I couldn’t help but smile.  Art is one of my great joys and deep interests; I’ve lived with sketch pads, pencils, paint trays and projects of all sorts since I was old enough to sit at the table.  My mother is an artist and a designer, and was also my first art teacher, both formally and at home.  To this day she sets up art lessons for my 8-year-old niece, Hayley and they come up with some of the most awesome, creative projects I’ve ever seen.  There is a painted lighthouse and waves above the bookshelf in their media room, cards, posters, restaurant menus, sculpture even; there are also numerous paintings, drawings, sketches, collages, all sorts of media, and ongoing projects around the house.  Suffice it to say, we are drenched in creative means.

But here in the village the options for art–or for structured creative periods even–are slim.  I brought my easel up to do some painting, but something about the time or the demands make it less accessible as it ever has been.  I’m not sure why.  The desire is there, but I think the daily routine seems to shun it.  Life up here is too practical sometimes, or feels that way, to be a conduit for the finer things.

No matter.  I am prepared to alter my schedule in order to nurture the seed of art, and I am ever more inspired for it when I chat with Keisha.  Yesterday we decided that today would be the day for drawing, and so this morning, just after 9:30, we arranged a couple of bottles of tempera paint, some cleaning supplies, a small mixing bowl, a roll of duct tape, and a cuff and stethoscope for our scene.

As we began to draw–first three thumbnail sketches, then the larger and more complete final–I remembered what it was about pencil, paper, shape and line that I like so much. I began to sketch the forms and to really see them in relation to one another.  At first I grew frustrated with my limitations.  I was too impatient with myself and my rusty abilities.  Why couldn’t I sketch a simple cylinder?  Or shade along the edge of a cloth?  I struggled for a while, laughing lightly, but still wondering whether I had altogether lost my hand and eye.

I glanced over at what Keisha’s work and probably uttered a soft, “Oh!” as I did.  Her pieces were marvelous!  She had such confident lines, such nice balance in her work.  It was still far from advanced, but it contained such promise.  Her drawings took up most of her paper, and her shapes were confidently drawn, without the hesitant sketch lines of some less skilled drawers.  At eighteen, she is a harsh critic, both of herself and of others.  While this can be problematic in some places, in some professions, in Keisha it may be her lifeline.  She is good at what she does and she is not too ‘artistic’ to admit it.

As we worked, my breathing changed, my lungs filling deeply as though my heart and  mind were joined again: All those microcosmic earthquakes taking place around me were set to rest, if just for a while, and the ground was level once more.  Outside, the scene was a flurry white mess, but in here we were organizing, form and line, shape and shadow, one sketch at a time.

MartHasteWart’s Luminary Topiary Bag Things

For those of you who can’t read urlspeak, the title of this blog comes from the mashed-together names Martha and Stewart, but are read by my husband, John, as Mart Haste Wart.  Since last summer, when I inherited a stack of Livings from a friend here in the village–or was it last Valentine’s Day when I was cutting them up and creating decorative card muddlings for those I love? No matter–since a while ago, my husband has taken to chopping up the names in Martha Stewart’s moniker to define her as someone more decidedly less bon vivant.

Certainly she has touched even the most remote of villages, and even the magazines are recycled again and again, though their specific Things, whether Good or not, tend to fade as we become engrossed in the living we are doing on our own.

But her topiaries live on.  Or are they luminaries?  I can’t remember.

All I know is that there’s a wave–a spate, if you will, a regular spate–here in the village, of brown paper bags cut all up into every odd shape and decoration and set up with sand and a candle in it to commemorate… some such event or holiday, be it village-related or not.

Since Halloween, Verna has been determined to get each one of us convicted on some sort of scissor homicide charge, thrusting stacks of lunch sacks into our hands or onto our desks and demanding we locate the x-acto knives or the pruners or the kitchen shears and produce some inkling of a pony or a pumpkin or a black cat, each of which will appear in glowy-orange form once properly extracted from the bag itself, much like Michelangelo’s David or Pietas, only the essential removed and only the essential to remain.

Alas, this art of glowing broomstick-witches, Christmas trees, poinsettia bushes or what-have-you has been reduced to mockery, regular ridicule here in the outer bush.  For no one here has much real panache with an x-acto, and those who do are neurotic enough to find a proper home for such tedium.  Additionally, the paper bags that have so sacrificially been offered to the luminary-topiary gods are nothing compared to the enormous bonfire Verna organized and lit just last weekend.

For this is Alaska, folks.  And while Martha Stewart will certainly be delivered once the little prepaid insert-card is mailed in and a check has followed, it is Sir Haste Wart who really finds a home in the rural Alaskan bush.  It’s Mart who rides the four-wheeler across the ice and plays skate-tag around a burning explosion of tree-sized logs; Mart asks for an Native Holiday when the sun finally shines in the middle of winter and Mart also punches holes in the ice to pull up a trout–or a minnow.  And even though Martha bakes cinnamon rolls in the kitchen, decorates a table with beaded ornaments, and makes the wreaths that hang on just about every door in the village, behind those doors live a whole village of Marts.  Mart Haste Warts.  And each one of us is trying to figure out exactly what to do with our inexpertly cut-out, sand-and-candle-filled Paper Bag Luminary.

The Dena’ina School

The Dena’ina School:

Meets in the bottom floor of the council building in Pedro Bay.

Has an unofficial enrollment of 4 students.

Is comprised of four of those banquet tables you often see in church basements and at craft bazaars.  We also have an old computer desk in the corner holding books and games and art supplies, and one other folding table, holding bins and brushes and paper for when we need creative outlet.

Has an amazing view on three of its four sides.  To the south, where I am looking now, is Lake Iliamna, Many Islands Lake, and right now it is trying to freeze.  Surrounding the Many Islands Lake are hills and mountains, some of the most arrestingly, stunningly beautiful ones I’ve seen in my life.

Also to the south is the light.  As it is winter, pre-solstice, and Alaska, the light is a commodity right now.  I am looking at a cloud-pocked sky that is the palest of pale blues.  The clouds, which bank along the bases of the mountains, are a silvery gunmetal gray, but bright, if that is possible.  Beneath the sky and the clouds and the hills are the people, their houses, us.

At my right is Knudson Mountain, drenched in snow and sunlight.  It is the larger of the mountains around here, rising 2000 feet or so.  It is lovely.

I cannot see to the east, as the wall of the council blocks my view.  But behind me, should I turn around, I would see Village Mountain and a beautiful rising slope of snow and trees and waterfalls.  In many ways, this is God’s gift, and it is a miracle to be here among it.

The school day spans from around 9 am to around noon.  Sometimes we get a late start, sometimes we don’t.  The last few days have been quite cold, hovering near 0, and no one is excited to get up and dress in the dark just to trudge themselves to school (or the office) in such cold temps.  We are lucky however; in Fairbanks and the Interior, they have been experiencing highs of -20, and in some places the temps have dropped to -45 or -50.   I have never been in degrees so low, -17 I think is my record, but I am grateful for the cold all the same.  The cold is what keeps Alaska as it is, its people, its culture, its way of life.

I look forward to the end of the school day today.  I will ask the students–Keisha, Brandon, Claire, Audri–to list their accomplishments this first week, and then to draft a quick note of what they would like to have done, but did not, due to whatever and whatnot.  This will serve as my reflective assessment, and I will make Seattle University proud (not that I need to, not that I want to, I just cannot think of reflective instruction without a shout out to my grad school profs.  Huzzah.).

I will walk home, possibly with Claire, to see how my husband John is doing, have some lunch, and begin work on the EPA/IGAP grant I have been assigned to finish by Dec. 20.

It is snowing.

The sun shines through.

It is a day to be teaching in Pedro Bay.

English as a First Language

I was not born an English major, but over the course of twenty or so years, I became one.  Going to college, I studied literature, read essays, wrote critical responses, short stories and analytical papers and all of it led me here.  To a desk beneath a window in building in a native village where I am currently working on a grant for funding from the EPA.  The Environmental Protection Agency.   No one here cares if I read Beowulf in six translations.

I look up water quality data, and I email environmental firms and I ask how much a baseline water quality laboratory analysis will cost.  And when I’m done, I work on the Integrated Solid Waste Management Plan for the village, compiling data (once I procure it) to assess how we should proceed in this village with our recycling program, or our landfill projects, or our protests against Pebble Mine.

In short, perhaps I should have followed Heather and Ethan and Liz and majored in Environmental Science at Willamette.  However, I did not.  And I am the better for it.
As it turns out, my English major has afforded me an incredible cornucopia of ideas and connections, and I can see now why those science nerds (you know you are, just put down your rock polisher and raise your hand) were so interesting to me.  They (you) offered me something that the comparative lit scholars could not:  you (they) offered me–and all of my POEM kin–a more concrete, critical view of the world, and not just an idealistic one based on story or myth or symbol.

As scientists, or environmentalists, or both, you saw the world differently from the way I did and I knew enough even at age 20 to pay attention to that, and to understand what you meant when you said literature could help you see the science more clearly.  Now I have its corollary in my view of Pedro Mountain: science can help me see the literature more clearly.  And not only from a reader’s point of view.

Here in Pedro Bay, when I write these grants or proposals, or draft an email to an engineer or an environmental scientist, I don’t constrain myself to the lofty language of academia; nor do I settle for the banal banter often appearing in many manuals or plans of this scientific nature.  I am able to see what I write more clearly, and to know what it is I am asking for, saying, or making sense of.   It is the marriage of these two hemispheres, the creative and the concrete, that makes us solid thinkers.  In an earlier post I discussed the practical-whimsical and, again, I find it is here.

I married a poet.  He is incredibly creative, holding an MFA and writing haiku as often as possible.  But at one time he had hoped to major in geology, a decidedly more scientific field than verse.   This early penchant shows in his ability to manage this little village’s governmental–and other–business.  He was not born a poet, perchance, but over the course of several decades he achieved it, with no little help from the questions he posed in geology.

When I was in college and reading my Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas I remember noting that Stein had been pre-med, or maybe full med, on her way to becoming a doctor before taking a major u-turn to become Gertrude Stein.

The cost of a degree may be great, but it’s worth it.  Whatever the major, the learning is the key, and the interest in furthering the knowledge, putting it to use, and making sense of the details all add up to this: Love what you do.  The rest will follow.