Monday, December 21, 2009

It's a good day.

Today is the winter solstice.  Nine more seconds of sunlight tomorrow.  Five hours, forty minutes, and nine seconds.  Pretty awesome.  I am in Minnesota at the moment so I won't be able to report on the affects, but I can only assume the would have been good.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Global warming. Yikes!

This is a recent article from the NY Times discussing global warming and its effects on Native Alaskans.  

Published: December 15, 2009
Alaska’s indigenous people are seeing erosion, rising waters and melting permafrost – and they have sent representatives to Copenhagen to raise the alarm

And here is a related article about some of the specific problems facing Native Alaskan villages.  The particular village in the article, Newtok, is part of our school district and the Nelson Island that they plan to move onto is indeed the Nelson Island that I live on.  The article states that they are some of the first American refugees of global warming.  That's a crazy thought.  

Published: May 27, 2007
The permanently frozen subsoil, known as permafrost, upon which many Native Alaskan villages rest is melting.

In the words of one wise student "It's global warming really super hard."

(A note: I owe much of this post to B and S, from whom I got the article and the quote)



Tuesday, December 8, 2009

A weekend with a dozen teenagers may sound like a lot of fun, but... (Part 1/?)

This past weekend I had the privilege to chaperone a group of twelve adolescent students as they went to Bethel to compete in the end of the season robotics competition.  It wasn't as bad as it sounds.  I know that to most people, the thought of 48 consecutive hours with a dozen teenagers sounds torturous.  Of course, some parts were ("Chocolate milk makes me fart"), but the insight I gained into my students’ lives was rewarding.  The insight into how all of my chaperones must have felt after nights of being responsible for me was, well, I wouldn’t say rewarding, but, rather, karmic.

Along with another teacher, Derek, we have been coaching our school's robotics team.  Using Legos and laptops, the students are given a task to be completed by a robot created from the Legos.  It is truly fantastic stuff.  Lego has been involved in robotics since I was in elementary school, but I hadn't seen any of their kits since then.  Technological advances have done wonders for the possibilities now available to student programmers.  As well as standard programming like making motors move forward and backwards and variable rates, students also have at their disposal light, ultrasonic, touch, and sound sensors.  Programs can become incredibly complex incredibly fast.  A sample program and robot students made was fashioned like a guitar and made different pitches as the student moved a Lego platform up and down the neck of the guitar.  For the past few months our team has been designing and programming their robot to complete a series of tasks in a specified time frame.  This is a nationally recognized competition and a win would take us to Anchorage for State with an opportunity to continue on the Nationals in Atlanta.

Our plan was to leave Thursday afternoon.  A total of fifteen of us were traveling: 12 students, Derek and myself, and our female chaperone, Monica.  Travelling for school sports and activities is slightly different here in Tununak.  Being 150 miles from Bethel, and without roads, piling into the trusty yellow school busses is not an option.  Instead, we pile into a series of small planes.  The order goes out to the airline and they send whatever planes they feel would work.  This all seems pretty simple, but what I am coming to love about working here is that absolutely nothing is simple.  Variables abound: weather (wind, rain, snow, etc.), availability of planes, God's Will, random miscommunications...  The list goes on.  So the plan is the make your plans then be ready.  You never really know what will happen until the call from the plane comes over the VHF radios that lace the town. 

 "Ten minutes." 

At this point the mad rush begins.  The plane will be on the ground in ten minutes.  This usually happens plus or minus an hour from the time the you and the airline had decided on.  Students are plucked from classes. I am plucked from class; my sub had been standing by.  Don full winter gear for travel: district policy - you never know if you will need to land in another village to be shuttled home by snowmachine (ie snowmobile) should bad weather close your runway.  Boots, snowpants, winter coat, hat, mittens, the whole kit.  Students pile into the sled behind the snowmachine with their bags, me on the snowmachine.  Cruise down the frozen river to the airstrip.  Cram into a Cessna 207 for the hour flight to Bethel.  Seat belts on, unzip coat, engines roar as the plane takes off.

Once landed in Bethel we gather our luggage and pile into one of the district school busses.  We are shuttled to the district offices (DO) to wait for school for the elementary school across the parking lot to end for the day so that we can move in.  Keeping up with the pragmatic way of life out here, we will be sleeping on the floors of classrooms in Gladys Jung Elementary School.  If you think this is strange, you may find it even stranger that this is common practice for everyone travelling in the district: special education itinerants, social workers, mentors, etc. as well as all travelling sports teams and coaches.  At any one time in Tununak, we usually have a few guests a week camping out on the floors of our rooms.  As our students mill about the DO I am informed by more than one person that a large cold front is coming in and that the airports aren’t planning on flying back out to the coast until Tuesday.  Just a reminder that it is currently Thursday.  That would mean six days in Bethel.  As excited as I was to be in Bethel, that seemed to me to be about three days too many.  As four o'clock rolls around and we gather our bags and hike over to the school.  I thank the teacher for offering us her floor and promise we will have everything back in place in the morning (they have school after all). 

Sunday, November 29, 2009

It's a small world after all

On Thursday I am scheduled to leave Tununak with one other teacher and twelve junior and senior high school students.  We are coaches of the robotics team - an academic extracurricular activity involving Legos and computers that culminates in a competition in Bethel.  This trip marks the first time leaving Tununak since September 26th.  A month and a half in once place.  About 55 days.  And this place is small.

When thinking about moving here I tried to think about what life would be like.  I had thought that I would get incredibly bored and watch a lot of movies.  So far I haven't watched a ton of movies.  I thought I would get sick of the people I work with and with my students.  At this point I am no more sick of either as I probably would have been anywhere else.

I knew that I would miss everyone who reads this.  My family and friends.  And because I knew that I was able to prepare myself.  It doesn't cure the longing to see everyone, but it makes it bearable.  What surprises me the most are the things that I am missing that I hadn't predicted.  They are a strange collection of things.  And some of the following things are things I didn't even realize that I valued.

Things I miss...
Grocery shopping - being able to go into a store and look at fresh food and then being able to buy it and immediately eat it.  A two week plus delay in payment to food delivery is a constant aggravation.

Options to do things I wouldn't do anyway like whether or not to shop on Black Friday for example.  I enjoy not buying anything on Black Friday - anything I can do to prevent from trampling someone to death over a DVD player.  It doesn't have the same feeling protesting something when you know that you didn't have a choice anyway.

Ice cream.  Okay, this I probably could have predicted.  But how I miss it.  And Eskimo ice cream is not a substitution.  There is no cream and no ice.  Instead, with the main ingredient Crisco, it is little more than greased berries.

Meeting people my age.  I quickly met my peers (as in the other teachers) in the first week of residence.  Since then it's been slim pickings.  I'm afraid that I am going to get stuck in some hypnotic trance at the sight of the first attractive girl my age I've seen in months.

Talking for an hour without mentioning school or students.  When you live and socialize exclusively with the people you work with your professional life never leaves.  I have always enjoyed the chance to escape work.  Here it is an impossibility.

On Thursday I fly to Bethel, population 6000.  In my previous life, 6000 is a small town.  Very, very small.  But 6000 is nearly twenty times the population of Tununak.  And Bethel has two(!) grocery stores with frozen sections.  So while Bethel may not cure all my longings, I've never been able to complain while eating ice cream.      

Saturday, November 14, 2009

It better get colder than this. Or as George Bush once said, "Bring it on."

I walked to the post office today. It just snowed about three inches yesterday and the temperature was hanging out in the teens with a light breeze from the north. I decided to try out my new winter kit. Cabela's has some nice gear. I happily own some sweet black overall snowpants and a real parka complete with a coyote ruff hood. Oh yeah, I felt Alaska-y. I also felt hot. I knew before leaving my home that I was probably pretty overdressed, and I was. Point being, it better get colder. I want to be able to use my new stuff and not be sweating excessively. If any of you only needed one more reason before you start doing your part to stop global warming let it be this - that I want cold weather so my new stuff isn't a complete waste money. Get those CFLs and turn them off when you are not in the room. Turn down your thermostat at night. Walk somewhere. Bike everywhere else. Give me a reason to wear my gear.

Monday, November 9, 2009

NY Times - blowin' minds

"The solar sail receives its driving force from the simple fact that light carries not just energy but also momentum — a story told by every comet tail, which consists of dust blown by sunlight from a comet’s core. The force on a solar sail is gentle, if not feeble, but unlike a rocket, which fires for a few minutes at most, it is constant. Over days and years a big enough sail, say a mile on a side, could reach speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, fast enough to traverse the solar system in 5 years."
Published: November 10, 2009

"Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas."
Published: November 10, 2009

"Every Sunday morning, the deep, melodious voice of State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr. rumbles across the congregation at his Bronx church. On weekdays, it echoes across the Senate chamber as he rails against Medicaid cuts or abortion. Earlier this year, it enthralled thousands at a boisterous rally against same-sex marriage.

But ask him about the gay people in his own life, and Mr. Díaz’s voice grows quiet. His smile vanishes.

Two of his brothers are gay, he murmurs, one of them recently deceased. So is a granddaughter. There is an old friend who works for him in the Senate. And a former campaign aide.

“I love them. I love them,” says Mr. Díaz, who grew up one of 17 children in Puerto Rico. “But I don’t believe in what they are doing. They are my brothers. They are my family.”

His voice rises again. “So how could I be a homophobe?""
Published: November 10, 2009

Monday, November 2, 2009

A case for indigenous languages

"Wherever a Yup'ik comes from in the southwestern region of Alaska, he or she can communicate orally with other Yup'ik speakers from other areas (whether from St. Michael or Togiak) regardless of those slight differences in pronunciation and in vocabulary which occur from place to place. Likewise a person who can read and write in Yup'ik can communicate visually with other people in other places without any difficulty. Language unifies people.

Language is not merely a vehicle of communication, however. It is the nucleus or core of the people's culture. Language is one - perhaps the most important - thing that distinguishes one people from another. The distinctive culture which has developed from the days of the people's earliest ancestors is to a remarkable extent deposited and reflected in the language, as is the environment in which they have lived. Many things, feelings, and concepts specific to the Yup'iks could not be accurately expresses in any other language than Yup'ik.

Of all aspects of culture, language is the most resistant to change and loss. This implies that, when the Yup'ik language is lost, the distinctive Yup'ik culture will be totally and irretrievably gone. Once the Yup'iks are culturally and linguistically deprived to the marrow of the bones, all Yup'iks will be lost in the mosquito-like swarm of Kass'aqs and will be no more than additional few Kass'aqs, even if they do not look white. The people's identity could be kept and consolidated most effectively through language.

Like the other Alaska Native languages, Yup'ik had been moving dangerously close to extinction for almost a century especially because of the federal policy of "English only in American schools". But the tide is now changing. With a resurgence of interest in the language and culture among the people, Yup'ik has been slowly regaining viability since the start of bilingual education which was launched in 1970 in the Kuskokwim area."

Preface to Yup'ik Eskimo Orthography by Osahito Miyaoko and Elsie Mather in 1979

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Interesting things I now know

Living in rural Alaska affords me quite a bit of time to do, well, I guess I would call it nothing if I were living somewhere else. But of course I spend very little time doing nothing. So what am I doing? The simple answer is learning even more random knowledge from a variety of awesome sources.

The first is National Geographic. In my opinion, this magazine should be read by every single person on the planet. Or at least paged through by every single person. Where else can you learn about prehistoric crocodiles, the civil war in Somalia, and see a picture of grieving primates watching the burial of a beloved elder? And did you know that at the turn of the twentieth century 180,000 mummified cats were shipped from Egypt to Liverpool to be used as fertilizer for English fields?

I also spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. These internet packets of audio information have become my TV. To add to my list of things every person should do is to listen to the following programs. Both from the amazing world of public radio. Radio Lab is a bi-weekly broadcast that is amazing and covers many areas of science (parasites, randomness, birth and death), and This American Life is broadcast weekly and features about four stories on a common theme (price fixing, the Devil, the health care, children being cruel). The glory of these programs is their diversity of topics and they means of weaving them into the awesomeness of humanity. I highly recommend both. Here is a nice little video from a recent Radio Lab episode.


The last thing I will mention at the moment is a magazine called Good. The thing is, the magazine is just okay. It's aimed at the neo-greenies in America that frequent Starbucks to get their organic fair trade soy lattes in double walled carboard cups with plastic tops, but each issue has a series of graphics they call Transparencies . This little set has some of the more interesting manipulations of data into graphics I have seen. Here are two examples both on the topic of fuel efficiency. Another point for the efficiency of humans.







Click image for full size image
And add a point to biking - the most efficient form of transportation invented. By the way, they have a transparency up stating that Minneapolis is currently one tenth of a percent behind Portland at 3.8 percent for bike commuters. Booyeah.

Monday, October 26, 2009

I am not freaking out.

I'm not. Really. Know why?

Because last week:
  • it got cold. Actually, that word should be reserved for a later time, but "cold" is, and always will be a relative term. Maybe I'll revise that to say that it felt cold. About 20 degrees. Fahrenheit. Really not a bad temperature, but then again, it is October. What really made it feel cold, what made it hurt, was the wind. We endured 35-45mph winds for three and a half days straight. My nostrils hurt walking from school to home.
  • the planes stopped coming. For three days. There was no mail, or packages, or fresh veggies and fruit - for three days. The wind was too strong to land a small plane. So they didn't come.
  • the river froze. Overnight. It froze. You could walk on it. People were. On the ice. And people were ice fishing. In October. On a river.
  • the bay froze. It looked like the Arctic. The Bering Sea was frozen. Salt water, with a freezing point below freshwater, was solid. A seal climbed out of the water and sat on the ice.
  • sunrise hit 10:00am. That would be midway through 2nd hour - US History.
And then this week:
  • the wind stopped. Calm. It is wonderful. Planes land. Planes bring packages and mail and food. My nostrils can breath happy knowing that frostbite is still a ways off.
  • the sun returned. Shocking how powerful a face full of sun can be regardless of the temperature. Shocking how it can warm your back as you sit awaiting a fish to bite your hook.
  • high tide came and swept the sea ice back out to sea. Blue water is again my view. The river also lost much of its ice. Not all, but enough to put the ice fishing opener on pause.
  • the sun was still shining when I left school at 6:00pm.
And so I am not freaking out. First of all because things have righted themselves. The weather became more Octoberly acceptable. But the main reason I am not freaking out is thus: like cold, I believe that phrase should be conserved for a time where its meaning is needed and it hasn't been watered down over weeks of me being overdramatic. So maybe I should end this with a caveat.
I am not cold...yet.
I am not freaking out...yet.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

A sudden thought

I haven't seen a pair of UGGs since I got to Alaska. You may be dying to know, "How do girls in Alaska find appropriate footwear to go with their miniskirts then?" They don't wear miniskirts.

My life is so much less stressful having to analyze this one less oddity of the teenage girl thought process.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Thoughts on a Tuesday night

Today I received ten pounds of Peace Coffee. I made four jars of strawberry jam with frozen strawberries that got melty on their plane ride to me then froze into a brick. I coached robotics and played with Legos. I corrected some math homework and read some short stories. I listened to Bill Clinton's interview with Fox News on YouTube. I got YouTube less than twenty-four hours ago. It came with the internet - a two month process. I listened to a new Built to Spill song. It was okay. I watched Andrew Bird on the Current's website. It was awesome. I watched the rain fall - I think. It was blowing sideways. Maybe it never fell. I tried to call Citimortgage, but ended up in the automaton maze pressing numbers after the computer failed to recognize my a clearly enunciated "two"s. I listened to a podcast about Vlad the Impaler and what happens when you are impaled. I drank some peppermint tea with my neighbors. I got three postcards: one from the Phillipines, one from China, and one from Vermont. I got a piece of mail addressed to the math chairperson. That's me. On a Tuesday.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Tundra misconceptions - Pt 3/3

The last thought on the tundra is how little I know about the tundra. This should be apparent from the previous two observations, but this short story should cement my lack of knowledge. Over Labor Day weekend there was the annual Blackberry Festival in Toksook Bay, one of our neighboring villages. Toksook is the closest village to us, a little more than six miles away, across the tundra and up over a hill. We planned on leaving Saturday morning and were getting all packed and suited up for the journey. Our hiking party consisted of my two neighbors, Ben and Sarah, Heidi and her husband George, and me. Ben and Sarah are teachers from New Yorkegon (umm…they taught in both New York and then Oregon before moving up to Alaska). Heidi is a teacher from Michigan who married the fourth member of our team, George, who is Yup’ik and grew up in Newtok, another village on the delta. As Ben, Sarah, and myself were putting on our hiking boots George came by to check on our progress. “You guys aren’t wearing rubber boots?” Sarah and Ben didn’t have any, while I did but hiking in them is literally a pain. Needless to say, our minds were pretty much already made up. We politely responded, feeling maybe a little nervous now, but still pretty set on our previous decision. “Why, should we?” George’s response only supported our lack of concern and unwillingness (in my case) in our footwear situation. “Well, you don’t need to wear rubber boots.” We left it at that.

Our hike began walking through uptown. Tununak, being the size it is, has both an uptown and a downtown, and entered the tundra. From here we had about a two mile hike to the “bridge” then up and over the hill into Toksook. Everything started fine, but about ten minutes into the tundra we began seeing reasons why both Heidi and George were wearing rubber boots. We had been following the four-wheeler tracks across the tundra. Tundra is similar to grass; the more you drive on it, the less of it there is. And like grass, underneath is mud. Now mud is not a huge problem. We were used to mud. Walking the dirt streets (yes, I can say streets because there are two) of Tununak is a weaving, dodging, at times leaping activity, but rarely a wet activity. What we were beginning to experience out in the tundra was that while it was possible to go around the mud puddles in the four-wheeler road, the surrounding tundra had the consistency of a wet sponge. Wetness was quickly becoming an issue. Lessons were being learned the hard way – when someone native to the area questions your decision not to wear rubber boots, you should also question that decision. And when a person native to the area is himself wearing rubber boots, you should not only question your decision, but change your plans. Too late though. A mile from Tununak, ankle deep in muck (which, by the way, is the Yup’ik word for water – how’s that for double entendre), we were on our way.

Having George with us proved to be a great benefit that became increasingly apparent on the walk home, but more on that later. With George in the lead, he used his experience walking through the tundra to guide us from if not dry, drier, spot to drier spot. By the time we got to the “bridge”, which turned out to be little more than a plank over the stream, we were wet, but not miserable.

Our hike back home, however, was a different story. Without our guide, we needed to apply our new knowledge of tundra navigation. Everything was going fine. I was leading when suddenly I looked up, and we seemed to be at a dead end. The trail kind of disappeared into a muddy, rutted out quagmire. I thought I saw some supportive spots and made my move. Nope, wrong. About a foot deep. Cold tundra water rushed into my non-knee high hiking boots. The nice thing about waterproof boots is that they keep water out. The bad thing about waterproof boots is that they keep water in. I could feel with every step the half-cup of water sloshing around in my boots, but we made it through the first challenge.

Ben took up the lead now and was doing a fine job. We were beginning to get pretty confident navigating dry spot to dry spot, correctly identifying which spots of tundra were stable and dry, and which were neither. All was going well, I was watching my feet to make sure I didn’t slip in the mud, when I heard Ben up ahead. “Oh! Oh! Oh no!” then Sara “Get the camera! Get the camera!” I stopped walking and looked up expecting to see the thing that she wanted Ben to take a picture of. By this time in our journey we had discussed that you can only get so wet. Well this is true, but I guess we were only referring to our feet. Ben, knowing that his feet were already soaked, was doing what we had decided was the most expedient way to cross the tundra: charging it through the puddles. It was faster this way, and again, you can only get so wet. But what none of use were expecting was a three foot deep puddle. Ben had unknowingly stepped off solid ground and his foot found ground three lower. Sara’s yell meant to save the camera, not the moment. In the moments immediately following I am grateful that the puddle was not deeper because we were laughing so hard a rescue would have been impossible. Ben’s step into the sinkhole quickly redefined our idea that you can only get so wet. Watching Ben wade out of the puddle he had found Sara and I, not wanting to follow Ben, found a, while longer, significantly less wet. The next twenty minutes over the tundra passed quickly without incident and I was celebrated our return to Tununak with an emptying of the boots of tundra water and a warm shower. Here’s to paying more notice to the subtle nuances of a new culture. Cheers.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Tununak more remote than the Amazon

My good friend Christoph just sent me an article on a study done on the remoteness of regions in the world. The scientists studied how long it would take to travel by road, rail, or water from an area to the nearest city of 50,000 people. So if you live in a rural Minnesota it would be a calculation of drive time to that nearest city, let’s say Minneapolis. Things get interesting when either (1) you are very far away from a city of 50,000, or (2) you lack roads, or a combination of the two.
* picture taken from
According to this study a number of things jumped out at me. The first is that a vast majority (90%) of the world is no more than two days from a city of 50,000. That goes for the Amazon and the Sahara and every other part of the world (not including Antarctica). The next thing is that the most remote place on the planet, a spot on the Tibetan Plateau, is three weeks from a city of 50,000. Three weeks! The study says one day by car, the rest, all twenty of them, on foot. The last thing to stick out to me is that Tununak, where I live, is in that ten percent; we are more than two days travel to the nearest town of 50,000. That is crazy. We are more isolated than nearly all of Africa, including much of the Sahara. Than nearly all of the Amazon.

I haven’t really figured out what this all means. At the moment we are able to travel in and out Tununak of by plane. Really that is the only way. There are no roads linking us to any other town, not even Toksook Bay which is only six miles away. I am told that the true isolation, the true remoteness will kick in during the winter as snow and weather close our runway down for days on end. Last year they went nearly three weeks without a plane landing in Tununak. Food, mail, packages – everything stops, gets backed up in Bethel.

I don’t have a whole lot more on this topic at the moment, but I will follow up in a few weeks. I came to the realization today that I won’t be leaving Tununak until Christmas unless I travel chaperoning sports (which I may still get talked into). That would be about three months not leaving an area not much bigger than one square mile.

Read the article though – the graphics are amazing.
Where's the remotest place on Earth?

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Tundra misconceptions - Pt 2/3

The second misconception that I am in the process of revising is that tundra is a solitary, monochromatic lifeform. What I have come to see is that the tundra is a solitary, monochrome lifeform only from the air; a solitary, but colorful lifeform from about six feet up (me standing); and an incredibly dense, diverse multitude of life and color when you are only inches from it. This conceptual revision came to me the first time we walked up the hill right outside of Tununak. We were heading up to the rock people. I had mentioned wanting to know where the berries were - I had heard they were everywhere and yet I had seen none. What I learned was that I was looking for something that does not exist - bushes. There is very little on the tundra that grows higher than a few inches, the berries included. I had not realized that I had been walking over berries for the last hundred feet. Upon closer inspection I saw that the berries truly were everywhere. Small blackberries, looking and tasting nothing like blackberries back home, were growing nearly everywhere I looked. I also noticed for the first time how incredibly varied the tundra was. I can't make a good estimate about the number of different plants growing in a patch of ground, but it has to be dozens of species in dozens of colors spanning the spectrum from deep reds and purples to all shades of green. The flowers come in bright blues and purples, yellows and whites, and then there are berries coming in red, white, orange, black, and blue. Hardly a monotonous place.

On food

I wanted to cover a topic rather close to my heart: food. Simply put I love food. All aspects of food, and it seems that with each year I become more in love with food. And maybe about now I should switch the word love to obsessed, but I must remember that I am trying to keep up the front of sanity.

My love with food began with eating it. As I grew, my experience in food expanded, and I found that I really like eating food and trying new kinds of food. I have been striving toward authenticity in my eating for a while now – getting experiences that most resemble what they are advertising. For example think of Taco Bell’s image of Mexican food and a legitimate taco at a small taco shop owned and operated by Mexicans. Authenticity. More recently my search for authenticity has evolved to search for ways to actually eat food. Too many of the things claiming to be food is really anything but, and as a result has begun to terrify me. I recently heard of a dessert made at a fancy restaurant that has for ingredients not a single actual food – it is all artificial ingredients (ie chemicals). Interesting science fair project – horrifying gastronomic project.

Then came my love for preparing food. This is tightly linked to the first love: eating food. People, for some reason, are surprised that I like to cook. But my response has been the same for a while. “I cook because I love to eat.” It’s a means to an end at times, but the more I do it, the more I am taking pleasure in the process. To combine the ingredients and to end with a mouthwatering, eyeball watering masterpiece is magical.

Most recently came my love of creating food. I recently began a garden back home in Minnesota with my mom. It was a modest 20’x40’ plot that we rented from the local garden center. It started out as a brown rectangle with considerable chunks of dirt and an intimidating amount of clay. I was convinced nothing I wanted would grow and the weeds would reclaim my rectangle. But, to my infinite surprise, food came. Slooowly at first. And then, out of nowhere I had zucchini the size of, to steal a comparison, baby seals. And beets, and beans, and beans, and beans, and tomatoes, that I heard are too prolific, and potatoes, and strawberries, and hot peppers, sweet peppers, peas, watermelon, cantaloupe, squash, and lettuces, and lastly (I think) carrots. All these edible items erupting from a previously cracked, clumped, clay riddled patch of dirt.

And so with all of these aspects of food present in my life, my move to Alaska involved a high sacrificing all three of these loves for an unknown amount of time. At our new-teacher inservice before school started they asked us to write a fear down that we had for the upcoming year. I am not lying: I wrote about eating good food. The thing is, Tununak is 125 miles from Bethel, accessible only by air (or boat), and Bethel is another 400 miles from Anchorage, also accessible only by air. Our food options are incredibly limited. Limited and extremely expensive. You have never really experienced sticker shock until you walk into Swanson’s in Bethel. Ten dollar bags of Doritos…seven dollar Oreos…good thing I don’t eat much of either of those. But nine dollar gallons of milk, eight dollars for five pounds of flour. Add that to the fact that the native culture doesn’t value fresh fruit and vegetables limiting further access to such in the two stores here in Tununak. I was a bit worried.

Saving graces began trickling in, thankfully. Most of the teachers out here order bulk through distribution companies specializing in shipping to bush Alaska. My neighbors tipped me off to a company in Oregon, Azure Standard, that specializes in organic and natural foods. Here is where I got my 50lb bags of beans, nearly 100bls of flours, and pounds of dried fruit in addition to a lot of other real food items. We also heard about a CSA (community supported agriculture) farm based out of Washington that ships to bush country Alaska. Kind of contrary to the typical CSA philosophy, but the Full Circle Farms has brought fresh, organic produce into my life again, and for that fully forgive any corruption of the ideal they may be causing. Love number one is safe – I have access to real, authentic food.

The second love – preparing food, was totally dependent on clearing the first hurdle. With that done, I could prepare world-class food. True, I am still terribly limited. Back home I could run (literally) to the store and pick up a missing ingredient, but here that is not an option. The reality is that it takes about two and a half weeks from placing a food order to receiving the food. Which means I have to plan my meals out at least that far in advance. This has required a total shift in thinking for me, one that is full of frustrating disappointments when my mind, still stuck in MN thinking, comes up with a great meal idea (Indian) only to remember that I don’t have any rice – or cumin, or cilantro, or lime, etc. The final result, though, is a positive one. When I plan accordingly, my life is awesome. A recent dinner consisted of roasted fall vegetables (potatoes and squash mailed from my MN garden, beets and zucchini from our CSA); chicken breast (that I acquired on a recent trip to Bethel); salad with red peppers, cherry tomatoes, and carrots (all from our CSA), and bread that I made. Life is okay thus far.

I am still working on the third aspect – creating food. It is possible, and in fact, our principal has a grow room in his house where he gets fresh greens and herbs. I am still trying to iron out the details. I first need to procure soil. I had plans of getting a worm bin (using a couple thousand earthworms to compost food wastes) to create compost, and it still may happen, but our weather is cooling off fast and I worry about having worms shipped and arriving alive. Any advice here would be appreciated.

Even without the last being fulfilled, I am incredibly happy about the first two parts of my obsession. Being able to attain and eat good food is a comforting fact. Seeing our box of fruit and veggies arrive in Tununak is such an oddly pleasing sight, but I should have expected as much. I love food.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Tundra misconceptions - Pt 1/3

The tundra holds a mythological appeal for me. It has always been something of a surreal landscape, something that I know exists but is so exotic that it can’t really exist. It ranks with the rainforests and the corral reefs of the world. Glaciers rank up there, too. These geographic features define an area above and beyond the landscapes I am used to seeing. These geographic features also hold an ecology so foreign to me that anything I read in books or see on television cannot possibly prepare me for what those features actually are. As of this moment in life I have now had contact with three out of the four I listed - corral reefs, glaciers, and now the tundra so I know that they do exist. But with each a similar feeling overwhelms me as I observe them.

After describing how much I read and how much I watch, nothing can educate me as much as how much I experience, I feel that some things need to be shared so that you can get just a slight feeling for the tundra. And I feel obligated to share a few things that people need to know about tundra that was lacking in my conception of tundra before experiencing it firsthand. My conception of tundra was that of a cold, foreboding environment, dry and brittle, light green to brown, invoking if not death, at least despair. This, I now know, is wrong on all accounts. After a few trips around Tununak across the tundra my initial reactions were centered around number one - how soft it is, number two - how many different plants they are growing in any square feet, and three - how little I truly know about the tundra.

Let me expound on these thoughts. First of all, walking in the tundra is like walking on a mattress, albeit a chunky mattress. Each step involves the constant monitoring and calculating of where to best place your foot next, a process similar to hiking a mountain trail. Then you modify your calculations with a certain margin of error due to the uncertainty of how much your foot will sink. This is one part of walking in the tundra that is unlike walking on anything else. One step may be on relatively sturdy ground when the next will involve sinking close to a foot. There are also rocks that speckle the landscape that themselves are speckled in lichens and mosses giving the rocks a type of tundra camouflage adding a very sturdy step to the mix.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Random thoughts on solar sanity

Today, September 22, at 5:18 pm, marks the autumnal equinox. At this point in time the Earth is at one of the four key points in its orbit around the sun. At the two ends of the orbit are the summer and winter solstices marking the points in our orbit where the our hemisphere, due to the Earth’s slant, is closest and furthest away respectively from the sun. The equinoxes, however, mark a tipping point. At the equinox, each hemisphere is equidistant to the sun. After that moment, we in the Northern Hemisphere will no longer be slanting toward to sun, but rather, away from it, each day being more pronounced than the last. What this means is that everyday between now and the winter solstice we begin to get less and less sunlight day to day. Its significance to me is that it is also the tipping point between my relative daily sunlight and that of everyone else I know. You see, the further north you are located in your hemisphere, the more severe the difference in sunlight becomes. At 5:18 I will switch from having more sunlight per day than everyone back home to the more depressing less sunlight per day. Here ends the astronomy lesson.

To mark this milestone, this beginning in a way, I wanted to set some baseline measurements with which you will be able to measure my sanity as I enter winter. I am doing this in an attempt, half facetiously, to make sure that if anyone notices a slip in my sanity, they immediately direct me to my sunlight imposter lamp sitting unplugged in the corner of my house. The way that I want to establish these baselines is to make a few statements indicating what I have come to see as normal living in Alaska. I feel I should also make a few statements indicative of the random thoughts already floating about in my head. Shall we begin?

I do not have a TV, DVD player, radio, and at the moment internet in my home. In addition, alcohol, from cooking wine to vodka, is prohibited by village ordinance in Tununak.

I feel that it is perfectly normal to buy twenty-five pounds each of two different kinds of beans and/or one hundred pounds of flour.

I feel that it is perfectly normal to consider buying twelve packs of Newman Os, and am quite taken with the fact that they are 15% off this month only! on Azure.

I look forward with great anticipation to getting packages in the mail, regardless of the outrageous cost of shipping.

I refer to four wheelers as Hondas regardless of manufacturer in the same way I call all tissues Kleenex.

I am in the process of procuring worms for a worm compost bin for my food scraps with the intention of creating compost then using the compost and my sun imposter to grow fresh vegetables.

Okay, a break, because I am beginning to think that I am already too late. But in the (butchered) words of Joseph Heller, “Those that know they are insane cannot possibly be insane because consciousness of insanity is the definition of sanity.” Perhaps there is still hope. And now I return to the random thought part of my baseline assigning.

We romanticize the Native Americans for their concepts on waste , regarding in high esteem the fact that after killing an animal they leave not a part unused. However, in our culture we regard the modern equivalent, a hot dog, as anything but romantic.

If someone were standing on the North Pole, every direction he or she pointed would be south. How would you give directions to that person?

Two jars of salsa are worth three boxes of cereal.

My knives are sharp. I have now cut myself twice – once slicing beets, once picking the seed out of a melon. I need to stop cutting myself until I am back in an area that has medical facilities I trust to stitch me up.

Eleven days equals twenty-one. Six to seven days equals never. Overnight equals the day after tomorrow. My brain just broke.

And that is that. Baselines set. Stay tuned. Hold on. It begins.

Friday, September 11, 2009

How not to catch a fish

Here in Tununak we have a river that weaves through town. I live on one end of town, and where we fish is near the bridge crossing the river on the other side of town. A week ago now I planned on getting a bit of fishing in with some of the other teachers. We were going to eat dinner and then gather our things and make the ten minute walk to the bridge. Midway through dinner we were interrupted by the knocking of children on the kitchen window.

This has come to be a common occurrence for we, the teachers, apparently, are objects of great interest to the local inhabitants under four feet in height. And we, being teachers, all know that if you give a mouse a cookie they will never go away...but, really, how can you ignore the sweet requests of children when all they want is to know what we are doing? And so we cave and we open the window and we begin talking to these miniature humans. And as we do we let slip that we are going down to the river and they quickly ask if they can come and we already know that this question is not really a question but merely a statement and that we will have a small escort of three children. Okay, we think, no big deal.

So we clean up dinner and our escort is awaiting at the front door. Only it has grown to about six children in the short time we were washing dishes. Alright, five fisherpeople and six local experts under four feet. Still not a big deal.

Our journey to the river begins. But as we walk, children with eyes of eagles and ears of owls, notice our journey and our escort becomes an entourage. Not only have they grown in number, but size as well. We have now acquired the junior and senior high. As our number grows, so does the noise, and as the noise builds more and more children are attracted. I believe we have reached critical mass. It's only a matter of time now. By the time we got to the bridge we are approaching thirty. Let me remind you that the entire school only has 120 students. So here we are with nearly a quarter of the school, none of which happened to bring fishing rods. Now some may be already making predictions as to how our fishing trip panned out. Let me mention a few more things to solidify those predictions.

First is that everyone of these children has more experience fishing in a single finger than our entire teacher party had combined. Second is that when someone, anyone, is near water without a fishing rod but with an ample number of pebbles and rocks, they are prone to throwing those pebbles and rocks into the water. And last is that fish are shy, skittish creatures by nature and don't respond well to loud, splash inducing children.

And so our night of fishing turned into a night of casting poorly to the chagrin of laughing natives only to reel in, repeatedly, an empty hook due in part to our inexperience catching fish and helped along being ensured that none of us got lucky and snagged a fish because all of the fish were far away from us after the onslaught of rocks and pebbles. And so we did not catch any fish (unless you count the the measly devilfish), but the weather was great, the moon was full, the sunset over the Bering beautiful, and the children, while unable to bring us any fish, did bring a night of smiles and laughter. Not too bad for a Friday night in Tununak.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Settling in to the bush

I am approaching a month in Alaska, and life is starting to fall into a routine again. New teacher orientation and district trainings are over (for the moment) along with the flights to and from Bethel. School has begun, my boxes I shipped have arrived, and my food I ordered is now here. Life in Alaska has begun.

Up until the last moment my teaching schedule was in flux. But on that first day of school it looked like this:
Period 1 - HS Math
Period 2 - HS US History
Period 3 - HS Math
Period 4 - HS Writing
Period 5 - JH World History
Period 6 - JH Math
Period 7 - JH Art
My classes have between 9 students in the junior high and 15 in some of the high school classes. Almost all are from Tununak with a few from nearby villages (Newtok, Toksook Bay, etc.). Getting acquainted with the curriculum, materials, and routine has consumed nearly every minute of my previous two weeks. Each day my grasp on all of that has become a bit tighter. I hear by the tenth year it is quite a bit easier.

In postal news, all of my boxes (I mailed six) arrived. Cookware, clothes, books, bedding, alarm clock, and all my other things arrived over the course of two weeks. Of course none of them made the eleven day estimate (calendar or work days) that the post office made, at least they made it.


My food also arrived, again over the course of two weeks. I am becoming increasingly interested in being able to see the journey my packages make. For one, why would boxes shipped at the same time arrive days and, at times, weeks apart, looking anywhere from absolutely perfect to absolutely appalling. But it is all here, and I guess that is something. And I acquired some bonus products. One company (Span Alaska) accidentally shipped me a box with nine bottles of vegetable oil and a 25lb bag of white sugar - yippee I guess. Azure, the other company I ordered from, added a 5lb bag of muffin mix - a bit more exciting, especially with the prospect of picking some of the wild blueberries that are growing in the tundra.

Food items that invoked unexpected emotions are thus:
12 - 12oz bags of Ghiradelli chocolate chips (Extreme joy)
25lb bags of kidney beans, black beans, and dried corn (Um...that is a lot of small things)
4lbs of yeast to share with my neighbors (Hmmm, look at all those creatures)
the unexpected veggie oil under the 25lbs of sugar (Wait, there is no way I ordered this!? Or did I? Nope, definitely not.)

Other than school and unpacking boxes I spend quite a bit of time hanging out, eating, talking, and everything else with the other teachers. Walks up the hill to the stone people, or over the tundra to the cross, or along the beach in search of fossils also dot the weeks. I have been making a conscious effort not to think that it is cold or windy. Because from what I hear, this is not cold, and this is not wind. That will come. Until then, I am going to go fishing, and berry picking, and hiking, and save my comments on the weather for the times that actually deserve the observation
.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

I understand the physics of flight, but...

but in a plane the size of a mini van barreling down the runway, prop spinning, engine roaring, pilot pushing buttons as various bells and dings go off makes one question Bernoulli's principle informing me that a couple thousand pound vehicle can leave the ground in a controlled manner. And then on top of that you know that your flight is at its weight capacity because you have been forced to leave behind all but two of your bags to be sent out on a flight the following day.

Sure enough though, regardless of my skepticism, the small plane's nose begins to lift and then the wheels, which I have been watching with with nervous anxiety leave the ground and away we go, the rapid acceleration as the plane climbs pushing me back in my seat. As I begin to relax a patch of turbulence throws me back into thoughts of plummeting back to Earth.

It really is an amazing way to travel though, all things considered. On one hand it is the only way to travel to Tununak - there are no roads leading here, but it offers a glimpse of the landscape, untouched by humans in any way except for the occasional village or fish camp scattered about the tundra. This is such an awesome sight for me that all three flights I have now taken keep my eyes glued to the landscape beneath me.

Tununak lies within the Yukon-Kuskokwim Wildlife Refuge, a 19 million acre refuge home to a wide range of wildlife - migratory birds, ducks, muskox, caribou, bear, moose, many types of fish in the rivers and streams, along with the marine life that thrives on the coast such as several type of seal, walrus, whale, otter, beaver, and halibut to name a few. Approximately 25,000 people share this land as well, primarily located in small villages like mine. Of that number the majority are Yup'ik Eskimos.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Week One

I flew in to Bethel on Monday the 3rd of August. Bethel is a small town of about 6300 340 miles west of Anchorage on the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta. The town is situated along the Kuskokwim River, the lesser known of the two rivers the delta is named after.

New teacher inservices started the day after I arrived. I am one of 53 new teachers to the district - out of 350 teachers total. We are told that this turnover rate is good for rural Alaska districts. Most of the new teachers are from the northern of the lower 48 states, a few from Arizona or California. Those from Minnesota are not hard to come by. Apparently we think that our winters are no different than the ones here. I am starting to question that assumption.

After three days of inservices I flew out to Tununak with the two other new teachers at my school and our principal. We flew out on a Cessna 207, a single prop plane that seats six. This truly is a fantastic way to travel - 500 feet above the green tundra potholed with meltwater lakes and ribbons of blue water going here and there. At one point a small group of musk ox inspired our pilot, knowing that this was our first flight, to circle back, getting low to the ground to get us a better look. This act of kindness acted on my stomach more than anything. In about an hour we landed on a gravel strip in Tununak. We walked along the beach to our housing arrangements that are a converted BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) school. Our housing sits less than one hundred yards from the water and at the bottom of a hill that has our school, Paul T. Albert Memorial School, at the top. Not a bad spot at all.



That night, without any of my boxes having arrived yet, I went out cast netting with one of the teachers who grew up in a village nearby called Newtok. I watched him throw the net bringing up one, two, and even three whitefish at a time. In about ten throws I netted one. Apparently fishing is more than luck.


Friday, July 31, 2009

The plan

I leave for Alaska to teach high school math in 64 hours. Small coastal village 500-some miles west of Anchorage. No cars, no roads, no stores, 120 students in a PreK-12 school. Fresh salmon. Yup'ik. It's going to be a change.