I suppose there’s a good reason that the ‘great books’ are called great. East of Eden was incredible.
And I feel that a man is a very important thing–maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent towards gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed–because ‘Thou mayest.’
-John Steinbeck
Handwritten last night. By the time I’d taken in the northern lights dancing through the stars and across the sky, walked up to the duplex and back down to the helipad with my camera and tripod, the cloud cover had blown in, and through it the lights showed still. Incredible. It sorta came through in the photo.
Early out, kids run free from school at 2:00pm, teachers meeting two-thirty to three, we move three pallets of canned food into the school kitchen from a connex (shipping container), human chain Hey-Oh Throw a box of #10 cans of apricots up to the next man on the stairs, boss mr. willis. Done with that at 5:00, hungry enough to eat a horse.
Half a bag of BBQ Lays and a full-to-the-brim bowl of beef stew later, I’m comatose in the recliner. Veg for two hours. Espresso at 9 and back at it, get those lesson plans done through thursday. I’m finally on it, finally moving past the hell of day-by-day lesson planning at ten at night night-by-night. Feelin real good. Done at 11, call it a night and step outside. No, not this way, the shortcut straight up to the duplex, no, tonight a short walk through the village. Back through school and out the front door, singing out loud Angel At My Door, and I look up and the sky’s all lit up with the northern lights like I’ve never seen them before.
I think I’ll sleep in a little bit tomorrow.
Yesterday, while fidgeting with my mustache, something alltogether unfamiliar happened. It tangled.
Now what?
Onward ho.
I finished a really, really really great book the other day, The Living by Annie Dillard. Two things I liked: coming to know characters and then watching their lives unfold over a wild era, and learning how the Northwest was back in the day. Great stuff, truly. Here are a couple good bits from the book:
———————————
Clare knew that common wisdom counseled that love was a malady that blinded lovers’ eyes like acid. Love’s skewed sight made hard features appear harmonious, and sinners appear saints, and cowards appear heroes. Clare was by no means an original thinker, but on this one point he had reached an opposing view, that loves alone see what is real. The fear and envy and pride that stain souls are phantoms. The lover does not fancy that the beloved possesses imaginary virtues. He knew June was not especially generous, not especially noble in deportment, not especially tolerant, patient, or self-abasing. The lover is simply enabled to see–as if the heavens busted open to admit a charged light–those virtues the beloved does possess in their purest form.
—-
It was not everybody got so deep into the battering and jabbing of it all, got in the path of the great God’s might. She moved across the burning plains, crossed two mountain ranges. She saw from the western shore with her own eyes the mild islands rolling off in the light, the way they must have looked at the foundation of the world. She called Lummi and Nooksack women her tillicums, and they called her tillicum, which who would have guessed. She lay under mats in the bottom of a canoe once during the Indian troubles, and Rooney told the Haidas she was clams. Lived in five or six different places, including a stockade. She felt her freedom. Reared two boys to manhood, busted open this wilderness by the sea, buried the men on their lands. She saw a white horse roll in the wild straberries, and stand up red. She took part in the great drama. It had been her privilege to peer into the deepest well hole of life’s surprises. She felt the fire of God’s wild breath on her face.
—-
Still later that August, during the first year of the panic, the good women of Goshen staged a tree-planting ceremony in the schoolyard, to beautify their world. The children, the mayor, and other townspeople assembled to plant two big-leaf maples, a linden, and–someone’s supreme inspiration–a Douglas fir. They were disappointed that so few men attended. The men, for their part, who had exhausted their youths and manhoods, crippled their backs, and sacrificed flesh, digits, and limbs at the task of clearing trees, marveled at the women’s zeal at planting trees, and reflected, not perhaps for the first time, that their partners and helpmeets seemed never fully to grasp the nature of their joint venture.
—-
The heavy rope pulled at him. He carried it to the platform edge. He hitched up on the knot and launched out. As he swung through the air, trembling, he saw the blackness give way below, like a parting of clouds, to a deep patch of stars on the ground. It was the pond, he hoped, the hole in the woods reflecting the sky. He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.
What’s a bush order? Food. Bought at Costco in Anchorage, packed by a bush-shipping expediter, shipped up to Nome then helicoptered out to Diomede.
The mail came, finally, after a long wait. It came on thursday, and it made me happy for two reasons:
1. because the second half of my personal belongings (two rubbermaids) are now here instead of sitting in Nome
2. because part of my bush order came
Only three boxes (total: 60-70lb) of my 400 pounds of food made it before the chopper was grounded in Wales with a Check-Engine light. But in those boxes there was joy. Coffee. Fifteen pounds of it. In one of the rubbermaids, my coffee grinder and my espresso maker. In another of the three boxes, California Dates. Pure joy.
The chopper’s supposed to come again on wednesday, weather permitting, with (knock on wood) aprox. 320 more pounds of food in boxes with my name on them.
:)
This is what it’s like to show up at Diomede as a new teacher at the start of the school year.
:)
Two things here, in order of importance:
1. Robert G. is a person awesome past words. Kinda like Darla G. Well, when I say ‘kinda,’ I mean ‘exactly.’
2. I did my first stall today, under Robert G’s perfect tutelage.
‘Stall’ is flying jargon for what happens when the plane’s wings stop generating lift. Stalling on purpose is a great training maneuver for tons of reasons, while an unintentional stall is a sign of either a poor pilot or equipment failure (really bad situation: both). So, when the wings stop generating lift, the magic of flying goes away really quickly, but not as quickly as the altitude needle spins around on its dial.
The wings stop generating lift when you don’t have enough airspeed, so to do a training stall you bring the 2000lb plane to a complete stop. Zero airspeed. How do you bring an airplane to a complete and perfect stop in the middle of the air? You pull up..the plane starts to climb, and you pull up a lot more, and next thing you know the plane is pointed straight up and right around when you realize you’re pointed straight up, the plane has run out of speed.
We stopped. In the air. Three thousand five hundred feet in the air. Over the Bering Sea. DEAD STILL..for a moment. This dead stillness lasts for an incredibly short moment*. Then that moment was gone, the plane wheeled over through the sky, the sky and the ocean have switched places and now we’re falling straight down out of the sky at 100mph. Spinning, too. No bad words nor good words nor any words passed though my head, as it was too full of mindblowing dumbfounding stupefying terrifying…umm..well, all those words added up then doubled up, that’s just about right.
Robert had told me to step on the rudder away from the spin direction to straighten the plane, so I mashed the rudder pedal, and we stopped spinning. Although there’s still the falling straight down thing going on, and we’re up to 150mph.
‘So, Dave, now what you do, sometime soon here you’ll want to pull up a bit, get ‘er back to level’ says Robert.
I pulled up a little bit, and Robert repeated himself with the addition of the word ‘more.’ I pull the yoke (airplane steering wheel), the plane levels out, I feel like my body was just squashed then turned upside down and inside out then back outside in then wrung out and plopped back into the seat, and then I realized I was grinning my face off like a one legged man who just won a butt kicking competition.
‘So, Dave, now what you do, is you do that again.’
So I did it again…
*calc buffs, here’s the idea: the moment lasts for about as long as d/dx(x^2) = 0
A lotta years ago I began to wonder if I would find myself in Alaska someday, and now some day is today and hey oh, look, I live in Alaska. Four or five years ago I began to wonder if I’d find myself teaching in a village in Alaska, and in April I signed a contract and on Saturday the wheels of paperwork began to turn..my initial teacher certificate should be here in a few weeks, the certificate that will make good my contract to go teach in an Alaskan village. It’s happening!
Day by day was the tale of the past six weeks. This “Summer Field Experience” bit of the certification program was the most intense thing I’ve done in my life. It was like the most difficult finals week I had during college, cloned and stacked five times over. Worth it? Like gold, baby, worth its weight in gold.
Learning? Well yes of course, all the things we were there to learn we did learn in spades: classroom management, disciplinary literacy (beating kids with books? why yes…in a way..sorta..but not), assessment, standards, GLE’s, strands, philosophy, lesson planning, behavior management, and oh so much more. And then some extra things too. One big extra thing, really. This: no matter how good I am at not judging, I still do. That one I learned the hard way, and I can only hope and pray that from learning it the hard way I’ll do better next time. Yeah, there’s a story behind it, even written up as my last Summer Field Experience journal entry. I wouldn’t feel ok posting it here, at least not for a while.
And now what? Four weeks of reading, organizing, planning, goofing off, and tutoring–the time will sail by–and ka-pow I get on a jet plane for the north. First to Unalakleet for some training, then a plane to Nome, then a helicopter to home sweet home, Diomede.
Day by day, one day at a time, that’s been the tale alright. But when I hit the brakes and look around I’m struck breathless by where I am and the trade I am privileged, honored and humbled to be a part of. It’s surreal, unreal and beautiful.
The best part? In five or so weeks, subtract the unreal part.
:D
Once I came upon a poem (by Robert Frost) less read. And another, too.
The Door in The Dark
In going from room to room in the dark
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.
A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don’t pair anymore
With what they used to pair with before.
A Question
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
(…and the trend keeps going.)
Trend? Trend.
Below this and the picture are some select parts of a post by Tom Engelhardt about memorial day. Scroll down and look at the list of towns. Those are the hometowns of the soldiers who’ve died this May while on duty in Afghanistan. There are twenty two towns, each recently struck by war’s curse: the death of a loved one. Year by year the wounds heal, but the scars are forever.
It’s Memorial Day and there’s a scarred town on my heart: Bellevue, Washington.
Thank you so much, Joe. We miss you :’-(
_________________________________________________________________________________
May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan. It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.
Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all — especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.
[…]
Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall. Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict. There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath.
Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.” There will be little controversy. They — their traumas and their wounds — will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers.
[…]
Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.” Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way — a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country. They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.
Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t. So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.
Spencerport, New York
Wichita, Kansas
Warren, Arkansas
West Chester, Ohio
Alameda, California
Charlotte, North Carolina
Stow, Ohio
Clarksville, Tennessee
Chico, California
Jeffersonville, Kentucky
Yuma, Arizona
Normangee, Texas
Round Rock, Texas
Rolla, Missouri
Lucerne Valley, California
Las Cruses, New Mexico
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Overland Park, Kansas
Wheaton, Illinois
Lawton, Oklahoma
Prince George, Virginia
Terre Haute, Indiana.
As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.
The pickup was big. Big tires, big man. HID accessory light-rack on top of the cab. Dualies? Check. Aftermarket exhaust? Check. I rolled up to the red light and scoped out this big truck opposite me. The man inside has a cell phone stuck to his ear. Of course. I shake my head, he’s just like the rest of them.
The light turns green, I go on my way and he goes on his way, and as we cross in our near and opposite paths I almost didn’t notice the tears in his eyes.
Best Faulkner I’ve read yet. But I’m new at this Faulkner thing. Did I mention I’m on a high falooting literature kick? So anyways I’m new at this Faulkner thing, and everybody tells me that I won’t really get it before two or three re-reads, and for every great huge brilliantly crafted idea and relationship I saw, I could feel two or three sail by me entirely uncaught. So then likely I liked this one most because I caught a bit more. And now throw all that out the window, here’s the moral of the story for now: this book was GOOD.
Excerpts:
——
“Then let him go!” the boy cried. “Let him go!”
His cousin laughed shortly. Then he stopped laughing. “His cage ain’t McCaslins,” he said. “He was a wild man. When he was born, all his blood on both sides, except the little white part, knew things that had been tamed out of our blood so long ago that we have not only forgotten them, we have to live together in herds to protect ourselves from our own sources. He was the direct son not of only a warrior but of a chief. Then he grew up and began to learn things, and all of a sudden one day he found out that he had been betrayed, the blood of the warriors and chiefs had been betrayed. Not by his father,” he added quickly. “He probably never held it against old Doom for selling him and his mother into slavery, because he probably believed the damage had already been done before then and it was the same warriors’ and chiefs’ blood in him and Doom both that was betrayed through the black blood which his mother gave him. Not betrayed by the black blood and not wilfully betrayed by his mother, but betrayed by her all the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it; himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat. His cage ain’t us,” McCaslin said. “Did you ever know anybody yet, even your father and Uncle Buddy, that ever told him to do or not do anything that he ever paid any attention to?”
——
“Why not?” McCaslin said. “Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you dont have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that’s shame. But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they–” the boy saw his hand in silhouette for a moment against the window beyond which, accustomed to the darkness now, he could see sky where the scoured and icy stars glittered “–they don’t want it, need it. Besides, what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was, when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?”
——
Until three years ago there had been two of them, the other a full-blood Chickasaw, in a sense even more incredibly lost than Sam Fathers. He called himself Jobaker, as if it were one word. Nobody knew his history at all. He was a hermit, living in a foul little shack at the forks of the creek five miles from the plantation and about that far from any other habitation. He was a market hunter and fisherman and he consorted with nobody, black or white; no negro would even cross his path and no man dared approach his hut except Sam. And perhaps once a month the boy would find them in Sam’s shop–two old men squatting on their heels on the dirt floor, talking in a mixture of negroid English and flat hill dialect and now and then a phrase of that old tongue which as time went on and the boy squatted there too listening, he began to learn. Then Jobaker died. That is, nobody had seen him in some time. Then one morning Sam was missing, nobody, not even the boy, knew when nor where, until that night when some negroes hunting in the creek bottom saw the sudden burst of flame and approached. It was Jobaker’s hut, but before they got anywhere near it, someone shot at them from the shadows beyond it. It was Sam who fired, but nobody ever found Jobaker’s grave.
——