The Month in Review

It's hard to believe that we've been back in Alaska for almost a month. It feels like just yesterday that we were hopping on the bush plane in Bethel with Junie, crossing our fingers that she wouldn't scream the whole way or the engine wouldn't blow out her eardrums.

I remember spending that flight thinking about all of the things we had to do once we landed in Goodnews: moving in to a new house, preparing for school that started in 5 days, and taking care of a 6-week old with a bad case of jet lag. But once we turned up the coast and saw big Beluga below us and those mountains stretching for as far as you can see, it felt like coming home. (If you look below the wing, you can just make out the village right along the shoreline).

The library filled with all of the teachers' packages.

My box of beautiful tanned fox.

I love this sign that hangs down at the store. When we say wilderness, we mean wilderness! When we got back to town, we heard this story from a reliable source: One day over the summer, a bunch of kids went swimming in one of the many ponds a mile or two from the school. When they jumped in, a momma bear and her cub jumped out! One of our 7th grade students fended the bears off while the younger kids ran to safety. 

Who says you can't grill in the bush?

I knew I was off to a good school year when I sneakily took this picture. At open house, some students came to my room and begged me for the 24 Game to play. Somewhat caught off guard, I located the deck, handed it to them, and then watched amazed as they sat down and practiced math problems for a good 30 minutes. One of the students in this picture hated math last year and let me know that fact quite often. You can see to the left the sun blazing in through the window, a rare blessing in August here. Many of their friends were outside playing bat and soaking up one final summer night, yet they wanted to do math. They even brought in some parents, teachers, and others and taught them how to play!

As Christina said in the previous post, we hosted two Yup'ik artists, Jack Dalton and Drew Michael, for the first two weeks of school, in the hopes of bringing the community and school closer together and kicking off our school year on a positive note. Jack, who is a professional storyteller, came to write new songs to incorporate into the Yuraq, the traditional dance. Drew, a professional mask carver, came to show our students how to work with wood and to carve their own dance masks.

Roy took me, TJ, Jack and Drew out fishing for silver salmon upriver. This is TJ, getting himself psyched up to gut his first fish. 

The guys with their catch. 

We spent a few late nights gutting, cleaning, filleting and packaging between 300-400 lbs of salmon. Drew spent a month in Togiak recently, where some of the elder women taught him how to fillet salmon. He taught me and now I'm filleting the salmon that I catch. Now we have a freezer full of salmon steaks ready to throw in the oven or on the grill.

Drew and I took the Honda out to a remote spot on the river that was pretty hard to get to. We had to get off the Honda and walk it through a few precarious places where the tundra gave way entirely (Anna Beavers warned me about these sinkholes; she told me they can swallow 4-wheelers entirely). But the trip was well worth it- the fish were biting and the scenery was amazing.

A rare flounder that I caught. I showed this picture to Roy and he immediately said "Yes, the sea is warming up and bringing with it new fish to our area."Climate change isn't a controversial topic in a place where we routinely see the effects firsthand. One of the big pieces of news when we came back was that Junior caught a stingray up at the spit, the first time one has been caught in living memory.

And because no post is complete without a few pictures of the baby...

At the clinic getting my shots!

Hanging out in my new crib!