Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [57]
It had been a mild winter to start. It rained for weeks, throwing dead spruce into creeks where they clogged culverts and flooded streets. But by February, snow pushed out the rain and layered deeply outside of town. John and I continued to teach at the small schools where we had been hired the year before. In the morning, we left our place in the dark. By nine, the growing dawn silhouetted the mountain range across the bay, though the sky would still be strung with stars. In midwinter, it wouldn’t be light until half past ten. It would be dark by the time we came home. On days when we returned to our place to find snow too deep on the part of our road the borough didn’t plow, we parked our cars in a narrow pullout half a mile from the house and skied home. In the morning, we skied back to the cars wearing headlamps over wool hats. We stashed our skis in the backs of our cars and drove to work. The city and borough maintained armies of plow trucks so that school was never closed because of snow, but occasionally, freezing rain or high winds canceled school. Because the beetle epidemic had killed so many of the spruce trees around town, strong winds coupled with root-loosening downpours often prompted officials to close the schools: Dead trees threatened to fall onto power lines, across roads, and onto school roofs and buses.
The director of the school where I taught was a stout, practical woman who had nearly shoulder-length gray hair and wore boys’ sneakers. She missed her sons, who were off at college, but was relieved that her husband had moved away. A string of troubled teenagers moved through her place, which was a collection of buildings without running water in various stages of being built or remodeled about a dozen miles outside of town—a brother and sister whose abused mother walked through town trying to avoid talking to people; a teenage girl from somewhere else who had somehow landed on the school’s doorstep; and a young woman who had lived there for so long that she helped bring the others up to speed: huskies to be fed outside, Chihuahuas and cats indoors.
I was so busy worrying about the fact that many of the kids would never master algebra that for a while I failed to grasp the real point: The director just wanted to get them through school so that they could find jobs, become independent, and move on with their lives. Moving on—and sometimes leaving town—was exactly what they needed to do. But I earnestly stuck to my failed vision. On Monday mornings I posted a riddle on the wall for the students to solve by the end of the week; Friday mornings, I ran science demonstrations. But the kids preferred to socialize rather than solve the riddles, and the science demonstrations usually flopped. And on the day when I looked out the window in the middle of teaching a biology lesson and saw cars swaying in their parking spaces, shaken by tremors deep in the Earth, I was the only one who wanted to run outside. The kids just looked up from their work and laughed.
IN THE WINTER, as shore ice clutches Alaska’s northern coast like a blanket pulled up under the chin, wind scours the state’s Arctic plain, endlessly drifting and sculpting its light snowfalls. In the Interior, snow piles up—each winter an average of five and a half feet drops on Fair-banks—and the temperature of the still air in this region dives deeply below zero. Far to the southwest, out in the Aleutian Islands, winter storms bring endless snow, rain, and wind. In the Southcentral part of the state, low pressure fronts spin off the Gulf of Alaska, sucking bitter air down from the north, bringing moist air inland,