On Thin Ice: Some days it would be better just to stay home.

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           “Aggghhhh,” my man grunt turned into a groan of agony as I sank to my knees in the snow.  Romay and I had been loading eight-foot long sections of spruce into the back of our pickup for less than an hour when I had grabbed a hold of what I thought was a small one. 

            In relation to the others I had been loading that morning and earlier that week, it was.  Though eight feet long, it was only about eight inches across the butt, and I wasn’t really lifting, but was turning it end over end up out of the ditch and onto the road.  I must have added a slight twist to the lift and ended up not really analyzing what caused it as much as to how I was going to regain a standing position.

            I crawled on my hands and knees to the back of the truck and grabbed a hold of the lowered tailgate, pulled myself to standing and then leaned against the truck as I shuffled to the passenger side. 

            “Romay,” I yelled “we’re heading home.  You’re driving.”

            My father’s wisdom in teaching me to drive stick at a young age in case of an emergency came back to me as my fourteen-year-old daughter fired up the truck, slipped it into first gear, released the clutch and pointed us toward home.

            “You okay?” she asked as she navigated the snow filled road.

            “Yeah, just a little sore,” I said as I pressed my palm into the seat to support myself.  “I think I might have put my back out.”

            When Romay was growing up, putting my back out was a regular occurrence.  She would ambush me from the back of a chair, wrap her arms around my neck, wait until I got close to a wall or counter and then push off with her legs.  Without fail, my back would go out every time, but since living in a community with a swimming pool, my core had regained the strength needed to keep my back in place.  I had been moving over a cord of green spruce a day from the ditches to the truck for around a week though, and evidently that takes a toll on a body.

            Upon returning home, I took a hot shower, and didn’t move far from the couch for the rest of the day.  With some rest, my muscles would loosen, and my back would pop back into place unexpectedly with an audible clunk.  Rest was the answer.

            The next day was beautiful outside and Myra asked the obvious question, “Are you and Romay going to go set traps today?”

            I don’t do rest well.

            I got dressed, threw together a trapping bag and went out to get the snow machine going while Romay got ready.  Two pulls and the motor was running.  While it warmed up, I walked around to the cargo rack on the back, grabbed a hold, bent my knees and hoisted it up out of the snow where it had frozen to the ground.  Lightning shot up and down my spine and I found myself back on my knees in the snow.

            I pressed myself up and gingerly walked around to the front skis where I lifted the nose of each one to break it out of the ice.

            “You look like you are doing better today,” Myra commented as I stepped back in the house to check Romay’s progress.  She hadn’t seen me grimace and fall.

            “Yeah,” I said, “beautiful day out.”

            And it was.  Galena normally does not have wind, but December is usually way below zero.  The mercury had been flirting with zero to ten above all week, and the warmth was making most of the locals feel giddy.  It didn’t matter how my back was feeling, it was nice out, and Romay and I were going trapping.

            Romay was ready, we got on the idling machine and headed out the trail right behind our house.  It led past a couple of dry lake beds and into some beaver ponds that each held at least one lodge.  Our destination was a large pond with a lodge on it that had been inactive, but showed a lot of otter sign around it.  A pull-out hole was right next to the old lodge, and it was our plan to go and set a 220 Conibear over the hole.

            We drove up and parked the machine on the land just behind the lodge.  A couple of years earlier, I had learned why not to park next to a beaver house as we chiseled a friend’s frozen rig out.  In a moment of weakness, he had pulled up in front of it to save himself walking ten yards, dropped his machine through the ice, and then had to walk the seven miles home in the dark.

            Even though this lodge was inactive (most times a frosted vent hole or even steam coming out of the top of an active one is easily visible), there was no need to tempt fate.  I walked over and checked the hole.  It was still open.

            “Dad, can I go over on the other side?” Romay called out as I dug the trap out of the bag.

            “Sure,” I responded without looking up.

            We had a cold early winter, the ice was solid, and this lodge didn’t hold beavers anymore.  There would be no harm in her walking around behind and back out onto the ice.

            “Dad!” came a panicked yell from just over my shoulder.

            Romay had walked the opposite way I had anticipated going right over where the pull-out hole was.  I turned just in time to watch her drop through the ice and into the water.

            Three steps and I was to where she had gone in.  I snatched the coat collar of the girl now up to her chest in ice water, braced one foot on the lodge just below the water line, and yanked her up and out and onto the good ice.  Below the water, a feed pile of willows was evident, sign that beavers were there and active.  Later she would tell me that she had never touched the bottom.

            “You’re okay.  You’re going to be fine,” I reassured her as I looked into frightened eyes.

            I helped her onto the machine and fired it up with one pull of the recoil rope.  The shortest route was across an open powder filled field.  In a place of cold and little wind, snow fills in the dry lakes and fields to bottomless proportions, but with a hand on the throttle, I could maintain plane and take the short cut rather than taking the weaving, slow trail we had followed in.

            The engine screamed as we floated across the field and intersected the hard-packed trail.  The skis came up on hard snow and forced the tail of the machine down, digging a pit into the powder.  I jumped off, Romay still on the seat, I grabbed the cargo rack and willed the machine out of the thigh deep hole it had sunk into, and shoved it up far enough for the lugs of the track to gain purchase on the hard-pack.

            Back on the throttle and flying the three miles home, we passed one bewildered woodcutter who we didn’t bother to return his wave. 

            “You’re going to be all right,” I yelled over the motor.  “We’re almost home.”

            Romay stripped out of her ice coated snow gear in the arctic entry way and stiffly ran up the inside stairs to the bathroom and a warm shower.

            “What happened?” Myra asked as she watched a frightened, crying girl fly past her.

            “Thin ice,” I responded.

            Myra’s expression was enough for me to know I had been both dumb and lucky.

            Thirty minutes of hot shower water later, pajamas, a blanket, and a light-hearted movie on television, a teen girl laid curled up on the couch cuddled next to her dad.  Perhaps it would have been better had we just been there all day from the start.

Safe and comfortable in a warm home.

           

           

           

The Girl on the Poster

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“Hey, I know you,” I said with my best used car salesman grin, “You’re famous.  You’re the girl from the poster.”

            The girl from the poster sheepishly grinned and continued walking up the ramp that I was walking down on her way to the Northwest Campus building.  Her rate of travel seemed to increase.

            The school district had flown a bunch of us to Nome in order to take a class for our Alaska School Activities Association coaching certification.  The training can now be taken online, but this was in 2001, back when the internet in the villages was even less reliable than now.  We were to complete the course work at home and then mail it (yes using a stamp and envelop and everything) back to the university when done.  The district was doing its best to comply with ASAA’s edict concerning coaching certification.  It was not the first time that ASAA had claimed they would “take action” if schools didn’t fall in line, but this time they “really meant it.”

            It was my first year of teaching, and I was slotted to begin coaching cross country skiing  as well.  I was living in Savoonga, and this class was a great chance to get off of the island, get a burger cooked in a restaurant, and maybe meet some new people.

            The Bering Straits School District has a program that highlights homegrown teachers, at the time it was called Bering Strait Success Stories, and I had walked by this young woman’s photo every day on my way to my classroom.  From the stock introductions at the beginning of our coaching class, I had learned that she was attending to become certified to coach basketball.  Based off of how she spoke, she was intelligent.  I would have had to be blind not to see that she was young, athletic, and attractive.

            We ended up sitting diagonal from each other on opposite corners of a conference table slapped together by putting four folding tables into a large rectangle.  I paid attention in class… I do still carry the certification card I earned from that weekend in my wallet, but I couldn’t help but having my train of thought hijacked.

            “Mike,” I called out as I walked into the fifth-grade teacher’s class back in Savoonga, “who’s this Myra Slwooko girl?”

            “Ah, Myra…” Mike had been around the district forever and knew pretty much everyone, “had her in my class when she was in 2^nd and 5th grade.”

            “Really?” my interest peeked.

            “Yeah, good kid,” Mike continued.  “You could do a lot worse, but if you hurt her, I break your knees.”

            Like previously stated, Mike had been around for a while, was much slower than me, but was also a former wrestling coach.  He was twice my size.  The comment had been part one guy ribbing another and part promise.  I decided to proceed with caution.

            “Where you going?” Mike called after me as I carefully backed out of his door.

            “I’m concerned for my knees,” I honestly responded.

            “Come in, I’ll give you some dirt on her,” and Mike gave me a brief history of the girl on the poster summarizing it with, “She’s Unalakleet’s sweetheart.”

Myra Slwooko during her first year of teaching in Elim standing with Crystal Ivanoff

            A month later found me leaving the island again and headed for Unalakleet where the teachers for the entire district would be attending a weeklong October inservice.  Every site would be there.  She would be there.

            I walked by a session on social studies curriculum.  I was an English teacher… but I went in to learn more about social studies.  One open chair left…

            “Well, hi Myra, I didn’t know you would be in this session.”

            She smiled warmly, and I decided that I would need to learn all about the district’s approach to the social studies curriculum.

            That evening, I walked into the classroom that the single male teachers were staying in and got ready to lay down with my book.

            “Think I saw Myra in the gym playing ball with a couple of other young teachers,” Mike said in my direction.

            I dropped my book and grabbed a pair of shorts.  I imagine watching a swimmer play basketball is much like watching the hippos’ ballet in Disney’s Fantasia, but I played all night, and the next night.

            Back on the island, I hearkened up the courage to send Myra an email.  The next day after school, I checked my inbox to find a message from her in it.  I clicked the button for it to download and watched as the spinning beach ball taunted me.  I got up and walked to the post office about a half mile away to check my paper mail.  When I got back to the school, the beach ball greeted me, and then the message opened.  I read it three times and carefully crafted a response.

            Each day after school I would click on the message and then walk to the post office, read, reread, respond.  Then the weekend came that I would be traveling to Elim where she lived to coach the Savoonga ski/biathlon team.

            “Jason,” Jennifer, one of my younger skiers said, “when we get to Elim… can I just sit under a tree?”

            It was an earnest question from a young girl who had never seen a tree larger than the scrub willow that grew near the airport in Savoonga.

            Myra met me at the school when the team arrived.  She was poised and beautiful.  I was awkward and clumsy.  So, we were pretty true to our characters.  I coached my kids and Myra hung out with the team.  At the end of the couple of days, I got back on the plane with the kids and headed back to the island.

            The email pattern continued.  I amped up my game and started closing with something a little more daring like “sincerely” up to the day when I got brave enough to write… “thinking of you often.”

            My kids traveled to White Mountain for skiing and Myra rode her snow machine west on the Iditarod trail to hang out with the team again.  And then the next weekend for the Western Interior Ski Association Meet also held in White Mountain marking the end of ski season.

            With ski season over, I called the airline and booked tickets for our first official date.  I would fly from Savoonga to Nome, Nome to Elim, stay at the house of the ski coach there, cook a romantic dinner, spend some quality time without the ski team, and then fly home in time to be at work on Monday morning.

            “How much?” I gasped when told the price of tickets.  As I hung up the phone I remember thinking how I would need to determine if I was marrying this girl early in the relationship.

            I looked in the mirror the day before getting on the plane.  I had been on the island, aside for Christmas break, for almost an entire school year.  I have never been a fan of haircuts, and the man looking back in the reflection very much resembled Grizzly Adams: hair down to my shoulders and at least two inches of bushy beard.  I wasn’t about to give myself a haircut, but I could do something about the facial hair.  A weed whipper would have been more effective, but after an hour with my razor, I could finally see skin that had not been exposed since August.

Myra wouldn't stand a chance against the newly beardless me.

            Myra greeted me at the airport as I deplaned, “What happened to your beard?” she looked disappointed.

            We had a good home cooked meal with the venison I had brought back from my Michigan Christmas visit, went for a snow machine ride during which I got Myra’s machine epically stuck, hung out, listened to music, talked, played outside, and had our first kiss.  It really was the thing that Hallmark movies are made of.

            I boarded the plane at the end of the weekend and headed back to the island.  I really didn’t need the plane, I could have walked about four feet above the waves all the way to Savoonga.  The price of the plane tickets did not even come to my mind as I went to sleep back in my own bed that night.  I started to wonder about the price of rings.