Sunday, December 20, 2009

Halfway point (roughly)

B and I are at a bed and breakfast in Athol, on our respective computers, listening to a pack of howling dogs. We spent today in the Village, hoping to get out. All week we’d been debating whether to leave on Friday night or wait until today, Saturday. If we’d left last night we’d be safely out of the Village, but would have to spend two nights here in Athol, at least one at a hotel (and nothing is cheap here, including hotel rooms). Waiting until today, however, put us at a slightly higher risk of running into bad weather. Which in fact happened. We started calling the airlines at 9:00 this morning, and all day long it was, “We’re on a weather hold, call back in an hour.” It was actually sort of nice to have a day of just sitting around watching movies all day, but our baseline stress level was very high – if we didn’t make it out at some point today, we’d either miss our flight to Anchorage tomorrow, or have to pay to take a later flight. Finally at 4 two airlines decided to send planes. I couldn’t believe it – it really hadn’t seemed that bad out earlier in the day, a little overcast maybe, but calm. As the day went on, it seemed to get both hazier and windier. As excited as I was to hear that a plane was coming, I was dreading the ride.

Our neighbor drove us down to the airstrip. The plane was a big one, a ten-seater. We had to stop in the Bay first to pick up 7 more people including a few small children, one of whom was a baby with what smelled like a soiled diaper. All things considered, I guess the ride wasn’t that bad…I don’t know, I don’t like these tiny planes, I don’t like flying at all, and the wind made it bumpy and it was getting dark and it smelled, and I kept feeling alternately nauseous and light-headed. It was not a fun trip. I was very, very thankful when we finally landed in Athol. We took a taxi to a Chinese restaurant (a restaurant! No cooking! No dishes!) and called J, a very friendly lady who is our assigned mentor through the district. She had offered us a place to stay for the night, which we assumed would be her house, but which turned out to be the lovely bed and breakfast her partner built and owns. We passed an hour chatting with an older woman on her way out to visit her son in a different village, and are now settled into our very cozy room. The owner’s dog team is outside, and apparently something set them off, because they are all howling and barking.

This past week of school went pretty quickly, there were lots of holiday things to do, including a Christmas show and a feast yesterday. The kids aren’t really excited about Christmas, I don’t think many of them get a whole lot of gifts and I imagine it gets boring fast with no school. Two weeks of sitting around playing video games and watching movies really isn’t that fun, even to a kid. The teachers, on the other hand, were exhibiting varying degrees of giddiness yesterday afternoon at the prospect of getting out for a while. Even the veteran teachers seem to have some cabin fever, and I know B and I were starting to consider the possibility today that we might not get out at all, and feeling utterly depressed.

Tomorrow afternoon we fly on to Anchorage, and from there we take a red-eye to Boston, with a layover in Minneapolis at some unholy hour of the morning. Besides the obvious things like seeing our families and celebrating Christmas, we’re both also very excited to do some of the things we haven’t been able to do for months, like drive a car, drink some wine, impulse-buy some stuff, eat ice cream, see people we don’t know, and maybe even go to the movies. Pretty exciting stuff.

I wish I had some insightful or deep reflections at this rather important marker of our time, our halfway point, but not really. We certainly haven’t changed our minds at all about spending more than a year up here. We love the kids and we’re both learning a lot, but you know that already if you’ve been reading this blog. We’re looking forward to getting back to Portland in a serious way, and one thing that I hope will last is the sense of appreciation I know we’ll feel when we first get back there, for things we used to take for granted. We just cannot wait to ride our bikes, to play Frisbee in the park, to eat grilled cheese and waffle tacos and fried pie at the food carts, to drink tea (and coffee and beer) with our friends, to walk in Forest Park, to stroll down to Alberta Street for coffee and bagels on a Sunday morning with our dog, to shop at the coop, to go to vegan restaurants, to go running outside, to work in our garden…oh, man. It’s making me sad just writing this list.

I don’t think either one of us would say we’re sorry we decided to do this. We both have moments where we’re sort of miserable, but we had those in Portland every once in a while, too. I think in the long run we’ll be glad we had this year, whereas if we hadn’t come I think we would’ve regretted that choice. All the same, it’s a bit of a relief to be halfway done.

Here’s one list a few of you might be interested in: the books I’ve read since we arrived. Some of you may recognize titles as ones you recommended in response to my earlier request. Some titles are books that were at the BIA (our housing unit), some were sent by friends or families, and some we brought with us. They’re in the order in which I read them:

Death, With Interruptions by Jose Saramago (I started this one on the east coast)

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neale

Mindset by Carol Dweck

Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

Volcano by Shusaku Endo

Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliott Gorn

The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle

Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle

Coming into the Country by John McPhee

Jonah’s Gourd Vine by Zora Neale Hurston

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Disobedience by Jane Hamilton

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Hanna’s Daughters by Marianne Frederiksson

The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Run by Ann Patchett

The Know-it-All by A.J. Jacobs

The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald

Teaching What Really Happened by James Loewen

Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes (I’m about halfway through this one)

1 comment:

  1. I just got to read this Sara - and its New Years day and I can't really attach a feeling to what I'm feeling. Guess probably sad more than anything but also thankful that you did make it home safely and we had lots of happy hours together. Time went by soooooo fast and I still have a 100 hugs I didn't give you.

    As for your list of books - impressive to say the least - I can't imagine reading that many books in a year no less remembering what they were about.
    Love you sweet girl

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