“Prison time is slow time, so you do what you can to keep going. Some fellas collect stamps, others build matchstick houses. Andy built a library.” – Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding, the Shawshank Redemption
Rural village life isn’t quite prison, but Jen and I have to be really creative to fill the time that we have. It seems that many of the people who choose to come teach up here fit into one of two categories: either they’re super outdoorsy and love to be out in nature (camping, fishing, hiking, hunting, and generally roughing it), or they are completely content to retreat into their den and do nothing but lounge around watching television, playing video games, and surfing the Internet.
Unfortunately, Jen and I fit right down the middle. We want to go out and have adventures and we like to snuggle up with a good book or movie too. What we don’t want to do is only do one thing all of the time. So for the past few months these are some of the things we have done to try keeping busy and having fun after work and on weekends.
Well, now that we’re all geared up (see my previous blog about extreme cold weather equipment), we took to the outdoors for some crazy adventures. We went moose hunting, didn’t get anything, tracked it through the forest, and then carried butchered moose meat (when our shooter actually bagged one) back to his house for him to chop and grind up. He gave us some fresh ground moose for cheeseburgers. MMM!!! They were so good (and so healthy… no GMOs or hormones in this meat!).
We have seen foxes stealthily tiptoeing though the village in the wee hours of the morning. They’re too skittish for us to get closer than a few yards away though. We’ve gone up and down the Kobuk River a few times just to see what’s what and get the lay of the land. And since the snows started (in September, lol), we’ve been out to make snow angels, take photos of icicles, out on snow mobiles (which were super fun), and even tried to dig a stuck van out of a snowbank.
Schools up here are constantly shorthanded, so I was asked to referee a volleyball tournament one weekend. I thought it was volunteer. I would have been happy to help out for free. But I discovered that it was a paying gig. So I quickly brushed up on the rules and then voila! Everyone in the community who attended got to see me in action and afterward, I received cash-in-hand to go buy fresh milk at the local village general store (it’s about $8.00 a gallon).
We had a nice Thanksgiving with some coworkers. And we even took a trip out into the woods on the outskirts of Kiana to procure ourselves a little tabletop Christmas tree. I was almost hip-deep in snow drifts just trying to get the tree cut down. Then we headed into Jen’s pre-k classroom to craft a few homemade ornaments. Our tree is so cute!
The plan is to exchange our gifts here first (with another fresh-off-the-plane pizza from Kotzebue) and finally to head home to share the holidays with family and friends for the first time in over five years! Boy, oh boy! We can’t wait to see everyone!
Until Next Time…
-Justin
Lost in Translation 