What Winter Has Wrought Spring Has Put Asunder
      Sixteen hour long days are bringing a quick thaw to the village.  Walking is hazardous at best and the mud everywhere is epic.  The boardwalks on this end of town are all messed up. 

 When in Kotlik...

     Here in Kotlik, custom dictates that if something wants to leave one’s body then one should endeavor to hasten its’ exit.  What I’m talking about is spit, nose nuggets, stomach and intestinal gas.  Yes, those habits I have grown up to consider reprehensible are perfectly acceptable here, and in fact encouraged in order to rid the body of foul substances.  I have witnessed on several occasions grown-ups and elderly folk out about town hock up a voluminous lunger and emphatically spit it out beside the walkway.  The phrase “I used to be disgusted but now I’m just amused” describes the situation in which I’ve seen the Yup’ik language teacher in my classroom delivering a lesson then halt and summon a lugy from the depths of her trachea and casually walk over to the trashcan to expectorate.  

     Then there are the gastrointestinal vapors.  There are probably more deep-belly belches occurring in class than I notice anymore because I’ve become so accustomed to hearing them from petite girls and older boys alike.  One thing I haven’t gotten used to is the flatulence that follows the morning dose of milk with breakfast.  Not only is it loud and from every direction in my classroom but the miasma I’m forced to endure in the aftermath is worthy of a union grievance.  I don’t say a thing and I suffer in silence but there have been occasions where the room’s atmosphere became so polluted that the children have banded together and forced the most offending individual to move to the hallway. 

Spring Arrives

    

 The days of the snowmobile are numbered here in Kotlik.  Last weekend was a blizzard and whiteout with temperatures in the single digits.  This week began with snow falling every day and the mercury slowly creeping into the teens and twenties.  Now it’s Friday and temperatures are in the mid thirties.  They are calling for 41 degrees on Sunday.  Yeah, a heat wave!

     So the snowmachines (what we call snowmobiles) are trudging around town, the tracks spinning up slush as the engines whine, straining to make any headway at all.  Kotlik is now buried in a foot of grainy chilled slurry.  Walking is a chore with every step sending up an icy splash in every direction.  There is no solid footing anywhere but on the boardwalk now, where the 4-wheeler snowplow has cleared down to the wood planks. 

     The ice on the river can’t last much longer.  Seventeen hours of sunlight a day is taking it’s toll on our frozen thoroughfare and breakup will be soon.  There’s already a good layer of water on the ice’s surface.  The sloughs around town have flowing water in them.  Thank goodness Hobart and I have less than a month remaining here.  Our days of aimless perigrinations are at an end because for the rest of our stay we’ll be stuck on the boardwalk unless we want to go slogging across the muddy tundra bog. 

     This year there has been ice on the Yukon since October.  Around here ice is about two feet thick in the center of the river.  This close to the open ocean the river level is affected by the tides so the surface of the ice moves up and down.  The movement is imperceptible but the difference between high and low is sometimes as much as three feet.  The surface of the river is a solid sheet of ice all the way across so somewhere something has to give as it rises and falls.

       The point of weakness is usually parallel to the bank several feet from the shore.  Long cracks, running along the river open in the ice, never more than an inch wide, as the thick center ice breaks from the thinner ice held fast to the land.  Water from below will seep up through the fissure and flood onto the surface then freeze, creating a new thin layer of ice.  Sometimes the surface of the new water will freeze but then the unfrozen water recedes back through the crack leaving a glassy thin ice layer suspended an inch above the more solid foundation layer.  Stepping on this feels and sounds like walking across a floor littered with fine crystal dishes. 

     On the coldest of days the water freezes before it gets to the surface and the cracks suture themselves pretty quickly.  Sometimes a crack will make a jagged dash across the center of the river.  In the cold of winter that’s nothing to worry about because the ice on both sides of the crack is still feet thick.  No chance of falling through. 

     During one of these tide changes I can lay on the river and listen to groans and creaks.  Sometimes there’s a snap.  It sound a little like the whale songs I’ve heard on television. 

 Red Sky at Night

     Me and Hobart’s pre-bedtime walk tonight started at around 10:30 and it was still about an hour before the sun would be touching the horizon.  The western sky was an impressive fiery yellow but the southern sky for some reason was a beautiful mix of reddish-orange-pink.  The redness of the sky was reflecting on the snowcaps of the Nulato Hills in the distance and sandwiched in between was a bruised dark purple streak of clouds.  The whole colorful display got me thinking where else I’ve ever seen colors like that.

       The first thing that came to mind was a ripe persimmon I’d seen growing on one of my father’s trees in his backyard.  Persimmons are a very beautiful fruit with an unfortunate name.  Then I thought of a religious pamphlet I received for a small donation from a Hari Krishna at an airport several years ago.  I just remember how colorful the pictures were in that magazine.  There was a chant inside that was supposed to wipe the dust from the mirror of your mind but I can’t remember how it went.  There is probably a good bit of dust on my mirror.  You don’t see Hari Krishnas much anymore.  They always used to hang out at airports.  I wonder where they all went?

      Another thing you don’t see at airports anymore is the coin-operated television.  Remember?  You sit down in one of those uncomfortable chairs with a TV attached, put in a few quarters and watch for 15 minutes.  I guess they went the way of the pay-toilet.  The last time I saw a pay-toilet was at South-of-the-Border on I-95 years ago.  What a bad idea, both the pay-toilet and South-of-the-Border. 

The last speck of sun is setting here but in Helsinki they are watching it rise.  Perspective!

    The Lap Game

 A festive crowd gathers on the river every night now.  It's been going on for the last two months, ever since it’s been light enough in the late afternoon.  They get out on the ice and play 'lap game'.  It seems like over half of the village is out there some nights.  They start small, a few people show up and start the game around 8pm and by 9 it's in full swing, with some times over forty people.  The sun doesn't set until around 10:30 now and at 11 it's still light enough to play.  Lap game is a hybrid of baseball, dodgeball and red rover.  There seems to be no limit to the number of players and it looks like the rules change on a whim.

     On their solitary island of civilization out here on the tundra the people of Kotlik get together for things like this the way a bunch of families in the South gathers for dinner on a Sunday after church.  There's lap game, Eskimo dances, basketball games, and bingo at the community hall.  There are no strangers here.  Everyone knows everyone else and their parents and grandparents.  Such is small town life but especially in a place so remote. 

     So the lap game goes on into the sunlit night and everyone out there knows they had better play while they can.  The 'break up' is coming soon when the river ice thins out and flows out to the Berring Sea.  When that happens the lap game field is gone and our freedom of movement will have melted away.  Restricted to the boardwalks, we'll find ourselves confined by the soggy tundra on one side and the river on the other.    No more fields of ice to play on.  No more striking out in any direction on foot or snowmobile to see what's over the next line of trees or to visit a nearby village.  Everyone will feel just a little more isolated and wait longingly for next Fall's freeze.

These are cool pictures of dirty snow at the end of the runway.

VILLAGE ENGLISH

     There is English and then there is village English.  Here in Kotlik and all of the villages on the Yukon Delta I have visited they speak a village English where syntax is a little jumbled from what we are used to and phrases have different meaning.

        Time has a new identity.  I’ve been asked “You always walk your dog?” by people when they see me walking around town with Hobart.  I want to reply that I do not always walk Hobart. I do other things at various times besides walk Hobart but at this minute I am walking a dog.  You see, “always” and “never” mean something different in village English.  ‘Always’ can mean ‘sometimes you do’, and ‘never’ can mean ‘sometimes you don’t’.  So in village English the phrase “You always sometimes never let us play games.”, makes perfect sense. 

    “ I need a this kind.”, “Do you have a this kind?”, “Get me a this kind”.  I hear this one all of the time.  Instead of the phrase “one of these”, in village English it’s “this kind”.  So you hold up a pencil and say “I need a this kind”.

     Pronouns are not what they seem here.  “We”, “she”, “he” isn’t always used in the traditional way.  I’ve been asked in class if “us are going to watch a movie”.  Or, “her isn’t here today because her is sick”. 

     Another common one is “Where you are going?” which is translated to mean “where are you going?”.  If something is lost you would politely ask “Where it is?”

     The one that has me puzzled the most is “try see”.  I can’t figure out where this one originated.  Where most people would say “Can you let me hold that?”, or “Can I see that?” the phrase here is “try see?”.  So if a friend is holding a basketball that you especially covet you might say to the friend “Try see?”.  And if he asks what you want you could point at the ball and say “this kind”.