Sun Over Buckskin and Full-Contact Sledding

In the dark winter months, Holden only sees direct sunlight after the sun comes out from behind one mountain and before it ducks behind another. I can remember the weeks it spent only an hour traversing low across that sweep of Copper Basin. But today we celebrated seeing the sun climb so high it crested that first mountain -- Buckskin, at 7,756 ft. Mimosas for coffee break. (Unless you're a teacher. I'm still mad about that.)

Later in the afternoon we had a full-contact sledding match, a fierce sport not for the faint of heart. This can be played in a couple of different ways. First, everybody for themselves. Line up a dozen or so occupied sleds at the top of Chalet Hill, count down from three, and suddenly everybody is trying to make it down to where main street hits the bottom of the hill -- and everybody is trying to make sure YOU don't make it down. Sled fronts get shoved to one side and go careening with their occupants into a ditch; two sled pile-ups get hit by an as-yet-unhindered third and somebody goes flying; one person falls off their own sled and tackles another sledder to commandeer their vehicle. Yes, we consider this fun. One of the best kinds. The second way of playing is partners: two people to a sled. One steers, the other flips anybody who gets near them. Again, the object is to make it to the bottom of the hill, and that first, but often there's more honor in screwing up somebody else's day. Third way of playing: line up fewer sleds than there are people, back everyone up twenty feet and add one more level of fun and chaos.

All in all, a satisfying day.

Dragsholm Slot

"August, are you twelve yet?"

"Yes. No. No, not till July."

"Okay, so, one adult, one child, um... Some time over Spring Break." I typed in our information and selected March 2-3 from the electronic calendar. We were on a Danish website, trying to figure out how much it would cost to get a hostel. But not just any Danish hostel. Oh no no. The haunted Danish hostel.

The kids go through cycles on how they like to spend their recess. How much it costs to stay the night in a foreign country is a new one. For several weeks they crowded into the loft in the school library and sang a Vespers service together: the setting from 2007 by Will Chiles. They sang as much as they could remember, and hauled up copies of THE LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER Book 7 for "the readings." There have also been recesses spent up at the dining hall playing ping pong and foos-ball (I have never known how to spell that). And read-aloud is another popular activity: I've read them poetry, ghost stories, two-minute mysteries, Roald Dahl's "Boy: Tales of Childhood," and every story book I could find that was illustrated by Edward Gorey or Maurice Sendak.

This morning they took up their research projects: with topics ranging from Castles to Giraffes to Michelangelo to Fairies. (I got in trouble straight away for saying, "Well fairies don't exist, really." I can't believe I've sunk so far.) Castles was the topic that extended into recess. August and I spent class time seeing what books we could order from the region's Public Library (they'll send it to Holden by post, how cool is that?) and had moved on to see if we couldn't find any useful internet sources.

It's GOOGLE'S fault for lighting on a webpage with the name "Haunted Castles."

"Let's see what that's about," we said, almost at once.

The first story we read together was from Dragsholm Slot, a castle in Denmark (Slot = Danish for "castle"). It has three ghosts, apparently, one of them "The White Lady," a young girl bricked into a castle wall by her furious father, which seemed ridiculous and bad until they tried to install modern toilets in 1939 and ripped out a wall and found a skeleton in a white dress.

Loads of stories like this. Come recess, we split an orange and some Goldfish crackers and petitioned for our class field trip to be in Denmark. And as soon as we could we were back in the computer room.

Dragsholm Slot is now a privately owned hotel, and for me to stay there a night would cost about 1600 Danish Kronen (275 USD). Add August, and --

"Two kids."

"Three."

The rest of the elementary school was drifting in behind us, and suddenly we were trying to find out how much it would cost to put five children and myself up in this hotel. I grudgingly added another adult.

Then we went back to reading the ghost stories. Some were gruesome tales of dungeons and spikes and crimes of passion and prisoners gone mad. Then there was the other ghost that haunts Dragsholm Slot, "The Grey Lady," a girl who had been a maid at the castle and still roams the halls, routinely checking if all is in place. Some wanted editing to temper the ghastliness; others to liven things up a bit. But they always know when I'm lying or leaving things out.

"Go back and read it right."

Someone remind me, when I arrive at last in Denmark, searching the churchyards for Kierkegaard's grave, that I promised an eleven-year-old at Holden I would send him a postcard from this haunted castle.

Stop Day (or, "Real Holidays Just Get on my Nerves")

This Thursday past was declared a "stop day" at Holden Village. Stop Days happen every month or so and are precisely what they sound like: no one works. The mavericks don't shovel snow, the kitchen doesn't prepare meals. The only thing we do that remotely resembles our life in community is meet up for prayer early in the evening.

We coordinated this particular stop day because the village population was down to 60 people, almost all of them long-enough-term staff to have a sense of how to fend for themselves come meal time when the kitchen hasn't laid out a buffet. Sixty people, if you need an image, can be fed with fifteen pizzas. It's roughly the size of Valpo's Church Vocations Symposium, only locked away in the mountains.

The rationale behind a stop day is simple: we don't get regular holidays. We're a retreat center. The rest of the world gets a three-day weekend and spends it here, while we take care of the laundry and cleaning the bathroom and getting food on the table. Even the school doesn't get most holidays: when you have to be vacated from your classroom in time for summer Narnia programming to start, you don't build too many days-off-for-the-heck-of-it into your year. No Presidents' Day, no Columbus Day, not even a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. I go to work, and don't get mail, and the dining hall is crowded. No wonder real holidays make me cranky.

Alas, the school doesn't officially participate in Stop Days, either. Part of that is the business of not too many days-off-for-the-heck-of-it. The other part is that the last thing parents want to hear on Stop Day is they're back in charge of their own children. We compromised this last time around by declaring a half day and taking the elementary school on a hike to Lower Copper Basin. They had a good time of it; stopped to test out the bouncy fallen tree three quarters of the way up, built a fire when we got there, admired the frozen waterfalls in the distance. They didn't exactly go to school, and we didn't exactly turn them over to their parents. Altogether an agreeable holiday.

Story that doesn't end with me punching a mountain lion in the face.

So I decided to try running at Holden. I spent a long time thinking this was impossible, not to mention undesirable, it being winter and cold outside and moreover snowy and icy by turns. But as it happened, I strapped Yak-Trax onto my trainers and did just fine jogging down the road in the direction of Lucerne. I might have gone half a mile. Not much, but it was a beginning.

There are lots of things to think about on a walk (or a jog) in the woods by yourself. At Holden, though, before you get to thinking of any of them, you have to sort out what you're going to do just in case you meet a mountain lion.

Statistically, in this area of the Cascades, there's one such beastie every hundred square miles. That means there's likely one between the Village and Lucerne (there is; I've followed its tracks), another between the Village and Lyman Lake (haven't seen his tracks), and one more between Lyman and Image Lake (followed his tracks for a good long time -- bit unnerving).

The Saturday morning of my run, I did not see a mountain lion. No tracks, either. I did, however, work out that should I see one, my options are (1) look very, very big and loud and scary, (2) go for the knife I'd forgotten to bring (damn), (3) land a well-executed round-house kick, or, the classic defense, (4) punch it in the face. Then it was on to thinking about casting for the spring production.

Since that Saturday, God has remembered it's winter and dropped a few inches of snow on us. But I hope this wasn't my first and last run of the season. If any mountain lions get in on the action in the future, I'll let you know which defense works best.

The Weekend at Holden

I should just have out and done with it: I don't do very much on the weekends. Or rather, I don't get very much done. But this is good, and rather like the concept of "un-schooling" that someone explained to me a while back. (Yes, there is such a thing.) The "un-schooled" don't go to school, nor are they home-schooled: sort of an official form of truancy. Mom might show and tell a bit about math, but there's no set curriculum to be got through. And there's the crux: "because I wasn't doing anything," my friend explained, "I did a lot of things."

So the weekend. I spent Friday afternoon, once school let out, sorting the village's trash in Garbology duty -- a monthly commitment for staff at Holden. Green glass here, brown glass there, pop cans, tin cans, landfill, burnables, compost. Friday was my February day. Other community expectations include attendance at worship (daily), staff meetings (every other week), and weekly dish-team. And of course, whatever your job is. On Saturday I had dish-team, except I forgot. Then I remembered. Just a little late. Well, forty-five minutes late. Well. In the end I went.

I did my laundry. This meant washing it in cold water (we don't have enough hot water to give everyone a shower on any given day, much less to spend on clothes) and hanging it to air dry -- because we don't have enough power for clothes dryers. So think of me when you're taking hot showers and drying your clothes any old time you want. Think of me, too, when you're doing your laundry the day you run out of clean underwear. Air drying takes a bit long for that strategy; gone are such carefree days...

I've been knitting a hat with yarn my mom sent me, so I worked on that. A student taught me to cable, and now I'm making a strap for a bag on another set of needles. This is the pattern:

CO 17 st
R 1, 3, 5, 7: P1, K3, P9, K3, P1
R 2: K1, P3, C6F, K3, P3, K1
R 4: K1, P3, K9, P3, K1
R 6: K1, P3, K3, C6B, P3, K1
R 8: K1, P3, K9, P3, K1
Work Rs 1-8 to desired length.

Used to be gibberish to me, too. Then I moved to Holden.

Watched a movie in Koinonia Fireside Saturday night: LARS AND THE REAL GIRL. Highly, highly recommend it. And I read the last fifty pages of a book I'd set aside months ago, one of Bill Bryson's lovely travelogues.

Decided we'd tackle the imperfect tense in Spanish this week, and set dates for performances of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED) [March 28] and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST [June 5]. Helped one student memorize lines and received a letter from another with instructions not to open it for a year. I sealed it up and tacked it to my bedroom wall, where I plan on not losing it.

Church happened. (In fact it often does.) Saturday evening we sang Vespers '86, that service I called Holden Evening Prayer until I found out there were multiple settings of Evening Prayer original to Holden, best distinguished by year of composition. Vespers '86 is the one we call Candle Light at Valpo. Then Gather Matins ("pink book," again, in Valpo parlance) on Sunday morning, and mass in the evening, where, yes, yes, what you always suspected is true: "God be with you," is more commonly formulated than "The Lord be with you"; likewise, "Go in peace. Serve the living God!" instead of "Serve the Lord"; and "Creator, Christ and Spirit" instead of Father, Son and same. We use inclusive language in a way that has gotten out of hand in the past, cf. Soul Purpose's experience at the Village time before last. Also we sang ELW 859 instead of ELW 858 for our closing hymn. Both are called "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty," but the version we sang eliminates every other reference to "Lord," "him," "King of creation," etc. Sometimes that makes me sad, because we discard poetry I rather liked and disbelieve our own potential to teach our children prayer without teaching them there's a very large man in the sky. But I rather liked the replacement Sunday night when I found out they'd traded out the line, "Ponder anew what the Almighty can do/ if in his love he befriends you." If in his love he... what? I'd never known what to make of that. Now it's "infinite love here befriends you." So I am mollified.

Everyone is welcome at the table, and when we pray Jesus' prayer, it's not a specific version. The invitation, "Please use the form and words that are closest to your heart," is often heard as preface. I think that's nice. I think it means you could pray in German or Spanish or Greek if you wanted to, but in the end you just hear two English versions unfolding side by side. And like I said, I think it's nice. At Valpo we alternated between "Hallowed be thy" and "Hallowed is your," and I suppose I always had this feeling that change was being foisted upon us -- that we should just stick with the traditional formulation and not force the introduction of this contemporary "Save us from the time of trial" business. Hearing people respond to the "words closest to your heart" invitation with that "other" version was just an experience I needed to have, I guess.

Doctor Who: "Warriors of the Deep" (Ep. 131)

The year: 1984. I was still working on being born, but the venerable British sci-fi series "Doctor Who" was working on a Cold War commentary called "Warriors of the Deep." Here's the NetFlix summary:

With Earth locked in a nuclear stalemate, Dr. Who (Peter Davison) again faces the Silurians and the Sea Devils when the creatures attack an underwater military complex, intent on sparking a devastating war between nations in this four-part story. Meanwhile, enemy spies have infiltrated the base and pose a further threat. Can Dr. Who help the Navy battle the aquatic beasties and unravel a web of intrigue among the ranks of the military?

This is currently my favorite story of Peter Davison's Doctor (the Doctor's fifth regeneration). Not least because the Silurians have a great monster-pet to unleash called the Myrka, in production a cross between a Pantomime Horse and Godzilla. (Very deadly, but only when it can lumber close enough.) The other draw, of course, is that unsubtle "nuclear stalemate" business.

Set in 2084, the tale pits two unnamed power blocs against one another in a general sort of hostility that's gone on far too long, then blows the perspective wide open as a race of aquatic warriors decides man's time of ruling the earth has come to an end. The Silurians ruled the Earth long before humanity evolved, and persist in referring to humans as "ape-descended primitives." It's not clear why or when they went into hibernation at the bottom of the ocean, but they're certainly ready to be done with it. Their strategy? Not genocide, exactly. They move to take over the underwater sea base so that they can launch a proton missile or two and provoke Power Bloc Alpha's human enemy into starting a nuclear war: basically, let the humans kill themselves, then reclaim the earth and restore the Silurian race to its former glory. "And these human beings will die as they have lived," observes the Silurian leader, "in a sea of their own blood."

So that's why we all had that sinking feeling we shouldn't have been building bigger and bigger nuclear weapons, knew there was something we were forgetting... Silurians. Biding their time. Right. Incidentally, everyone in the episode (Silurians, Sea Devils, navy officers -- everyone but the Doctor and his two companions) ends up dead. The last shot is of the Doctor, tired, spent, announcing, "There should have been another way." Nice moral, aaaand -- cut to theme music and end credits!

Like The Butter Battle Book, except complete with sticky end. I love this show.

Letter from a Five-Year-Old

Olaf and I sat down this morning to work on writing. I thought we'd better ease into it. I wrote, "Hello, Olaf!" on his notebook, and he copied, "Hello Olaf" underneath. I wrote a sentence about Mac the Cat, a character whose story we know and love and read together when we feel like practicing that soft "a" sound, and he read it and then copied it underneath. Then he raised himself up a bit and whispered in my ear, "Chris is coming today."

Chris is Olaf's oldest brother, a few years out of college, married, and living outside Holden Village. But, as Olaf astutely pointed out, he's coming to visit today.

Shrewd Teaching Aide that I am, I looked down at Olaf and said, "Would you like to write a letter to Chris?"

So it began.

"Shall we start it, 'Dear Chris'?" I've gotten used to writing with Olaf; he's at a bit of a loss to tell a narrative himself, and often needs prompting to speak in full sentences.

"Yeah," he said.

"Dear Chris," I wrote, reading it aloud as I did.

"I wish I was out."

And I copied this down. He hadn't waited for me to prompt him; he hadn't waited for me to suggest what we might talk about first; he hadn't waited for anything, in fact, except for me to finish writing. And when I finished writing "out," reading aloud as I went along, Olaf said, "You've been out for a year."

So down this went as well. And I just want to point out, that according to this logic, if you're not at Holden, you're just on a really long "out".

"I'm in Kindergarten." He waited for me to catch up. "I'm almost in First Grade." I said it slowly and wrote it down. "You're coming back today." Then, "I forgot what I was doing." And, "I am writing." (No clue.) Long pause.

"Is that all you want to say?" I ventured.

"Yeah."

"How should we sign it? 'From Olaf'? 'Love, Olaf'?"

"Love, Olaf." I wrote it down.

We moved to a table and I got out the triple-lined paper (dotted line in the middle) for him to copy. We went one sentence at a time: I wrote, then he copied. Eventually he noticed that I persisted in ending my lines with a little dot, and he started copying these as well.

"Do you want to draw a picture?"

He did. He sketched in pencil an image of two people, one very much taller than the other: himself and Chris. It was raining in the picture. Chris was holding an umbrella over them.

"Do you want an envelope?"

He did. I showed him how to fold the pages so they would fit, and he asked me to seal it, and to address the front.

"What shall we put, 'To Chris, From Olaf'?" I was back to prompting.

"Yep. You write it."

I did. Until I got to Olaf. "Do you want to write your own name?"

He took the pencil, and I pushed the envelope over to him.

"How do you do 'Saint'?"

Olaf usually writes his name without the Saint, but a pack of J-termers from St. Olaf University had on sweat shirts that apparently taught him this was his full appellation.

"Um, it's an 'S' and then a 't'," I said, not knowing why I should discourage this.

We finished up and drew a stamp, and now we're just waiting for the bus. Olaf is smiling.

The Week at Holden

So I've done my kids the favor of getting them hooked on the current run of "Doctor Who," and they in turn have introduced me to their private obsessions, most notably a young adult series called "Ranger's Apprentice." That one's stuck; I'm still in queue for one of my students to finish Book 5 so I can knock it out in a day and a half. (Remember when books only took that long to read? They still do, if you read the right sort of books.) Just today, the village fifth grader offered me the first volume of "Guardians of GaHoole", a perhaps misguided attempt to extend an olive branch, as the book appears to chronicle the epic journey of some barn owls, but then it turns out the main owl's name is Soren, so, cool.

In other news, P.E. has consisted lately of floor hockey inside the Village Center, which, due to the season, is both unheated and unobstructed by pews. We're that low on power; floor hockey is played in full, bundle-up snow gear. The high school beat the mavericks and have named themselves the FloorLords. There's talk of knitting matching hats and jerseys, and yes, they're capable of that.

We're into China in World Geography, which means I get to spend next week digging out Mencius, Hsun Tzu and Chuang-tze (I'm reading The Tao of Pooh to get myself in the mood). After the triumph of Drama's One Act Night (featuring the last scene of Hamlet and David Ives' WORDS, WORDS, WORDS), I've got the kids working on Duet Monologues while I privately debate the feasibility of mounting two productions before I leave the Village: in the running are THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED), Oscar Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, and a heavily edited version of Stephen Adly Guirgis' THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT.

I also have more books checked out on my public library card for students than for myself, and when a student correctly identified person and number for a preterite verb in Spanish class I almost teared up.

We still can't use clothes dryers (not enough hydro-electric power to fuel them AND the dish washer AND the lights in Koinonia AND...). There's been no new snow in four days. The sun is out a little longer and a little longer each morning, and I've taken to spending those hours barefoot -- whether inside or, occasionally, out on the thirty inches of snow we do have. I'm not sure you can predict how that feels except you try it.