Anchorage Daily News

TUNUNAK -- "Please line up," I hear myself saying for what feels like the 15th time in 30 seconds. "Please line up." All around me, 50 third- through fifth-graders run, playing "not-it," arms outstretched, smacking one another with increasing ferocity. I walk over to a particularly hyper third-grader, touch his shoulder lightly and repeat, "Please line up."

He whips his head around and screams "No!" so loud and long I can see clearly that he does not have strep throat.

Despite his reticence, he does step into place in line -- for about 17 hundredths of a second. Then he tears around the far side of the gym, slipping and falling and rolling like a kid on fire before smacking another boy in the leg and scurrying away. For a few more minutes, the students scream and flail.

Slowly, as it does every day, a line forms. A few stragglers at the back persist with their game of slap tag. Boys at the front of the line lie flat on the filthy gym floor and arm-wrestle. The junior high and high school students march in orderly, grazing the carpeted wall with their shoulders as if unable to stand unsupported, and line up for their lunch. The elementary teachers scuffle in, cross their arms in front of their chests and wait for the students to form their line.

The high-schoolers scoot forward as the line advances. They look like a catatonic army marching to chow. I wonder if they ever get a full night's sleep.

As the elementary classes are walking out of the gym, one of the high school teachers and an aide come rushing in, squeezing past the elementary's back-of-the-line ne'er-do-wells.

"There's a house on fire."

"House fire."

They both stammer, their voices overlapping in the rush to get the words out.

Word spreads faster from kid to kid than the fire itself, and soon the entire gym knows what is going on outside. Despite my announcement that for the day, all students will have to stay inside, a few slip out the back door, climb the melting snowbank, wade through the puddle where the boardwalk is missing (we'll fix that this summer) and climb the ADA-certified ramp, handrails and all, to the front of the school.

"We asked you stay inside," I say as I usher the students back in the door. Still, two other employees are standing right at the rail as I flail my arms as if pushing the air behind the students to hurry them. "Let's go." Still, human curiosity is an incredibly strong force. I must admit, half my reason for following the students outside and escorting them back into the building was to catch a glimpse of the spectacle myself.

From the metal-grated porch the flames are tilted toward the ocean like the petals of some burning flower, leaning and licking for the sun. A plume of black smoke pillows in puffs from the roof rafters and carries out over the frozen Bering Sea.

As I walk back into the school, turning away additional gawkers and corralling them back to the gym, I think to myself, "And this is only lunchtime."

An hour later, I was draped in a white apron, a hair net digging into my forehead and my hand reaching into the bloody cavity of a newly thawed turkey. The house fire was beyond hope. No one was hurt. They let it burn to the ground. Despite the excitement of the afternoon, there was still much to be done. The next day is graduation, and this evening is dinner for the graduates and their families.

This year we are having a fairly large graduation, five students. So that means turkey for nearly 70 people. Food had to be ordered days in advance because you never know about the weather.

For a while it is just me alone in the kitchen, cutting lettuce, dicing carrots and beheading asparagus. My fingers curl around the knife in the old familiar way. My focus sticks to the edge of the knife. And the blade flies.

An hour whips by without me noticing. The first set of is browning when a teacher comes in with a trio of student helpers. They set about carving the bruised and moldy spots from the strawberries. In the gym, other staff members start rolling out the tables, laying the linens and setting the silver. Or, in other words, putting out the plastic, tablecloths and cutlery.

Still more helpers come as we near the appointed hour and the meal comes together: rare treats like fresh vegetables and fruit alongside the even rarer shrimp cocktail and salad with, as the seniors requested, lots of ranch dressing.

We work together to tray up the plates and serve dinner by candlelight in the gymnasium, the glass backboards of the ubiquitous hoops pushed flat to the wall but still looming above the diners.

It isn't until several hours later, after the pots and pans are scrubbed and laid out to dry, that we all finally head home. The sun is still an hour from setting into the icy ocean, but it is low enough to cast a golden sheen across the rotting ice still choking the shallow bay before our village.

Graduation is tomorrow, but for a moment I look back. I turn and look back on the rest of town; I can make out the new gap in the roofs where yesterday a house stood. I think I can make out a thin wisp of smoke rising from the gap.

R. Brett Stirling lives and writes in Tununak on Nelson Island, about 110 miles west of Bethel. He is principal of Paul T. Albert Memorial School.

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