For some reason, summer vacation brings out so much ease of mind after nine months of intense mind work. If you have never been an educator, you can't believe how your mind works when you are working with students and people. I get so wired during the school year that I feel like I have no time to do anything after school.
Summer brings out the intended to-do things I fell behind in during the year. The snowmachine maintenance stuff, the house maintenance stuff and so on. It seems my time starts being regulated by the twice-daily tides. Living out in the coast of Alaska, the tide regulates when you can go out and do stuff. Low tide means clam digging, hunting for molted ducks because the ducks have no place to hide and if they try to go up to the shore, the mud exposes them.
Only on the incoming tide do most fish start swimming in to the rivers so it is the time to check the nets. The other part of low tide is it sometimes makes your boat high and dry so going anywhere is limited by the height of the water. The other factor, at least around Scammon Bay, is when the tide gets low, it gets too shallow to go to Black River unless you go out through the ocean below the sand islands. Then you will have no way to get into the Black River channel because the channel is blocked by sand bars.
So I have to be busy with things around the house or around the boat, or the fish rack or getting wood from the mountain side. But once the tasks are done, I start having to look for things to do. I am in the middle of finishing a book, but relaxation makes me lazy and start procrastinating. If you don't know what procrastinating means, it is putting off doing something till later.
I have a masterpiece facemask I have been intending to do and know exactly what it looks like and it already has a name, but I have not started it in five years. I am a pretty good carver but haven't done it since high school. I do make some survival things like spears and spear heads, sleds, etc., but those are things I need to get done. It's the extra things I need to get done that I just can't seem to make time for in the summer.
I will definitely do the things I need to do like herring fish, salmon fish, halibut fish, finish a boat cabin, and these are happening now. I just hope I get the other things done this summer.
Harley Sundown is an educator and a member of the Calista Corp. board of directors. He can be reached at hsundown@loweryukon.org.
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