Sixty-something, partly cloudy, with a light breeze. While this phrase could arguably be used to describe me, this time it is, in fact, a description of recent weather here in Craig, on the outskirts of the Southeast Alaskan rainforest. I am fond of saying that there are two kinds of weather in Craig: straight-down rain […]
Author: Evelyn J. Willburn
Lights out
How do you knock a person unconscious? Movies make it look so easy and convenient. I’ve actually lost consciousness twice that I can remember. One time, I was about twelve and my friends and I were playing a stupid and dangerous game. We called it Blackout. What you did was you breathed hard and fast […]
Armed and maybe dangerous
Alaska has a regulation that says a student who brings a gun to school must be suspended for a minimum of one year. While I was principal in Kake, Alaska ,there was at least one school board member who had missed that memo. I know this because one day he drove up to the elementary […]
In which Gretel gets a makeover
One Christmas my sisters and I got Sound of Music dolls. As the youngest, I got Gretel. When Gretel came out of the box, her hair was braided and coiled around her ears (think Princess Leia). My first order of business was to take her hair down to brush it—and that was the end of […]
Teeter totter
Stop tipping your chair. You’re going to fall. If you fall, you will disrupt class. If you’re going to tip your chair, could you at least keep it on two legs? One leg looks really dangerous. How do you keep it balanced like that? I’ve really never seen a kid keep a chair balanced on […]
You big bully!
There is, apparently, a large portion or our brains that thinks we still live in caves and chase gazelles with sharpened sticks. Such a paradox we are. I’ve heard it said that even depression serves, or rather did serve, a critical function in the run-and-hide period of our history. The rationale goes like this: the […]
The fourth state of matter
Weren’t we all taught in elementary school that there are three states of matter, solid, liquid and gas? It’s a nice neat concept for an elementary science lesson. You can demonstrate with a block of wood, a bottle of water, and a balloon. But along comes “plasma” to muck up the equation. First of all, […]
Fancy footwear
For a kid who spent at least 40% of the year barefoot, I sure set a store by my shoes. Scene: I’d been trying to be cool with some other kids, and we went to a shoe store in the mall to try on the platform sandals, some of which increased our height by at […]
Sunday morning
There is nothing in my life that has caused me greater ambivalence than religion. I was raised in a religious family, although we didn’t attend traditional church. Sometime before I was old enough to remember, my parents had a parting of the ways with the local Episcopal church and decided to instead join the Anglican […]
Golf, Southeast Alaska style
These two pictures represent Craig, Alaska’s answer to a driving range. We are crammed onto two tiny islands joined by man-made causeways (see the picture in my right-hand widget column), and there is no flat ground anywhere to be had. There was a time when I laughed at golf, declaring smugly that it couldn’t possibly […]