Being polite, walking that shifting line that is somewhere between standoffish and slightly weird, is a tricky business. When I was a teenager, I worked at the local gas station/convenience store for a while. My co-worker Rosetta often entertained the rest of us with stories. One time she told us about her nephew Shelley, who had left Powhatan for the bright lights of New York City. Shelley was in the city, yes, but he was still a country boy who had been taught to greet everyone with friendly courtesy. Even strangers. So there he was, walking down the crowded streets of New York, trying to say hello to everybody. Rosetta said, “that boy like to sprained his neck! Goin’ down that street noddin’ and sayin’ ‘How you do? How you do? How you do?’ to every single person, and not one a them even so much as looked at him!” I remember hoping, in my somewhat grandiose way, that Shelley would not surrender his outgoing nature to the cold streets of the city.

Do that google-earth-time-and-space thing, and find yourself in Aniak, Alaska with me, where I have come to do a stint of substitute teaching. Aniak is a community of about 500 people, and I have been advised that everybody waves, whether they know you or not. I’ve spent the last few days testing that hypothesis and have found it to be about quite true. Take this afternoon. I walked out into the snow, waving at everybody, decked out in my snow gear, 40-below boots, giant gloves and even giant-er fur hat, to take some pictures of the river. Aniak sits at the corner of the Kuskokwim and the Aniak Rivers, and right now (in mid-March) the rivers still act as ice roads. I walked over the dike (break-up brings some crazy flooding) and down by the river ice. I looked up and saw six snow machines coming off the river. They were zipping along single file, evenly spaced, and as they went by me, I waved at every one of them and every one of them waved back. It was a toss up whether I had time to put my hand down between greetings.

How you do, how you do, how you do?