Norovirus hits North Haven

With 15 students out--nearly a quarter of our population--and children who say even their parents are sick, we are running scared from "the Puke." One of the second graders came to me at recess to tell me that her dad is ill. "My daddy's sick," she reported. "What does he have?" I asked. "The Puke," she replied, adding that her brother had had it the day before.

Ugh.

For those who want to know more about this horrid creature--is a virus actually alive?--and vague hope for a vaccine, Scientific American tells us it can live in well water for years. Google trends shows that it hit hard right after Christmas and again last week and, depending on where you live, might be on the rise again.

All I can say is, wash your hands like mad and if you or your family gets it, stay the heck home for at least three days after you start to feel better. That's not me talking, that's the fracking CDC.

Good luck.

Islands Apart

To start this column, I first wrote, “Having never taught on an island...,” and that did not seem completely right. I thought for a moment and suddenly it dawned that my first teaching job was actually on an island. Apparently, the fact that it was an island with more than 20 bridges and countless car and rail tunnels linking it to the mainland, and a population of several million people confused me briefly. Manhattan’s George Washington High School, where I student taught before working as a long term substitute, sits high on a hill at the corner of 192nd Street and Audubon Avenue, overlooking the Harlem River and the Bronx. In 1776, the British chased General Washington’s army from nearby Fort Washington across the Hudson to New Jersey a rout that later led to the Battle of Trenton and eventually to that famous ferrying of his army across the Delaware.

In 1982 most of the 2000 students were either first or second generation Americans from the Dominican Republic. I could buy sweet milky Cuban coffee in any of eight bodegas between the subway exit and the metal-detector bedecked school entrance. In the school’s heyday luminaries like Maria Callas and Henry Kissinger earned their diplomas there. By my time there a general malaise, probably due to decades of fiscal neglect, prevailed. Historic WPA murals damaged in riots during the 60s and 70s faced their rooms with scarred faces. When I started my student teaching in late winter, the school had recently run out of lined paper and none would be provided again until September.

That a piece of historic American art marred by urban strife could be ignored for decades because of a lack of funding, or that a pre-computer age high school could run out of paper in the biggest city in America calls into sharp relief the differences between these islands and their schools. Here at NHCS, events like Spirit Week build the ties that bind us, connect the elementary children with the older kids, the teachers to students they may not have in class, teachers to other teachers, and all of us to the ideal of community education. We had no such goals on that larger island; keeping the kids off the streets sometimes seemed our sole objective and we felt as if we accomplished something when our pupils showed up.

As Spirit Week, an almost entirely student-organized series of events, unfolded last month, I marveled at the way children encouraged one another through creative, athletic, nourishing, even silly exercises. T-shirt painting and an egg-drop competition allowed us all to stretch our creativity a little; a hungie-gungie lunch provided delicious comfort food; a relay race gave the basketball geniuses a chance to showboat and the rest of us to be supported for our, at least in my case, somewhat less than stellar attempts.

According to NHCS Student Council President Leta Hallowell, Spirit Week coincidentally bumped up against the school’s traditional Gingerbread House Competition. In an apparently dependable part of this tradition, the faculty’s tropical-themed gingerbread house failed to prevail. This is just one sweet occasion created by Librarian Kate Quinn. Neither my last island school nor any school since has employed anyone in the role Kate has created at this school. As most readers must know, Kate delivers a tray of treats to both the faculty and the high school every Thursday. I will remember one of these concoctions, replete with butter, poppy seeds, and just the right amount of jam, as Heaven in a Cookie.

This month we had a mini-Spirit Week with some impromptu Homecoming events to mark the first home basketball games set to commence Friday the 13th. Meatball submarine sandwiches Thursday and basketball shooting contests and a round of Captain’s Coming--a nautical and more sophisticated version of Simon Says on Friday put the whole school in the mood to support our teams in Friday’s games.

True to its reputation, Friday the 13th proved less than lucky for the Hawks as lousy roads in the Bar Harbor area kept Acadia Christian closed and their basketball players leashed. When the home season finally began Monday, the standing-room only crowd saw our young teams demonstrate enviable tenacity and heart against Jackman’s strong, mature Forest Hills teams. Though the visitors won both the boys’ and girls’ games, North Haven spectators could see the teams offer up grace, speed, elegance and sportsmanship.

As freshman Hawk Megan Goodell played the national anthem on her flute to open the game Monday, I could not help but think of the tens of thousands of high school players and spectators hearing that song throughout the country. As I listened, I thanked whatever invisible workings of the universe allow North Haven Community School to offer its unique environment and education to its children, and embody community so thoroughly.



(This column was also submitted to the North Haven News.)

And Everything is Made New Again

"The novelty will wear off." That's what one of my young coworkers said the other afternoon. She had seen my eyes widen at the blue sky and the bluer ocean, punctuated by what the Irish call white horses, and Americans more banally call whitecaps, racing the breeze while we plowed across Penobscot Bay from Rockland to North Haven Island, my home as of about a month ago. 

Since then I've been wondering whether it is the novelty that has filled my heart since my interview and hiring at the North Haven Community School late this summer. I want to imagine she is wrong. I want to believe that the border between my home and the rest of the world will always be tangible, porous, measurable, palpable, and wet. 

Today our principal, Barney, said we have to, "get out of here." Encouraging us to avoid the comforts of complacency, he said that as soon as he began to feel that getting off the island was too much trouble or not worth the effort, it was a sign he needed to leave, and soon. I wonder when I should tell him that ship has sailed. My ultimate goal is to see how long I can stay without leaving, and I have been thwarted in that effort by everything from a hurricane to an island wedding.

Hurricane Irene took me to Harridan Central in Alna to close the cellar windows, and forced my hand regarding my horse Sami's winter arrangements. She now resides at the Taj Mahal of horsey homes, Whitefield's Acorn Hill Farm. There, she can claim blonde bombshell status while mingling with the elite--the tall, black, elegant Friesians farm owner Jennifer Grady raises and shows.

My island landlords had asked me back in August whether I would mind relinquishing my winter rental for one weekend in September as one of the island girls was marrying a summering boy, some 350 people had been invited for the wedding and their house was needed for the invasion.  If I had known it would be the most beautiful weekend of the year, I might have thought twice. I thought wistfully about the bride, though, imagining that she might find a minute or two to notice the good fortune of a warm, dry, sunny wedding day.

As for the expedition, well, it's an actual expedition into Maine's North Woods, replete with actual wilderness. I haven't encountered actual wilderness without lots of actual contact with modernity--so I guess that keeps it from being actual wilderness--since I was about 12, and I don't want to say how long ago that was. And we are canoeing. Canoeing the West Branch of the Penobscot River up near the Canadian border. When I told my dearest dear Stan that the expedition took us into the wilds, he scoffed. "Do you know how many people are on that river every summer? Do you know?" he asked. "250,000," he answered, harrumphing. I told him the itinerary, starting with, "We put in at Old Roll Dam." He consulted his iPad for a moment, then said, "Hmm. That's actual wilderness."

O.k., so it is novel to teach at a school of some 60 children, k-12. It is novel to start the school year with a trip down an ancient, storied river with a boatload of teenagers. It is novel to ride a ferry 12 miles across a bay to get home from a shopping trip or the bank. When and if the novelty does wear off, I would be surprised if some other novelty failed to replace it, though.

The neighbor's giant horse chestnut's leaves should drop in November, and my line of sight from the front porch to the thoroughfare will include the ferry. That will be new. In December, I will likely need coaching about how to manage my car without posted rules about the village's side street parking protocol. That will be new, though arguably not that fun. By February, I will want to know the finer points of the school's Knowledge Fair, and will look to my students and fellow teachers for ways to make it rich, beautiful, and informative. That will be new.

Suddenly, I am reminded of why I love teaching and why I feel grateful every day to the fates that brought me here. Everything is new. Every year. Every day.