On Hold

I was supposed to be on a plane headed to the East Coast when it happened. First it was a few deaths at a nursing home in Seattle. Then the emergence of some cases in New York. Then local hospitals filled to capacity. New clusters emerging every day. One state after another, including Alaska, shuttering its schools and directing teachers to work from home. The shelter-in-place order, which seemed radical in the moment, coming in California, then in New York, then in Illinois. Over the weekend we got our own such mandate up here in the Arctic.

The preceding several weeks had seen me managing job applications and interviews, some within education and some without, and I was preparing for easily the most important meeting of my life when an e-mail from the employer appeared on my smartphone screen. For the safety of the applicants, interviews had been postponed indefinitely, but everyone who had earned a slot would still retain it for when things returned to normal. Whenever that was.

I'd already taken leave from work for a trip that wasn't going to happen, so I called my boss, cancelled the time off, and enjoyed an unscheduled spring break in Aurora City, eating sushi and ordering coffee and watching free cable TV as the news from the outside world grew ever more ominous. More than once, I looked out from my top-floor hotel suite and wondered if the virus was already moving in the streets below me. Each day delivered a news item that managed to make me cry.

And when I returned to Point Goldlace, it wasn't to a regular work environment after all; it was to a two-week quarantine, under the terms of which I'm still housebound. I expected to resume my regular schedule on April 6, but today came word that we'd be permitted to perform our duties remotely, reporting to school perhaps once a week to print necessary items.

As to what the next couple of months of my life looks like, I honestly don't know. The dirty secret of education right now is that the actual amount of things we can do without students is limited, and all of us are essentially just putting together substitute plans. The work of an entire week takes me an hour or two, and after that "working from home" means a lot of Internet and a lot of reading. Is this supposed to be how we exist until the end of May? And what comes then? Do I fly home to a diseased East Coast? Do I visit family? Is that even safe? What does a summer look like without freedom?

I'm leaving Point Goldlace at the end of this school year, but haven't yet informed our district administration. It's another one of those things that's fallen by the wayside in light of everything falling by the wayside.

I hope you're all healthy and safe. And I hope it all comes out right.