Thursday, October 25, 2007

Living My Life ; Moving Every Book ; Stalking Tides

Something personal:

We moved every book in the small tribal library where I've been volunteering, to incorporate what will be four new bookcases. They're creating a library in their computer lab/education director's office/traditional language classroom/afterschool program building. They got an IMLS grant and will be interviewing for a part-time one-year consultant to really help them create a library and train them to keep it going on their own. It's not what I imagined I wanted, but after saying I'd just help out until they got their real librarian, I decided to apply for the position. Don't know if I will get it since it's a plum opportunity and I am a newcomer to town. I try not to count on it. If this does not happen, I'll have to think about what else to do both about a partial income and about my apparent continuing need to recognize myself by my identity as a librarian.

Meanwhile, I turn up over there a few mornings a week, and am helping them build their database, rearrange all the bookcases (pointing and waving, taping markers on the floor, moving to and fro with armloads of books, having trainwrecks)(think small: maybe about 2000 volumes at the moment), make a shopping list for supplies, fantasize about the web page we should have though it's only 'we' if it becomes an actual Job, etc. My mom asks regularly in a chirpy expectant tone, "What's happening?" She means, have you made an army of new friends, and do you have a job yet. No and no. "Ma," I say to the telephone, "I'm living my life."

Went out to Neah Bay two days ago (after an epic morning of bookcase moving...) to get a recreation permit from the Makah tribe for the much anticipated day hike to Shi Shi Beach with M. a couple of weekends from now; and to go to the Makah Museum, an impulse left over from before I stopped reading Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula : Who We Are because it was just too sad. So I moved on to equally dismal reading about global warming (the really sloppy Under a Green Sky) and overlogging... Neah Bay is a very long way from anywhere, a two hour drive. The Makah Museum is stunning, and the Makah reservation on its remote cape is the true northwest corner of the country.

Today, back to Rialto Beach for the 9.3 foot high tide at noon. There will be no heavy surf, but still interested to see how much higher it is than last week's ecstatic 7.3 foot storm tide.

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