Slana, AK

September 7, 2017
Population: 147
Venue: Slana School

I wrote an essay about this day, which was published in Alaska Humanities Forum’s “Forum” magazine:

I was in Slana for my last presentation before returning to Anchorage, nearly three weeks into the tour. Having given 23 presentations and with road fatigue taking its toll, I was growing grumpier by the day and almost wished that I had the beautiful fall day off to explore Wrangell-St. Elias instead. But I had scheduled my week of school visits in the Copper River School District specifically because the Slana School had caught my attention while researching Alaska. A K-12 school with 18 total students, a town population of 150, sitting on the border of a national park six times the size of Yellowstone. If the premise of the project was to put classical music to a “field test,” there was no better place than Slana.

“Is that the piano-ist?” I heard children shout out in the playground as we drove into the parking lot and hopped out of the van. I rolled the piano out of the van and into the school gymnasium as the lead teacher apologized for the “chaotic” day, since Xerox was also visiting that day. I watched as a Xerox man dropped off one small printer and leisurely drove away.

As the students rolled in to the gym, it felt no different from any other school visit, except that the young kids were rowdier and more unbridled. The older students helped the teachers corral them and settle down, and I went about my usual presentation with more or less the same response as in other schools. Halfway into the presentation, one student raised her hand and asked, “Can I try playing?” 

Whenever the student group was small enough, I had been encouraging curious students to come up in front of the group to play, so I obliged. As student after student came up, I was incredulous of the music that poured out of them - clearly some of them had gotten a hold of a keyboard and had figured their own way around them. One seemingly shy little boy played a pieced called “Raindrops,” intricate for being a beginner’s piece. I thought it was beautifully played but didn’t think much of it until at the end of my hour with the students, when he raised his hand to announce that he had learned Raindrops in a village from an adult who had taught him to play it for times when he was sad because he was being bullied at school, and the raindrops symbolized tears. “It’s meant to be played for just me privately - but I wanted to share it with you,” he told me. 

In the afternoon, Andrew and I visited the Wrangell-St. Elias Ranger Station, just down the road from the Slana School, and drove about 30 miles into the park on a dirt road that involved stream crossings (Good job, U-Haul van). The largest U.S. National Park by far, the sheer scale of this place was what I found most memorable and palpable. Although much of the park is only accessible by air, we enjoyed hiking the Skookum Volcano Trail, a deeply eroded volcanic system.