Every so often, a student appears in my classroom and I do not have a desk for them. There is no warning. No furniture advance team. Just a kid standing in the doorway holding a schedule, looking at me with the touching assumption that I am the adult and therefore have planned for this. This is flattering. Yesterday I had 31 students and 31 desks, which for several hours suggested I knew what I was doing. Today I have 32 students. So I start looking. Maybe there is a desk in the hall. Maybe someone down the corridor has one buried under a printer that stopped working during the first Obama administration. Maybe there is something in storage behind six boxes of textbooks and a piece of audiovisual equipment nobody can identify but everyone agrees should not be touched. Eventually, something turns up. It may wobble. It may have three generations of initials carved into it. It may be a table. Fine. A folded piece of cardboard goes under the short leg, the kid sits down and class begins. Teaching includes a fair amount of this. Not enough desks. Not enough pencils. Not enough time. Occasionally not enough copies because I counted wrong, which seems unfair considering how many years I spent being told math would be important. You find something. You make room. The bell rings. I thought about this when I read that Utah’s 2034 Olympic organizers are working to secure 24,000 hotel rooms. Twenty-four thousand. Somewhere there is a spreadsheet that should probably have its own ZIP code. Athletes will need rooms. Coaches will need rooms. Media will need rooms. Officials and sponsors and people wearing credentials whose exact Olympic function I will never understand will need rooms. Of course they will. They are coming. They need somewhere to sleep. And eight years ahead of time, people are working on it. I admire this kind of preparation. I am regularly surprised by the need to make dinner. Still, I kept thinking about the number. Twenty-four thousand places for people who are not here yet. Park City spends a lot of time thinking about where people will stay. Visitors, anyway. The other conversations are quieter. Someone’s landlord is selling. Someone’s rent went up. Someone found a place in Heber. Someone is moving to Kamas. Someone has begun saying “45 minutes isn’t that bad” in the hopeful tone usually reserved for a strange noise coming from the transmission. There is usually some math. Rent plus gas. Mortgage plus child care. Paycheck minus everything. Nobody says, “We are currently experiencing an affordable-housing crisis.” They say, “Do you know anybody renting a basement?” Or, “We might stay one more year.” Or, “I think I can do the drive.” Then somebody asks how your kids are. The roads are less subtle. Every morning, cars pour toward Park City. Every afternoon, a great many of them leave again. Inside are people who have spent the day teaching children, cleaning hotel rooms, preparing food, caring for patients, repairing buildings, running lifts, plowing roads and doing all the other work required to keep a mountain town functioning. Then they drive home. Almost always to another town. This barely sounds unusual anymore. Works in Park City. Lives in Heber. Sure. Kamas. Makes sense. Salt Lake Valley. That’s a haul. Forty-five minutes each way? Could be worse. It is remarkable what can become normal if you say it often enough. Park City, meanwhile, is excellent at figuring out what to do with people who come here. We feed them. We put them in rooms. We put them on buses. We rent them skis. We point them toward Main Street. We handle Sundance crowds, holiday weekends and powder days. We survive Saturdays at the grocery store, though some of us make poor tactical decisions around 5 p.m. The Olympics will be bigger. More people. More buses. More radios. More matching jackets. I am looking forward to it. I want the flags and the cowbells. I want kids to see athletes from all over the world walking down Main Street. I want to watch the sports I understand and several others where I nod thoughtfully while having no idea why somebody just lost four-tenths of a point. And I expect we will find the rooms. All 24,000 of them. We have eight years. There are committees. There are spreadsheets. There are adults involved who, unlike me with the 32nd student, appear to know people are coming. In my classroom, there is always a moment when I look around and think there is absolutely nowhere else to put a desk. Then I check next door. Someone moves a printer. I look in storage. There it is. By the time the bell rings, the kid is sitting down. In 2034, people from all over the world will arrive in Park City, and I expect we will have found their 24,000 rooms. Tomorrow morning, the cars will start coming up the highway again. And somewhere, someone who works here will hear about a basement apartment that might be opening up. They’ll probably call from the car. Heather Bryant is a Park City resident, writer, longtime educator and mother of three. She writes educational curriculum and essays on parenting, conservation and the importance of place. The post There’s always another desk appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less