As the snow piled up, we needed to figure out a way to keep our road and driveway plowed. Our neighbors, who lived in the only other house on the road, owned a plow truck, and we agreed to keep the road plowed in exchange for borrowing the truck to clear our driveway. Like us, the neighbors rented their place: a long, double-wide trailer fitted out with deck and shed. They had two young girls with white-blonde hair who dressed decidedly un-Alaskan in dresses and sandals. One of the daughters was named after a pop music star. They were from someplace else, and the girls’ father worked up north for the oil and gas companies: two weeks on, two weeks off. Their mother, a petite woman who wore slim jeans and bleached her hair blonde, stayed home. Often, when John and I came home from work, we found that she had already cleared the snow. She was tough; she could handle a disagreeable truck, a heavy plow blade, and a snow-covered road that dropped off on either side into a ditch. I was determined to master the plow truck until I got it stuck on the side of the driveway, and John suggested it would be okay if I gave up.
Each step toward becoming familiar with the life here shunted me another one back. While walking my students to the beach during recess, a man leaned out of the window of his rusty black truck and shouted at me: “You’re one of them outsiders, come up here and think you own it.” I was stunned. It was impossible to know exactly what he meant. Was it because I was a teacher in a place I knew so little about? Or because my students misbehaved along the road, roughhousing in the middle of the pavement, picking up trash and then chucking it into the grass? And once, when I asked a fisherman a simple question about his work, he responded, “You must not be from around here.” It was true, of course, but because I so wanted to belong, my face burned.
In this small coastal town, where tourists and seasonals flushed in and out with the weather, the length of time you’d spent in the community held more sway than what degree you had, how you made your money, or the size of your bank account or house. And everyone had been here longer than someone else. On Monday nights, I left the radio tuned to the city council meetings. Whether the discussions were about gravel mining, timber sales, or what the town should do with a small windfall of cash, citizens always prefaced their comments by saying how many years they’d lived in town.
But their short histories were nothing in comparison to the stories told by petroglyphs of people and marine mammals on rock outcroppings along the bay’s shore. The Kachemak Bay region had been inhabited for thousands of years. A handful of Native cultures (including Sugpiaq Alutiiq and Dena’ina Athabascan) made their home here—arriving by sea and by land to take advantage of the rich ocean resources and protected water. But by the time the Russians ventured into the bay in the late 1700s, hungry for new riches, few Native settlements remained. In a small Native village on the bay’s south shore, the Russians set up a trading post to ship pelts back to Russia. They distributed influenza and put up a church.
Across the bay from where the Russians set up shop, Homer began as a coal outpost. By the turn of the nineteenth century, American coal men mined the seams in the bluffs along the beach and laid a railroad from there to the tip of the Spit, where a deepwater anchorage allowed ships to dock at any tide. Gold seekers also landed among the clutter of buildings the coal miners had raised along the bay. Locals named the town after a swindler, Homer Pennock, who had lured a crew of optimistic lads north from as far away as Denver in search of gold. Although he assured the men otherwise, Pennock had never been to Alaska before. When they failed to find riches, most of the men took off farther north in search of gold, but Pennock returned to California.
Coal mining proceeded in fits and starts. The coal here was of a low quality and had a tendency to self-ignite, and it was expensive to ship to market. So, as with many frontier towns, the local economy changed numerous times after the arrival of the white man. Some Homer men turned to breeding wild foxes for fur, rearing them on the bay’s islands where they could be let loose to den and breed on their own.
Early settlers here found it easier to dock boats on the south shore of the bay than on our side. Short piers were built off the steep rocky beaches across the bay, providing an adequate draft of water regardless of the tide. In front of the house where John and I lived, and elsewhere along the north shore, mud flats extended far out into the bay, so landing here had to be scheduled for high tide. Once the water retreated, a vessel would be stranded on the flats until the sea returned twelve hours later. Industry sprang up, then, more readily on the south shore. Canneries were built to process salmon that ran up creeks and rivers across the bay, and herring salteries preserved and packed these oily fish, which spawned on the south shore. For years, Homer remained a desolate outpost served by larger communities across Kachemak Bay.
By 1915, new settlers from the states found that the land around Homer was ideal for homesteading. Native grasses grew thickly and could be scythed and fed to cattle in winter. The maritime climate was mild with adequate but not too much rainfall. Extensive stands of spruce provided timber for homebuilding, and good water seeped in springs and ran plentifully in streams. These new settlers kept cattle and horses and grew cool-weather crops—cabbage, potatoes, sturdy greens. At the head of the bay, wide grassy river flats provided excellent pasture. But living off the land wasn’t easy. The soil stayed cool well into spring, and rain often disrupted haying and harvesting seasons. The winter cycles of freeze and thaw wreaked havoc on plants. Few local markets existed for farm goods, and farmers were dependent on shipping companies based in Seattle or farther away to bring supplies and transport goods for sale. It was clear from the beginning: If you didn’t know the place well, know it intimately, you would starve or have to go somewhere else. This is what was important: frost dates, signs in the weather, where to find wild food, when and where the fish ran, how to stock up for the winter, what the tide was doing at all times, how to read the surface of the sea.
At the corner of one of the main intersections in town, an old log cabin sat empty on an unkempt lot. It was a relic from the homesteading days. The original owners had built it on an island off the south shore of the bay where they lived for a time. Then they took it apart, barged it to the north shore, put it back together again, and set up a small mercantile in a tiny, attached shed. Theirs was one of the first stores to sell goods in Homer that, until then, could only be purchased across the bay. Other remains of history were scattered around town too. You could drive by an old stick-framed Civil Aeronautics Administration building, constructed in the 1940s with an influx of wartime federal funds. Built for providing weather briefings and other information to pilots, it now stood, mostly forgotten, in a junkyard a few miles out of town. And homestead cabins scattered around town were in different degrees of abandonment and repossession; some were falling apart, while others had been dressed back up and were again in use. People remembered when you could dial just four digits to make a local call. These days, we had to dial the exchange, but since it was the same for everyone in town, we remembered each other’s phone numbers by only the last four digits.
John and I quickly befriended a family that had a modern sort of homestead fifteen miles out of town and six miles off of pavement. Taro and Cynthia lived in a yurt, a circular house with a diameter of twenty feet that they had bought as a kit and raised with the help of a few friends. They had no nearby neighbors. Their daughter Kaya, six, was one of John’s students, and their son Ghen, four, would be in a few years. Taro, a short, sturdy man whom people sometimes mistook for an Alaska Native, was from Japan. He fished during the summer and worked construction during the rest of the year. Cynthia, from upstate New York, did various jobs and took care of the kids. John and I admired their scrupulous resourcefulness: They filled their chest freezer with fish every summer, grew a garden, constructed their own outbuildings, and made do with no running water and very little space. And we admired their art. Cynthia made clay pots and dreamed of the day when they would build a studio for her and her husband to work i
n. Taro was a carver and built toys for the kids out of wood salvaged from construction sites and the beach. John and I often went to their place to ski or to share dinners of salmon and large bottles of red wine. Cynthia took us down to the spring where they filled water jugs. She showed us the bathtub Taro had carved out of a solid trunk of driftwood cedar. I was in awe of their handmade life.
On New Year’s Eve, John and I drove out to their place on a road white with new snow. It was the coldest night since we’d arrived in Alaska, well below zero. From the road, we skied down to their house under a sky cleanly pricked by stars. They had set lighted candles in small pockets dug into the snow, illuminating the way to the yurt. Inside, a dozen or so people sat on whatever they could find, drinking rhubarb wine and beer, sharing food. Most of the guests were neighbors who had skied over or traveled by snowmachine. Taro cut thick strips of raw flesh from a three-foot-long king salmon he had caught and frozen whole the previous summer. Cynthia spooned hot rice with fish and seaweed into bowls for the kids, while we ate sashimi. Wine and heat from the wood stove flushed our faces pink. A bonfire had been going in the snow-covered yard all day, long enough to melt a wide pit. When the yurt got too crowded, we went outside and stood around the fire with bottles of beer freezing in our hands.
The circular house sat on a snow-covered field that sloped down into a creek drainage. The place was surrounded by untrammeled, unbroken snow. Cynthia and the kids had built a wall of snow next to their house and illuminated it with candles. And they had pushed their boots through the snow in the yard, drawing swirling patterns in its surface. For these artists, snow was a canvas, the night sky a backdrop, and light was paint. At midnight, Taro struck a metal oil drum he’d hung from spruce posts as a gong, and the sound pulsed through the dry air into the valley below us. This, I thought, was an exquisitely beautiful life.
New Year’s ushered in the bulk of winter. The lip of the bay iced and cracked. Hoarfrost crept down the beach. Plows drove through town, pushing snow into chest-high ridges in the middle of the road. Later, after the roads had been cleared enough that cars could pass, a huge truck came to vacuum up the snow. A vacant lot on the edge of town became a mountain of dirty, discarded snow that would last long into spring. On cold mornings, with temperatures in the teens or below, John would go out in the dark to the sloping garage next to the house and plug in the car’s engine block heater. After tea and breakfast, the car would be warmed up enough so that it didn’t cough so darkly when it started.
It snowed for months, and the flakes endlessly erased themselves on the liquid surface of the bay. In February, avalanches up the highway closed the road to Anchorage for a week. This was the only road to anywhere, and cargo came into town by truck. Milk disappeared from grocery stores, then bread. Finally, a plane came to restock the store shelves. For days, people were stranded in town, in Anchorage, and at all points in between.
As the months went by, I learned signs. A snow sky was obvious: It was heavy and silent, a down comforter quietly shaking out its feathers. Dry days were colder, I learned. And on the coldest days, snow didn’t even bother to fall. I learned that Jupiter and Saturn traveled across the night sky paired. I could train a scope on Jupiter, the brighter point, and see four of its moons. I thought about Galileo, who had watched them four hundred years before. Windy days, I found, were the crows’ favorites. This was when they played. They hovered and danced, collected and dispersed. I learned how winter was measured: by whether the floatplane lake in town froze solid enough for stock car racing; by how many days of good, clean ice there were on the lake behind the airport for skating; by how often the power went out and for how long; by the number of feet of snow that accumulated in the hills.
In late winter, as patches of tired grass began to show through the snow, moose roved into our yard. A yearling decided he liked a spot next to the house where two exterior walls sheltered a triangle of grass. After spending the night there, the animal left behind a scattering of long white guard hairs on the flattened grass. Owls visited the yard too. A great gray owl perched at the top of a cottonwood, and magpies flew in to harass it. We watched the neighbors’ cat steal up a birch tree toward a perched bald eagle. As the cat got closer, the bird eyed it indifferently. The standoff ended when the eagle upped and flew away. Coyotes slinked across the mudflats in front of the house, and a decadently plumed male pheasant strutted across the yard to impress potential mates.
In the spring, winter’s carbonated sky went flat as the darkness leaked out of the night, making stars lose their luster. The sun crept out of the southern sky, arcing widely toward the north. We had been gaining five minutes of light each day and by late May, there were sixteen hours of daylight. There was a mania to this time; the days were getting so long that it seemed we had two days inside each one. After John and I came home from work, the sun shone for hours and we wanted only to be outdoors. Nights never fully darkened and sleeping felt irrelevant. That spring, as red tulips we hadn’t planted petticoated the house, ferns pushed their curled fiddleheads through last year’s dead growth. We picked them and panfried them in butter. Horsetails shot up in diminutive forests along the roadsides. Fields of chocolate lilies bloomed in cocoa-colored flowers, which drooped earthward and smelled of rot.
By this point, I had learned that there were two ways you could live here: the particular way of life this place afforded or the way you could live anywhere else. Even twenty miles out of town, some people lived with wall-to-wall carpeting, satellite dishes, and office jobs. For John and me, it seemed important to live in the unique way we could here. So we experimented with self-sufficiency. In the fall, we had made jars of rosehip butter, a sweet paste the color of rust, from the fruit on bushes that grew around the house. I couldn’t decide if I liked it, but I ate it anyway, spread onto whole wheat toast sliced from loaves I’d baked myself. This meal was sturdy and practical; at least, I thought, the vitamin C-laden hips would ward off scurvy. In the spring, we made a dark green concoction like pesto from the young shoots of stinging nettle that multiplied in a wet spot in the yard. We canned jars of clam chowder using clams we dug from the mudflats in front of our house, and we ate whatever wild thing we could: urchin roe, mussels that washed onto the beach in clumps, fireweed shoots, wild mushrooms. We planned a garden and started seeds next to the window.
For a week in May, sandpipers arrived by the tens of thousands; the bay was their stopover point to their nesting grounds in the north. Gulls and terns took over the taiga near the airport. This hummocky area of stunted spruce provided ample nest sites. Red-necked grebes built floating nests on the floatplane lake and put up with the engine noise. The cranes returned in a dramatic V, and for a day or so, this was all everyone talked about. A flock of feral pigeons loitered at the harbor looking urban and out of place. Salmon threw themselves up local streams. The spectacle of summer, I realized, had begun.
At this time of year, the chorus of birds was continuous. Although robins are known as morning birds, here they sang until well after midnight, and didn’t get up at dawn. John identified the melodies that began hours before we woke: the three-note calls of golden-crowned sparrows, the delicate fluting of hermit thrush, the incessant solos of kinglets. In the evenings, orange-flecked varied thrush sounded their referee whistle calls from the tops of spruce, and snipe, stocky birds with long bills, showed off in the sky: They circled and dove and let out a ghostly, ascending sound created by air rushing through their tail feathers. As John and I tended our garden starts, nothing seemed more important than growing food and learning the birds who made those calls.
4
PEOPLE’S LIVES
TENDER: n. A vessel attendant on other vessels, especially one that ferries supplies between ship and shore.
Tom Watkins’s cabin sat so far over the edge of the bluff it looked like it could tumble down to the beach any day. It was a tiny structure—fifteen by fifteen at best, with a low loft up steep, ladderlike stairs. A few skinny alders
seemed to be the only things that kept his bit of flat earth cut out of the edge of the bluff from sliding into the sea.
The view from Homer’s bluff was so seductive it inspired impractical and idealistic construction; the bay flushed out silver, turquoise, or deep blue—depending on the weather—into the mouth of Cook Inlet, and a range of opulent peaks, specked year-round by snow, strung across the horizon on the other side of the water. This vista lured people into building where they shouldn’t—in places where the bluff lost a foot of land per year as its face constantly eroded. The land slid out from beneath luxurious, glass-fronted retirement homes and steadily crept away from vacation cabins built on the edge.
I met Tom on an airplane when John and I were flying back to Alaska after our first trip away since we’d moved to Homer. He was in his early or mid-sixties, I estimated, and had a long face, pale blue eyes, short gray hair and a tidily trimmed gray mustache. He was tall, big-boned, and stiff, and joked about the uncomfortable seats. By the time we touched down in Anchorage, I had promised to show him how to use email on one of the two computers recently installed in the Homer library for the public. Tom wanted to communicate with his daughter, a lawyer in Arizona, but had never used computers before. In exchange, he said, “I cut fish out on the Spit. I’ll take care of you.” This meant free food.
Over the next months, I visited Tom from time to time at his cabin, which was barely a quarter mile from where the highway into town narrowed into the main thoroughfare. “No need to call,” he told me. “Just come by. I’m always home after dark.” It was the time when summer was rapidly becoming fall. Fireweed seed pods were twisting off along the roads, sending white fluff someplace else. A steep set of wooden stairs ran down the edge of the bluff to Tom’s house from the parking pad where his beige Cutlass waited until daylight. He was bowlegged and his knees were weak. He didn’t take the stairs after dark, especially not these days when the nights were cool enough to drop a slippery layer of frost on every surface. A couple of guys from the fish processing plant had built a handrail out of two-by-fours along the stairs, but that wasn’t going to be enough to keep him from falling.
Tide, Feather, Snow Page 5
