by Jill Homer
One of her friends is going to bring it to my office tomorrow, along with the keys.
“So what should we do about tonight?”
“I don’t know. Did you find a campground?”
“Who needs a campground? We have a house. Let’s go back up there and see if Jen is home. Maybe she’ll let us in. If not, we can camp in the yard.”
I felt dubious about squatting at the cabin without legal documents, but the gray sky threatened rain and a roof was an inviting prospect. Back on Trail Court, we hadn’t even emerged from my car when I noticed a man with a long brown beard walking down the driveway.
“You two checking out Robin’s place?” he asked as approached us. The man was wearing a white T-shirt with orange vinyl rain pants draped loosely around his waist by black suspenders, and brown rubber boots. His hair was thin and stringy, his beard unruly, and he smiled in an exaggerated way that was both disarming and suspicious.
“Actually, we checked it out earlier,” Geoff said. “We just talked to Robin. We’re moving in tomorrow.”
“Oh, so you’re the new neighbors,” the man grinned wider. “I live next door. Name’s Mike.”
“The place with the horse?” I asked. Mike nodded.
“What do you do?” Geoff asked.
“I’m an oyster farmer in Halibut Cove, across the Bay,” Mike said. “You folks new to town?”
“Actually, we just got here today,” I said. “We’re moving from Idaho … well, he was in Utah.”
“Utah, huh?” Mike said. “You got work?”
“I’m starting work tomorrow at the Homer Tribune, one of the weekly newspapers in town,” I said. “I’m and editor, and reporter, too.”
“Tribune, yeah,” Mike said. “I advertise with them.” He turned to Geoff. “How bout you?”
“I sell stuff on eBay, bike racks, bike parts and other stuff,” Geoff said. “I’m thinking about looking for a side job in construction or something.”
Mike broke out his manic smile again. “Tell you what, I have a job for you! Ever work on an oyster farm?”
Geoff laughed. “Um, no. How do you farm oysters?”
“Tell you what, it’s easy,” Mike said. “Just put the spat on a rope, drop it in from the boat, come back, pull up the rope, and there you have it. I could use some help on my boat, cleaning gear and other stuff.”
“Do you go out for a few days at a time?” Geoff asked.
“Hell, no. I come back every night to see my wife. I like a warm bed. So do you want the job?”
Geoff shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
“Great,” Mike said. “I’m going back out again on Wednesday, early. ‘Bout four o’clock. I’ll come get you. Wear something warm. You two staying here now?”
“Not until tomorrow,” I said. “Robin’s friend is coming to drop off the keys at my office. We just wanted to check it out one more time.”
“So where are you staying tonight?” Mike asked.
Geoff and I both shrugged.
“Tell you what, you don’t need a key. I was in there last month helping with the remodel, and I’m pretty sure you can get in through that window,” Mike said, pointing to a kitchen window that was fifteen feet off the ground. “Let me go get my ladder. I’ll be right back.”
As Mike jogged down the driveway, I nudged Geoff. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to break into the house?” I whispered. “I mean, we technically haven’t rented the place yet.”
“Yeah, but we’re as good as renters,” Geoff said. “The landlady already said we could have the place.”
“We haven’t signed anything and we don’t have any keys. A verbal agreement isn’t going to cut it if the police show up.”
“Who’s going to call them? Mike?”
“True. Probably not him,” I said. “That guy is pretty weird. He doesn’t even know you and he offered you a job. We could be anyone, and he’s helping us break into his neighbor’s house. Are you going to take him up on the job offer?”
Geoff shrugged again. “Why not? I’ll go out with him once. Even if he never pays me, it sounds pretty fun, going out on a boat and pulling up oyster pots.”
I agreed. “I’m jealous, actually. I’d pay to do that.”
Mike returned with a fifteen-foot ladder and directed us to the side of the house.
“You’ll have to knock out the screen, but you should be able to slide in right there. I know it’s high, but this is the only window that opens above the basement.
The “basement” was actually just the lowest level of the cabin, with the separate apartment that was hidden by the front and back balconies. It also didn’t seem to contain any windows at all, as opposed to the upper level with its landscape windows that filled two walls.
“Looks tight,” I said as Mike propped the ladder against the house, lending perspective to the small window.
“I’ll check it out,” Geoff said. He climbed to the top rung of the ladder, pried open the sliding glass, and tapped on the screen until it fell to the floor. He reached inside for some sort of handhold and wedged himself through the narrow gap. Three or four anxious minutes passed before he greeted Mike and me at the front door.
“It’s nice in here,” he said. “There’s lot of space. The loft is smaller than I expected but there’s still plenty of room for a bedroom. But check it out, this place is awesome.”
Mike followed me inside and stood at the doorway as I surveyed the room. The top edge of the ceiling towered at least twenty feet over my head, and even in the waning daylight, the tall windows filled the room with light. Large trees surrounded the cabin, and the wooded back yard seemed to stretch all the way to the distant mountains. I had spent my adulthood living in small apartments, or crammed into a house with as many as nine other college students. I assumed I would have to work hard in cramped offices for years before I could branch out to a place of my own, without roommates or the ever-present noise of the city. Then Alaska abruptly landed in my path and offered this dream on a silver platter. At age twenty-six, I’d achieved the ultimate dirtbag dream: Inexpensive living, open space, plenty of outdoor activities nearby, and no crowds.
After Mike left, Geoff and I pulled a few bins from my car and spread our sleeping bags on the wood floor of the loft. “So what do you think?” I asked Geoff.
“This is great,” Geoff said. “I’m glad we jumped on it. I really doubt we’d find anything better.”
“What about Homer?” I asked. “Do you think you’ll like it here?”
“Sure,” Geoff said. “I mean, the mountains are a little far away, hard to reach from here at least. And it will probably be crazy touristy in the summer. We’re far from Anchorage, too, and it’s kind of going to suck to drive for five hours just to go to the airport. But yeah, I like the house. I like that guy Mike. I’m sure we’ll meet other interesting people. It’s definitely going to be a cool place to live.”
I smiled as we laid down. “Yeah, it’s going to be an adventure.” How far the adventure would take me from the world I knew, I couldn’t yet tell. But it already felt like a lifetime.
______
Homer Bound
September 12, 2005
This is Giant Iron Pterodactyl Man; I think of him as GITMo. He guards the trailhead for Homestead, an amazingly scenic cross-country trail system that begins just half a mile from my house. I walked by this rusty statue at least five times before I first noticed it. Is that a testament to GITMo’s flawless integration into his environment, or a telling symptom of already spending too much time in Homer? I suspect it might be the latter. Alaska attracts some strange people; strange people build strange things. It doesn’t take long before the topless mermaid statues and ten-foot burning baskets blend in like Starbucks in Seattle.
I’ve been thinking lately about how different this place is from the pla
ce I grew up. It’s not just GITMo and the topless mermaid. It’s not just the art patrons showing up at a $75-a-ticket gala in evening gowns and rubber boots, or the environmental art that appears on a nearly daily basis somewhere along the Spit. It’s not what Homer is ... but what it refuses to be.
I come from the perspective of Everytown, U.S.A., growing up in a sea of suburban housing peppered with strip malls and parking lots. And now I live in a seaside community in rural Alaska, in a town that has been in a three-year fight to keep Fred Meyer away. We have exactly two chain stores — Safeway and McDonalds, if you don’t count an Arby’s in a gas station — in a retail community of more than 5,000 people. And, if I’m not mistaken, those stores came in fighting for their spot, too. Part of me believes this is great. That this is the way America used to be — locals dominating the local market. Buy Alaska! Feed your neighbor! It’s the American Dream. But a large part of me is nostalgic for the K-marts and tract housing of my youth. Sometimes, it’s not about what you love, but about what you know.
*****
The Homer Tribune was located in the lower level of a small shopping center, below an organic food co-op and next door to the Homer Department of Motor Vehicles. The architectural style of the strip mall —with teal awnings and wood paneling that had been painted chocolate brown and brick red — was distinctly from the 1970s. This decade also apparently saw the most recent renovation of the building. Awnings sagged and paint was faded and cracked. Outside, a three-foot cement barricade featured a whimsical mural of seine fishermen netting dozens of brightly colored fish.
The Tribune office itself was a minimal storefront with a single glass door and two small windows. The interior wasn’t finished. Rough cement slabs formed the walls and a thin strip of detached brown carpet covered part of the concrete floor. A few cubical walls separated reporters’ desks from the rest of the high-ceilinged room, but for the most part it was a drafty, open floor plan. It wasn’t a newsroom; it was a news warehouse.
The receptionist stood up from her door-side desk and led me to a cluster of tables wedged into a corner five feet away. The tables were strewn with papers and five-year-old iMacs, and were occupied by the Homer Tribune news staff: one editor, one reporter, and one sports guy. All three swiveled their chairs and turned to face me at the same time.
They were younger than I expected — but then again, small-town weekly newspapers tend to employ fresh-out-of-college journalists with brighter ambitions and fewer demands. These newspapers especially needed employees who thought twelve dollars an hour with no overtime and no benefits was a perfectly reasonable wage.
A thirty-something man with a short brown beard and a surly look on his face pursed his lips in a half-smile. “That has to be the sports guy,” I thought. An attractive man with curly blond hair who was younger than me — early twenties — grinned through a set of perfect teeth. “Reporter,” I silently assessed. A woman with long strawberry auburn hair, freckles and expressive blue eyes blurted out, “Finally, you’re here!” —as though I had taken three years to reach Homer rather than three weeks.
“Hi Carey,” I said, nodding. “We made it, barely,” I said.
The woman stood up and reached out to hug me in the casual way one might greet an old friend. “We’ve been crazy this week and now we’re way behind. We publish the paper on Tuesdays and there’s still a lot to do. You know Quark right?” she said, referring to the Tribune’s page design software.
I nodded.
“Good, I need you to start putting together some pages. I’ll show you the folders where I put the edited stories. You can browse one of last week’s papers to get the gist of the design.”
She plopped me down in a dusty swivel chair next to an iMac and scrolled through the various file folders on the screen, describing each one with almost frantic urgency. I watched with a terrified sort of bemusement. So much for a training period or easing into the work. Life happens fast in Alaska.
“Let me know if you have any questions,” she concluded. “But give me about an hour, I’m trying to finish up an editorial.”
I nodded weakly.
“Oh, and I should tell you while I remember. Don’t make any plans for Wednesday night. I need you to go to a gallery opening. Watercolor painter. I’m busy, and galleries are your beat as the arts reporter.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Maybe I can just ask you real quickly, to explain the overall job description, just so I know what to expect.” In truth, I had asked very few questions during our phone interview three weeks earlier.
“Well, you’re the page designer, like we talked about, but Sean” — she pointed to the bearded guy — “designs the sports pages, so you don’t have to worry about that. And I’ll help on Tuesdays when we’re on deadline. I also need you to help with editing. You’ll report on local artists and events — you’ll see, there are a lot — and probably also write some feature stories. Oh, and on Tuesdays we’ll have you update the Web site. It’s not hard. Jane will show you how to do that.”
“Jane?”
Carey squinted, and I realized I’d just expressed an unexpected ignorance. “The publisher. She’s out right now, but she should be back this afternoon. She’s looking forward to meeting you. Eventually you might need to help build ads. We have an intern right now helping with that but she’s leaving to go back to school after Christmas.”
“Okay,” I said, drawing out the word as though it were a sentence.
“Oh, of course,” Carey said as though it hit her as an afterthought, “I should introduce you to everyone. This is Layton,” she said pointing to the young man. “He’s our news reporter. Layton’s new here as well. And Sean writes sports. He has about eight kids at home …”
“Five,” Sean interrupted in a monotone voice.
“So we let him do his thing and try not to annoy him much. Dawn over there is the office manager. Julie (she pointed to a woman with glasses and a brown pony tail at the farthest end of the room) is our ad salesperson. Our intern’s name is Emily; she’s a graphic design student. And Jane is the owner. She’s one of the more well-known entrepreneurs in town. She built the Tribune from the ground up and has kept it going for twelve years even though we’re competing with a corporate-funded paper. You know about the Homer News, right?”
“I did read their Web site,” I said. “And yesterday I noticed two different Homer newspapers on the newsstand. I’ve never seen competing community weeklies before.”
“Yeah, the Homer News comes out on Thursday. We come out on Wednesday. Most people in town seem to read both newspapers so we can hold our own, but there’s always healthy competition for breaking news. That’s actually going to be one of your jobs with the Web site, making sure we keep it updated.”
“What kind of breaking news do you have in Homer?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Carey said. “Plane crashes, drownings, bear maulings, unexplained shootings. This may be a small town but it’s still Alaska.”
“Right,” I said. “Sounds exciting.”
“So where are you staying right now?” Carey asked. “You need help finding an apartment?”
“Actually, weirdly, we already found a place. We just got in pretty late yesterday afternoon but we called about a cabin we saw in the classifieds and loved it, so we agreed to rent it. In fact, that landlady’s friend should be dropping off a key here anytime now.”
“Whereabouts?” Carey asked.
“Up on Diamond Ridge,” I said. “On the end of a road called Trail Court.”
“You’re joking!” Carey exclaimed. “I live on Trail Court. You must be at the place right next door. Robin’s place, right? Weird, I thought she already found renters. But that’s good. You’ll like it there. You have a good car, right?”
“No,” I said. “I have a crappy car. An old Geo Prism.”
“Well, you’re going to have t
o get something with four-wheel drive before winter,” she said. “We’re a thousand feet above town, so what falls as rain in Homer usually falls as snow on the ridge. There’s snow from October until May. Last year we had nearly three hundred inches over the season. You can be buried to your neck in snow. Lots of shoveling. You’ll need a better car.”
“Noted,” I said. “I brought my boyfriend with me as well. His name is Geoff. He lived in Palmer this summer and traveled all over Alaska. His car is worse than mine, a rusty ’89 Honda Civic.”
Carey laughed. “Well, good luck to you two. What does he do?”
“Right now, a little of everything and nothing. Sells stuff on eBay. Picks up odd jobs. He wanted to do construction here in town. Actually, the next-door neighbor Mike offered him a job as a sort of deckhand for his oyster farming boat.”
Carey narrowed her eyes. “I don’t really know Mike, but I’d maybe be a little cautious with him. He doesn’t always strike me as genuine. But he’s nice enough. He’ll probably help you dig your car out of the driveway when you inevitably get stuck.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Okay, we really need to work,” Carey said. “Just let me know if you need help with something. Good luck.”
I sat down and started scrolling through the bewildering maze of data. The blond reporter, Layton, wheeled his chair next to mine.
“Welcome to Homer,” he grinned through his perfect set of teeth. “Home to dreamers and misfits, even by Alaska standards.”
“Have you lived here long?” I asked.
“Just since May,” Layton said. “I lived in Kenai for a while. I worked at the Peninsula Clarion.”
“Really, the Clarion?” I said. That was the Kenai Peninsula’s daily newspaper, based in the town of 8,000 that was two hours north of Homer. “It’s not often that journalists move from dailies to weeklies, especially in the same region. What brought you to the Tribune?”
“I was fired,” he said. “Yeah, I was stupid. I got a little drunk. I crashed my car into a ditch. It was dumb, but that’s what it is.”