Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  “Oh,” I said, caught off guard by the fact Layton was willing to share this information with me when we didn’t even know each other.

  “What brings you to Alaska?” Layton asked.

  “Followed a boy,” I grinned, happy to have my own embarrassing piece of personal information to share. “Yeah, my boyfriend Geoff wanted to move here, and I just thought, why not? I lived in Idaho Falls before and it wasn’t exactly paradise. I’m looking forward to the great Alaska adventure.”

  “It is an adventure,” Layton grinned again. “Have you met the Russians yet?”

  “The Russians?”

  “The Old Believers. They’re Russian Orthodox followers who came to Alaska to escape communism in the Soviet Union. They live at the end of the road, only speak Russian and all drive huge trucks.”

  “I can’t say I’ve met any Russians yet,” I said. While picking up coffee at Safeway in the morning, I did see a couple who looked vaguely Amish. The man had a long beard and brimmed hat, and the woman was wearing a lacy cap and a homemade dress. They must have been Old Believers.

  “Oh, you will,” Layton said. “And the Kilchers, too. They’re a big homesteader family in town, one of the first. They’re a crazy bunch. Jewel is one of the granddaughters. She grew up here.”

  “The singer Jewel?”

  “Yeah,” Layton said. “But she snubbed Homer once a few years back and now people in town don’t like her, for the most part. They think she think she’s too famous to acknowledge her roots.”

  “Homer definitely seems like a quirky place,” I said.

  “You have no idea,” Layton said, and wheeled his chair back to his side of the desk cluster.

  After five hours of decoding the puzzle of the Homer Tribune’s layout and making what Carey deemed encouraging progress, I took a lunch break. I felt too anxious to eat, but needed fresh air to calm the throbbing pulse beneath my skull. I walked along Main Street, consciously breathing as slowly as possible. The salty breeze had a hint of sweetness from the decaying leaves already lining the gutters. Between buildings I caught glimpses of Kachemak Bay, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. The downtown area was typical of a small tourism town — seafood restaurants, sophisticated coffee shops, a tiny library, a large civic center, an organic diner called the Cosmic Kitchen, and an assortment of art galleries.

  Carey told me over the phone that Homer attracted a large population of artists, and people came from all over Alaska to buy art. I liked the idea of a community that supported the dream of creating art for a living, but didn’t quite believe it until I saw it for myself. In Homer, sculptors, painters, and photographers can vie for space in more than a dozen independent galleries. Journalists have two newspapers. Writers have a large library and two independent bookstores. Chefs have at least twenty restaurants that cater to tourists. Banks, law offices and corporate buildings were, by comparison, surprisingly absent from downtown Homer.

  I wondered to what extent the community really fostered a creative life, and how much of it was a facade. Economists have said that one way to measure a society’s wealth is how much it invests in its art. But modern American society, wealthy as it was, seemed to have little use for art. So much of what we call art has been farmed out to machines, regurgitated by entertainment capitalists, or mass-produced for the sole purpose of taking up space on walls. Even I was guilty of taking my childhood dream to create animated cartoons and write fiction, and turning it into a career that centered around basic page design, sitting through city council meetings, and writing police report roundups. And yet, creative energy still pulsed through my veins — a desire to capture the fleeting experience of life through images and stories. I had a feeling that this “Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea,” as some residents called Homer, had become a refuge for people like me — people who longed to surround themselves with wilderness and art, while still clinging to the comfort and security of modern routines.

  The divide between creativity and security seemed to be at the heart of Geoff’s and my disconnect as well. He wanted to spend his life in motion — a kind of creative wandering — while I wanted to find a single space where I could create my best version of life. Early in our relationship, we connected through outdoor adventure — spending weekends camping in the Utah desert or hiking in the mountains. Over the next few years, our pursuits became increasingly ambitious, beginning with a road trip across North America in 2001, carrying over to a three-week rafting trip along the Green River, then growing to an entire summer traveling through Alaska, followed by a 3,200-mile bicycle tour across the United States. When we moved together through the world, our hearts synchronized effortlessly and love came naturally.

  The passion we found amid the thrill of physical challenge and awe of nature didn’t weather well when we returned to home routines. I insisted on pursuing my journalism career while Geoff continued to embark on adventures without me. He didn’t understand my desire for domesticity and I didn’t appreciate his reluctance to make commitments. Still, we both shared passions that couldn’t be broken by mundane necessities, and an affection that had the power to trump individual ambitions. This move to Alaska seemed to provide an ideal compromise — a career and security for me, freedom to move and plenty of wilderness for Geoff, and the prospect of ongoing adventures for both of us, together.

  *****

  After Geoff picked me up that evening, we returned to our spacious cabin on Diamond Ridge. As we grabbed the last three bags that he hadn’t unloaded from the car already, I felt a rush of excitement about the nesting process. That entire house was a blank canvas, and we were going to fill it with the colors of our new life.

  The vacant interior seemed to grow larger every time I re-entered the room, with a peaked ceiling that was probably thirty feet high at its tallest point. It was no longer entirely empty. Next to scattered piles of my possessions, the room also was strewn with splintered lumber and panels of particle board. A blue tarp was spread across the floor, piled with two-by-fours that emitted the pungent aroma of furniture varnish.

  “Um, what have you been doing?” I asked Geoff as I stepped around the boards to grab a water bottle from the refrigerator, noting Geoff also purchased milk, cheese, bread, and a five-pound bag of spinach.

  “I’m making stuff,” Geoff said. “I took a trip to the dump today to drop off some garbage, and they had this big stack of wood. I strapped as much as I could on the roof rack and hauled it home. I have everything I need to make a bookshelf, a couple of side tables, and maybe even a kitchen table. Tomorrow I’m going to go scavenge some more pieces to build shelves for the shed.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty awesome. At that rate we won’t even need to go garage sale hunting this weekend.”

  “We still need a couch,” Geoff said. “Chairs, too, which I probably can’t build.”

  “And a bed,” I added, considering the prospect of spending more nights on the wood floor.

  “Yeah,” Geoff said. “So how did it go at work?”

  “Great,” I said. “They put me right to work and it was a little crazy. There are three other people in the newsroom, but everyone was so busy they hardly talked to me — even my boss, and that was mostly just to show me the gist of what needed to be done and to give me more work to do. It seems I came at a hectic time. Hopefully the job mellows out soon, but it was fun.”

  “Sounds stressful,” Geoff said. “Did you get the key?”

  “Oh yeah, one of Robin’s friends dropped it off today, along with the lease. There’s only one key.”

  “I’ll get another one made, but I doubt we’ll need it,” Geoff said. “This doesn’t really seem like the kind of neighborhood where you have to lock the doors. Plus, we don’t really have anything to steal.”

  “The bikes,” I offered.

  “Yeah, but even those aren’t all that nice. Do you even ride your bikes any more?
”

  “I sort of fell out of the habit in Idaho,” I said. “But I plan to ride more here. I’m going to bike commute to work sometimes, so hopefully I can stay in shape. I looked into gyms here and they’re crazy expensive. I’m going to miss that free membership I had in Idaho Falls.”

  “Yeah, you’re not going to be able to ride your bike in the winter.”

  I shrugged. “Guess not. From what I hear, the snow lasts from October to May up here. Oh, get this, my editor at work is our next-door neighbor.”

  “That’s cool,” Geoff said. “We’ll have to go up and say hi sometime.”

  Geoff had already hammered together one nightstand by the time I unpacked boxes of camping gear and clothing, and hung a slim row of T-shirts and sweaters in the closet. We cooked the last of our spaghetti for dinner and unpacked the small assortment of kitchen items — a few pots, bowls and plates, along with silverware that didn’t sell during my yard sale in Idaho Falls. This weekend we would travel north to Palmer to pick up Geoff’s car and the last of his belongings. We also hoped to tap a few garage sales for the cheapest versions of necessities we didn’t already own. My life was on a bullet train of change, but the simplicity of its forward motion gave me some comfort. Homemade furniture, a dedicated partner, and a clear sense of purpose were all I needed to be happy. And I felt happy, possibly happier than I had ever been.

  ______

  Transitions

  September 20, 2005

  My friend Monika in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sent me this picture today. She took this photo of Geoff and me in late August in the Salt River Range of western Wyoming. Several old friends converged from our various corners of the country (me, Idaho; Geoff, Alaska; Monika, New York; and Chris, Utah) in this remote forest along the Grays River to camp, hike and reminisce about life before dispersal.

  I enjoyed seeing the photo because it was taken just a few days before I received a job offer from Homer, Alaska. At the time I was heavily conflicted about the prospect of moving to Alaska. It was a vague plan Geoff had for a while. But after he left in the early summer, I grew more comfortable with my life in Idaho, and more leery of the unknown north. Employment was scarce, distances extreme and, if I suddenly found myself single, as my ex-boss in Idaho put it, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

  After the trip ended, Monika moved from New York to Michigan; Chris took a different job in Utah; and Geoff set down the final ultimatum — he was going back to Alaska, with or without me. That same day, I got the e-mail from my current employer — a job offer.

  “So how do you feel about living in a town called Homer?” the e-mail began.

  And my first thought was: Fine, really.

  Two weeks later, I returned from my last spin class, finished my last midnight shift at the copy desk, and hit Interstate 15. I had been so conflicted, but somehow this transition fell so perfectly into place that it was like merging onto a winding interchange, only to look over at the end and find you’re still parallel with the highway. Something like that ... but I think, now that I look at this photo, maybe I knew that all along.

  *****

  I started bestowing names on the neighborhood moose that lurked near the roadside as I pedaled my bike down Diamond Ridge Road. There was “Fed Moose,” a young male with knob antlers who would walk toward me every time I stopped to take his picture. “Buck” was a big old bull who would rush off the road and hide behind alder branches, as though twigs could mask his hulking body. “Bessie” was a cow moose with a sub-adult calf that was nearly her size. “Andy” was what I called the teenager because I didn’t know its gender. There were always groups of moose out on the muskeg that kept more natural distances from people, and a few more that had the gall to saunter down the paved streets of downtown Homer.

  Moose weren’t the only large wild animals to utilize the same spaces as Homer’s human residents. One afternoon in late September, Geoff saw a young grizzly bear crossing our back yard, close enough that he could see its blond fur rippling as it ran. When I expressed trepidation about leaving the house with a grizzly nearby, he said, “I wouldn’t worry. It was a small bear.”

  Another nonhuman subculture was the congregation of bald eagles along the Homer Spit, a five-mile-long sandy tongue that juts out from the mainland. Although eagles are abundant along Alaska’s coastline, they were especially drawn to the beachside home of a Homer resident named Jean Keene. Jean was a petite, 81-year-old woman with wild red curls, wire-rimmed glasses as large and round as her head, and an obsession with eagles. A former rodeo rider and professional cattle driver, she traveled all over the United States and eventually found her way to Alaska. She drove her motorhome to the End of the Road, parked at the Homer Spit Campground, and never left. While working for a seafood processing plant, Jean started saving fish scraps to throw to eagles on the beach. Word apparently got out. Soon dozens of eagles were congregating on the Spit, and then hundreds. The scraps weren’t enough to feed all of them, so Jean started buying whole chum salmon from the processing plant. When she could no longer afford it, she requested donations from tourists. Even as the hobby took a toll on her health and still-active employment at the plant, the octogenarian worked tirelessly to feed them all. Locals called her “The Eagle Lady” — an Alaskan version of a crazy cat lady.

  Photographers delighted in ready-made access to wild eagles, but locals soon grew weary of crowds of habituated raptors that stole fillets from halibut processors, screeched through the morning, and defecated on roofs and cars. Jean was a controversial figure in Homer, but harsh critics and even a few federal laws weren’t enough to sway her from the daily feedings. I enjoyed watching eagles fight over shredded salmon carcasses and swoop in from flag poles to snatch fish out of the surf. Still, even I found their presence vaguely unsettling. It just wasn’t natural for dozens of large birds of prey to crowd together on rooftops like they were chickadees. Often, a dozen white heads would turn in unison as I passed by their perch on buildings that were shuttered for the winter. This time of year, the Homer Spit was eerily reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock film.

  It didn’t help that a number of creepy characters populated the spit. Besides Jean, there was a transient population of vagabonds and homeless people that locals referred to as “spit rats.” Other semi-permanent residents included a group of anywhere from one to five men — it was always hard to determine the actual number of live-ins — who occupied a derelict ship that was beached a half mile north of the harbor. Complete with broken masts and life rafts hanging from the bow, the wooden ship was draped in ragged curtains and littered with trash. Surrounding the ship were several smaller beached fishing boats, as well as scrap wood sheds. Someone had erected a life-size Styrofoam castle tower — a prop from a past production of the local theater. We called this place “the pirate ship.” I often spotted men milling around outside, carrying garbage bags and sometimes, if it was raining, wearing garbage bags. I had no idea what the men did for a living, or why they resided in a leaky old boat. From the outside, their makeshift shelter had a creative if creepy aesthetic, as though it were deliberately designed to evoke a broken seafaring dream. How else could one explain the frayed ropes strung across the masts, or the hundreds of colorful floats strewn about the property? I was intrigued by the structure, but feared its occupants and never lingered long enough to explore.

  There was also the Salty Dawg, a seedy bar that had become a popular tourist attraction. The single-room log cabin was one of the first buildings in Homer, dating back to 1897. The structure served as everything from a post office to a railroad station to a school house. A local businessman purchased it in the 1950s and began operating the cabin as a bar, moving it from the mainland to the Homer Spit shortly after the 1964 earthquake. He erected a fake lighthouse next to the cabin to hide a water tank, thereby creating one of the most recognizable buildings in Alaska. I walked inside only once, just long enough to
take in the musty atmosphere and observe brown water dripping from a few of the hundreds of dollar bills stapled to the walls and ceiling. The bartender just grimaced and I ducked out before he could bark at me to order something or leave.

  The Homer Spit had its ritzy side, too. There was the Land’s End resort, where Geoff and I once devoured eighty-dollar, five-course meals on the Homer Tribune’s dime. The Spit was home to most of Homer’s halibut fishing outfitters, a few art galleries and restaurants, and the Pier One community theater — a bright red building that was a favorite perch of Jean’s eagles and also host to quality plays in the summer. During the summer, the Spit was constantly bustling with tourists who visited a number of art galleries, restaurants, and fishing outfitters along the boardwalk. But by late September, harbor dwellers, land pirates and long-term tent campers took over as the prominent population.

  After two weeks residency I’d become a near-full-time bike commuter. I often took the long way home from the office by veering onto the paved bike path along the Homer Spit and pedaling ten miles to the end and back. A stiff breeze consistently blew from the west, and seagulls hovered almost motionless in the wind. I liked to stop at the farthest point on the beach and look across the bay to the Kenai Mountains. A salty film covered my lips, but there was always a sweetness to the air. Pedaling out the Spit was my way of relaxing after work. Wind and waves roared with a soothing intensity, and I understood why self-help gurus used ocean soundtracks on meditation tapes. As I pedaled away, I’d concentrate on the rhythm of my bicycle, emptying my thoughts to the soothing hum of tires on pavement.

  My new job was proving to be consistently stressful — the deadline pressure of publication day was crushing, and my list of duties seemed to compound almost daily. It wasn’t unusual to attend a gallery opening or play production late into the evening, then wake up early the next morning to piece together layouts, edit Carey’s and Layton’s reports, write my own articles, “put the paper to bed,” update the Web site and online classifieds section, and submit my feature proposals for the following week. The publisher, Jane, put me on ad design duty and had me teach the intern, Emily, how to use the company’s software even though I was the newest person on staff. Carey was sympathetic but had a massive workload of her own. Jane’s authoritarian management style had her assigning blame for mistakes rather than rewarding success, and all of us walked that tenuous tightrope between camaraderie and hostility.