Homer, Alaska: The Town With Spit

Day Sixty

The town of Homer is a homey sort of place that sits towards the south end of the Kenai Peninsula.  I think of it as the town with spit.  A long spit of land sticks out from main part of town into Kachemak Bay.  The spit is loaded with tourist shops, charter boat offices, a boat harbor and about a thousand RVs.

Our RV is not one of them.  We are staying at Anchor Point, about 14 miles north of Homer.  Kyllonen RV park is a small place with a great view and an espresso shop.  My kind of place.  The nice lady who owns it put us on the bluff overlooking the ocean and an active volcano on the other side of the Cook Inlet.  They thoughtfully put the hookups on the wrong side so we could park facing the ocean instead of backing in.  Our motor home has its view out the front.  Anchor Point, by the way, has the most westerly highway in America.  Sorry, Kauai, you folks are easterners to us. Or maybe you just don’t have a highway.

The volcano we see out our front window is called Redoubt.  I have no doubt that it is perfectly safe.  It hasn’t erupted since way back in…lessee…2009.  We had experienced a 4.6 scale quake last week while in Soldotna, but didn’t notice.  This area is so geologically active, they got hundreds of aftershocks. We didn’t notice those, either. Marsha points out that 4.6 is the same size earthquake that hit her hometown of Logan, Utah back in 1962.  It scattered bricks from the front walls of business out across Main Street. That was the very day I arrived in Logan for college. We wondered at the time what quaint Mormon custom required scattering bricks out in the street. Now I know.

But back to Alaska: Just to the left of Redoubt there is another volcano, even bigger (photo at right).  It is called Mount Iliamna, which is an Indian word meaning “Dang, that’s a big volcano.” [See my explanation of translating Indian names in our blog on Denali].  Iliamna is straight across the straights from Anchor Point and has a summit over 10,000 feet high. It does frequent earthquakes but no eruptions. We hope.

Thursday, the morning after we were here, our neighbor and friend Jack Stayton (I’ve mentioned Jack and Gayle before; we first met them in Dawson, Yukon) called my cell to tell me there was a bull moose in a pond down the bluff in front of us. Sure enough, it was a moose.

The night before, we had driven down the lane to the ocean and saw a bald eagle take some food away from a flock of seagulls.  Then another bald eagle tried to steal the food from him in mid-air and the first eagle dropped it into the top of a tree.  Life is complicated for eagles, apparently. And for trees, as well.  I’m sure they are saying something like, “Look out!  Here come the eagles to dump more stinky fish on us.”

The next day Jack and I put on our waders, grabbed our fly rods and hiked across the meadow to the river to fish.  The meadow had been a fresh water bay a week or so ago, so with all that water the fireweed had already grown taller than we are.  We needed a machete to get through it (below).

We each caught one Dolly Varden.  It was probably the same fish caught twice.  It was tiny. Jack said that the day before people were catching king salmon in the same hole.  We got guppies.  Didn’t the same thing happen on the upper Kenai? Well, no. A three-pound fish is not a guppy. That's Jack below.

That night we grilled half of a salmon I had caught the day before. Marsha had found a salmon rub recipe in a tourist publication and we rubbed them and tossed those puppies on our gas infrared grill.  That was the best salmon I’ve ever eaten.  And certainly the freshest.  So that must be the key to the flavor. That and undercooking it.  This is sushi-grade fish.  We’ve seen people eat it raw.  So you don’t overcook it.  It was wonderful.

On Saturday the four of us went into Homer to the farmer’s market, where they actually had farm produce. Imagine that. Real farmers at a farmer’s market.  They also had marimbas.  A marimba band made up of adults and teens, hammering away on beautiful homemade marimbas.  Boy, they were terrific!  The Williwaw Marimba Band.  We’d been told that Homer was the place the hippies all went when they left the Haight-Ashbury in the seventies.  If that’s true, they’ve since reproduced and are now into the third or fourth generation. Hippies of all sizes and ages.  A fun place (when it isn’t snowing).

They grow vegetables in Alaska.  Honest.  Yes, the growing season is very short.  But during it they get 24 hours of daylight so the plants grow like crazy, reaching enormous sizes.  “No sir, those are not onions; they are radishes.”  Farming is done mostly up in the Matsu Valley, where we haven’t yet been, but Homer has farms, too. 

They grow a mean salsa here.  I bought a pint of salsa from a little Russian girl at the market.  I didn’t notice she was Russian because she had a jacket on over the distinctive dress of the Russian colony.  We later drove out East End Drive about 20 miles to the northeast and at the end we saw an onion-domed church in a village you can’t visit because it is on private land.  James Michener said that after the czar walked away from Alaska in the 1800s, leaving it U.S. territory with no law or government, most of the Russians who remained married into the native population and effectively disappeared as a people.  But here they are:  Speaking Russian, apparently, and wearing Russian peasant attire.  From their dress I first thought they were Amish or maybe polygamists. That they were Russians never occurred to me.  Before I could investigate this further,  my friend Gary solved the puzzle for me.  He sent me a long article from The Atlantic that explained that they are  "Members of the Old Believers--a Russian Orthodox sect that left the church in 1666, in the face of state-issued church reforms--traveled more than 20,000 miles over five centuries in the search for the perfect place to protect their traditions from outside influences."  

After the farmer’s market we went up to the new library and the annual art festival across the street.  Anywhere else it would be called a craft fair, but you get the idea. We sampled local foods---homemade tamales we got from some nice native ladies. Well, I should have ordered Halibut blubber or something else local.  Something they actually knew how to make.  But it is all fun.

Since we’ve been here we’ve visited art galleries and shops in Homer, did some more fishing, and taken a lot of pictures. Oh, yes, and we’ve seen something here we haven’t seen in the two months since leaving home:  a sunset. Well, almost a sunset.  The sun goes down behind Mt. Iliamna, then sort of slides north behind Mt. Redoubt before emerging again as a sunrise.  It never quite gets dark, but we do get beautiful sunset-like colors here. Over the weekend someone decided the almost-darkness was enough for fireworks. At midnight. At first we thought all the explosions were only something like a war starting. Nothing to go see.  But I went anyway, and took my camera.

This afternoon Marsha and I went back into Homer so she could look for fabric with which to make quilted wall hangings--fabrics with bears, fish, Fireweed, and other prints we don't see too often in Arizona.  

We found the lines too long in all the restaurants, so we ended up in a fish market, Coal Point Seafood Company.  There we sat at a counter (right) and each had a huge bowl of seafood chowder made with salmon, halibut, clams and other goodies pulled from the bay today.  It sure was good.  One of the most satisfying restaurant meals I think we've had in Alaska. It was too big to finish so we have leftovers.

On Wednesday we are leaving for the east side of the Kenai Peninsula and the town of Seward. It was named for Lincoln’s secretary of state who was reviled for buying the whole of Alaska from the czar for a handful of beads and other trinkets. Oh.  Marsha says that was Manhattan Island; Seward used money.  But not much of it.  Not as much value as they now take out of the ground here in oil every day.  So Mr. Seward was like the guy who bought Apple stock back in the 80s. Which back then didn't seem like a good idea, either.

Anyway, there is a lot more of Alaska to tell you about.  And more of Canada beyond that.  So stay tuned!

John and Marsha Taylor

(All photos copyrighted 2013 by John B. Taylor)