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By Root 3233 0

the mad rush of consumerism and conformity. Seeking solace in the sea, sky, and mountains of the Kenai Peninsula, particularly the temperate zones, they hoped that subsistence farming and fishing were the way off the treadmill of making money. As Gary Snyder had said, these seekers all wanted to “create wilderness out of empire.”9 Homer’s slogans became “The Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea” and “Living on the Edge,” and were a way of giving the finger to Main Street. To the professional fishermen in Homer, who thought of their village as the “Halibut capital of the world,” all these cosmic-minded kids with no money were a disturbing trend. “Humans don’t own the earth,” Lady Greensleeves and Spoonguy have said about the ethos in Homer. “Pacha Mama, Mother Earth, la madre tierra, she bears us on our destiny, and herstory is a vast saga.”10

Curved around Kachemak Bay, Homer—the magnet for the beats in Alaska—was a clannish fishing village centered on a low, treeless spit (a long, thin gravel bar jutting out into the water). Muir had found the Homer Spit—where fishermen caught thousands of Pacific halibut and Pacific lampreys—enchanting when he sketched Kachemak Bay in 1899. The spit was surrounded on both sides by the exchanging tidal flows of Cook Inlet and the Gulf of Alaska. Low, wooded mountains rose on one side of the spit; on the other side was a rolling ridge of glistening glaciers. At twilight, Homer glowed in what some people described as a blanketing halo. “Light,” Muir had written. “I know not a single word fine enough for Light . . . holy, beamless, bodiless, inaudible floods of light.”11

Homer, a magnet for vegetarians, may be where seaweed became a popular health food in the 1950s. Bands of seaweed—such as porphyra (black seaweed), palmaria (ribbon seaweed), and macrocystis (giant kelp)—became a subsistence food for hitchhikers along Kachemak Bay. Such seaweeds were rich in minerals, vitamins, and carbohydrates.12 Likewise, the clams and mussels of Kachemak Bay, whose beds were in the mudflats, were also an attraction; small but succulent, they were among the best-tasting in the world. Nestled along Kachemak Bay was a huge raft of sea otters. Daily they swam about in these highly productive waters, gorging on shellfish.

When the Harriman Expedition visited Kachemak Bay in 1899, Charles Palache of Harvard University, the mineralogist aboard the Elder, noted the “interesting geology” around Homer; the area gave him a newfound interest in crystallography.13 John Burroughs, however, found “nothing Homeric about the look of the place.”14 But he loved seeing the volcanic peaks, Iliamna and Redoubt, sixty miles across Cook Inlet to the west.

The Kenai Peninsula was ripe for the beat generation ethos after Ginsberg’s Howl was published in 1956, followed by Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957. As Muir had told an earlier generation, “Go to Nature’s School—the one true University.”15 Homer was a natural place for the beat philosophy to take root because the village spit—not San Francisco—was truly the end of the road in America.16 While Snyder and Whalen were injecting Zen Buddhism into the poetry of California, the Barefooters, a group based in the Los Angeles area, were melding Hare Krishna, reincarnation, and Henry David Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify” into a heady cocktail. The back-to-nature cult had started in 1948 as the Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, and Love Community (WKFL). A subgroup with theatrical ambitions in the Los Angeles area performed a Christmas play in which none of the performers wore shoes: hence the name Barefooters.

The WKFL was led by Krishna Venta, who sought martyrdom. The members permanently shunned shoes; the men refused to get a haircut until world peace was achieved; the women dressed in long, flowing white gowns and liked to serve apple butter on homemade wheat bread. The Barefooters intended to wear their holy robes until universal love rained down. Love and service were the goals of WKFL. These cultists, forerunners of the San Francisco hippies, devoted their varied talents to humanitarian endeavors