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By Root 296 0

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