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By Root 258 0

thickly and could be scythed and fed to cattle in winter. The maritime climate was mild with adequate but not too much rainfall. Extensive stands of spruce provided timber for homebuilding, and good water seeped in springs and ran plentifully in streams. These new settlers kept cattle and horses and grew cool-weather crops—cabbage, potatoes, sturdy greens. At the head of the bay, wide grassy river flats provided excellent pasture. But living off the land wasn’t easy. The soil stayed cool well into spring, and rain often disrupted haying and harvesting seasons. The winter cycles of freeze and thaw wreaked havoc on plants. Few local markets existed for farm goods, and farmers were dependent on shipping companies based in Seattle or farther away to bring supplies and transport goods for sale. It was clear from the beginning: If you didn’t know the place well, know it intimately, you would starve or have to go somewhere else. This is what was important: frost dates, signs in the weather, where to find wild food, when and where the fish ran, how to stock up for the winter, what the tide was doing at all times, how to read the surface of the sea.

At the corner of one of the main intersections in town, an old log cabin sat empty on an unkempt lot. It was a relic from the homesteading days. The original owners had built it on an island off the south shore of the bay where they lived for a time. Then they took it apart, barged it to the north shore, put it back together again, and set up a small mercantile in a tiny, attached shed. Theirs was one of the first stores to sell goods in Homer that, until then, could only be purchased across the bay. Other remains of history were scattered around town too. You could drive by an old stick-framed Civil Aeronautics Administration building, constructed in the 1940s with an influx of wartime federal funds. Built for providing weather briefings and other information to pilots, it now stood, mostly forgotten, in a junkyard a few miles out of town. And homestead cabins scattered around town were in different degrees of abandonment and repossession; some were falling apart, while others had been dressed back up and were again in use. People remembered when you could dial just four digits to make a local call. These days, we had to dial the exchange, but since it was the same for everyone in town, we remembered each other’s phone numbers by only the last four digits.

John and I quickly befriended a family that had a modern sort of homestead fifteen miles out of town and six miles off of pavement. Taro and Cynthia lived in a yurt, a circular house with a diameter of twenty feet that they had bought as a kit and raised with the help of a few friends. They had no nearby neighbors. Their daughter Kaya, six, was one of John’s students, and their son Ghen, four, would be in a few years. Taro, a short, sturdy man whom people sometimes mistook for an Alaska Native, was from Japan. He fished during the summer and worked construction during the rest of the year. Cynthia, from upstate New York, did various jobs and took care of the kids. John and I admired their scrupulous resourcefulness: They filled their chest freezer with fish every summer, grew a garden, constructed their own outbuildings, and made do with no running water and very little space. And we admired their art. Cynthia made clay pots and dreamed of the day when they would build a studio for her and her husband to work in. Taro was a carver and built toys for the kids out of wood salvaged from construction sites and the beach. John and I often went to their place to ski or to share dinners of salmon and large bottles of red wine. Cynthia took us down to the spring where they filled water jugs. She showed us the bathtub Taro had carved out of a solid trunk of driftwood cedar. I was in awe of their handmade life.

On New Year’s Eve, John and I drove out to their place on a road white with new snow. It was the coldest night since we’d arrived in Alaska, well below zero. From the road, we skied down to their house under a sky cleanly pricked by