Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [23]
The view from Homer’s bluff was so seductive it inspired impractical and idealistic construction; the bay flushed out silver, turquoise, or deep blue—depending on the weather—into the mouth of Cook Inlet, and a range of opulent peaks, specked year-round by snow, strung across the horizon on the other side of the water. This vista lured people into building where they shouldn’t—in places where the bluff lost a foot of land per year as its face constantly eroded. The land slid out from beneath luxurious, glass-fronted retirement homes and steadily crept away from vacation cabins built on the edge.
I met Tom on an airplane when John and I were flying back to Alaska after our first trip away since we’d moved to Homer. He was in his early or mid-sixties, I estimated, and had a long face, pale blue eyes, short gray hair and a tidily trimmed gray mustache. He was tall, big-boned, and stiff, and joked about the uncomfortable seats. By the time we touched down in Anchorage, I had promised to show him how to use email on one of the two computers recently installed in the Homer library for the public. Tom wanted to communicate with his daughter, a lawyer in Arizona, but had never used computers before. In exchange, he said, “I cut fish out on the Spit. I’ll take care of you.” This meant free food.
Over the next months, I visited Tom from time to time at his cabin, which was barely a quarter mile from where the highway into town narrowed into the main thoroughfare. “No need to call,” he told me. “Just come by. I’m always home after dark.” It was the time when summer was rapidly becoming fall. Fireweed seed pods were twisting off along the roads, sending white fluff someplace else. A steep set of wooden stairs ran down the edge of the bluff to Tom’s house from the parking pad where his beige Cutlass waited until daylight. He was bowlegged and his knees were weak. He didn’t take the stairs after dark, especially not these days when the nights were cool enough to drop a slippery layer of frost on every surface. A couple of guys from the fish processing plant had built a handrail out of two-by-fours along the stairs, but that wasn’t going to be enough to keep him from falling.
The cabin was a mess. Old newspapers and food wrappers littered the painted plywood floor. The place smelled like the bottom of a beer can the day after you thought you’d emptied it. There was no running water, and dirty dishes piled in the dry sink. A plywood outhouse sat among alders too short of a walk from his front door. Tom hauled in jugs of water that he filled at a free tap outside the main supermarket in town. He washed his dishes in plastic tubs balanced on the rails of the deck which stretched around the cabin. He emptied them over the railing when he was through.
His place would have been called a “shack” by my friends back East. But here, no one used that word. A small house, even a dingy one, was a cabin, an A-frame if it had a steep peaked roof that sloped down nearly to the ground, or just the neutral “place.” People didn’t judge how other people lived.
Tom decided he didn’t want to learn to use email after all. “Nothing’s wrong with a phone call!” he concluded. Instead, I stopped by Tom’s just to visit. I’d gingerly clear old newspapers and beer cans from the padded blue vinyl van seat he used as a sofa. The mess depressed me, but I was drawn to his stories. Tom would deliver an update on the one-armed woman he was sort of dating. She also worked at the fish processing plant, and had given him the painting of a wolf howling under a full moon that hung crookedly on his gray wall.
Tom was from Ogema, Minnesota, a tiny town in the state’s poorest Indian reservation, a rectangular patch of prairie interrupted by lakes and hardwood forest in the northwest corner of the state. His father had been one-quarter Ojibwa, his mother a little more than three-eighths, which made Tom, as he described, Indian enough to get free health care at the reservation clinic. He told me about his ex-wife, a beautiful Indian woman who had left him years before,