Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [28]
So many things that make sense elsewhere make no sense in Alaska. Except for some of its far-flung Aleutian Islands, the entire state—which, if laid across the others, would stretch from Georgia to California—encompasses only a single time zone. And in the fall, we put our clocks back with everyone else so that, as we are already losing five minutes of light each day, we are suddenly plunged into afternoon darkness. The director of the school where I taught told me it took the students months to get over the time change. At least one elected official in Alaska reported that she received more letters about daylight saving time than about any other issue. And here, it makes sense for services to come to people, rather than the other way around. Nurses, dentists, and beauticians fly into remote villages across the state. And Alaskan school districts were using the Internet to deliver classes to the child rather than the reverse.
HOMER WAS KNOWN as a place where people ended up staying after their cars broke down. The saying was: “It’s all downhill to Homer,” which meant that it was easier to come to town than to leave. A friend who grew up in the Midwest and was now a father of two once told me, “This place isn’t so great, it just has a great view.”
But people had fought for this place. Nearly three decades before, the state had sold access to patches of the seafloor in Kachemak Bay to oil and gas companies. A jack-up rig, a floating drill rig with retractable legs that stood three stories above the surface of the water, was barged in. But when the rig got stuck in the mud and began to leak oil, fishermen and other residents were furious. A pilot who lived on the undeveloped side of Cook Inlet and referred to himself as “the Bush rat,” campaigned for governor on a platform of keeping oil and gas out of Homer’s bay, and he won. The state bought the access back from the companies. Recently, however, oil and gas interests were creeping toward town by land, in some cases drilling in people’s backyards without their consent, which they could do because the state holds title to resources beneath nearly everyone’s lawns.
This was a place people had worked to protect, but also, naturally, a place people abused. Some houses were ringed by an obstacle course of junk cars, defunct fishing equipment, earth-moving machines, and building supplies. Although you could leave a car at the dump for free, dead vehicles could be seen all around town, slowly rotting. One day a year the borough towed away abandoned cars, no questions asked. The radio announced this day in advance; all you had to do was push the car onto the edge of a public road.
In a community so dominated by its natural surroundings, it was surprising how landmarks were often more about people and less about the landscape. When giving directions, someone might say, “You know the tan house with that gigantic spider they nailed to the outside for Halloween years ago? Well turn right there, and go a quarter mile.” Or, “I’m not far past the house of the guy who dragged that old castle into his front yard.” Mostly, people explained where they lived by how many miles from town they were: “I’m eleven miles out East Road.” Or, “You gotta go seven miles up the North Fork, then turn left after the dip.”
Racial diversity was not something Homer bragged about. It was a white town, save for a few Natives, an occasional black person, the families who owned the two Chinese buffet-style restaurants in town, and a handful of Latinos, many