A Life Wasted

The Kenai Peninsula 1989

Other than Anchorage, all communities in Alaska are small.  Homer was small.  The town itself was quaint, functional and not very interesting so we drove straight to the Homer Spit.  To reach the end of the road you had to go to the end of the Spit.  There we found the End of The Road Motel, which was literally built were the road ended.  The road ended in the motel's parking lot and behind the motel were the water of Kachemack Bay.  We could go no further.  There were other motels in town, but for us there was only one.  We checked into the End of the Road.

Homer Spit was a long narrow piece of land below the town of Homer.  I don't know how long, but I'll guess two to three miles.  Most of it is barely wider than the two lane road itself, but the end opens up and that's were the businesses are located.  The Homer Spit mostly facilitates the fishing industry with some tolerance for tourist.  We were too late in the year for tourist, so it wasn't crowded, but we were tourist none-the-less.  Of course I had to walk the many docks to see the boats.  There were a few rugged boats that were used for sports fishing, but most were commercial fishing boats.  I knew plenty about boats.  I'd seen commercial fishing boats since I was a kid in Savannah and through my Coast Guard days, but I'd never seen any like these.   These were hard boats built for a dangerous sea.  As I walked the docks I spoke to the men on boat decks working gear.  They were like their boats: hard men built for a dangerous life.  I was drawn to the boats and the life as if my destiny.

When we drove into Homer the first thing we did was find a newspaper so we could house hunt.  The second thing was to find the airport.  Homer had a fine airport, it's tarmac was packed with bush planes.  Like the boats out on the Spit, the bush planes were the real.  None were new.  None were pretty.  All were rugged, perfect for the wilds of Alaska's out back.  I watched a pilot repair the torn fabric of his Piper Super Cub with a large roll of Duct Tape, then told my wife:  "I love this place."  She laughed because she knew that I did and she laughed because she did too.  Alaska seemed like the kind of place that could hold me in one place.  Mary believed we had come home because Alaska fit us both so well.

After a few days of unsuccessful house hunting a new Anchorage paper arrived with an ad that caught our attention.  I don't recall what it said, but it was a cabin and it jumped out at both Mary and I.  It was too late in the year for house hunting in Alaska, so we had decided to find something to rent.  We wanted a place in Homer but nothing there was available, so we would be content with a house on the Kenai Peninsula.  The add made it sound like it was perfect for us.  I didn't know where it was because the location was given as "Sterling Highway, mile marker forty-seven and a half," without the name of a community.  Alaska addresses were given in mile markers, but I'd not heard of the Sterling Highway.  When I asked someone about it I learned it was the road we had arrived on.  Alaska had so few roads it was assumed everyone knew their names.  Which is why there were few road signs.

I called the number and talked to the owner.  I told him our circumstances, number of kids and dogs.  He was fine with all of it.  I told him we were in Homer so he gave me directions.  It wasn't until we pulled into Cooper Landing four hours later that we realized the guy on the phone was the same old man who'd showed me the sheep on the mountain.  It wasn't until months later that I realized Red had run that ad in the Anchorage paper as bait to pull me back to him, into his carefully laid trap.

We all loved Red.  He was a real deal Alaskan and one of the most interesting men I have ever met.  His stories were the stuff of frontier legend and I still believe they were all true.  Red had homesteaded Cooper Landing before there was a road through it, before Alaska was a state.  He claimed his property was valued at more than a million dollars and I believed him.  It would be worth ten million today.  It was as beautiful as any wilderness fantasy, the location ideally suited.  From his front door I could throw a rock into the Kenai Lake.  It was also a hundred yards from the spot were the Kenai Lake overflowed to become the Kenai River.  The Kenai River is famous world over for its salmon fishing.  If you've seen a photo of men packed tight fishing salmon in a river the odds are that was the Kenai River.  Its called combat fishing because of the number of fisherman on the bank.  That's where Red lived, and that's were we rented a rustic log cabin from him.