MY Wildness - MINE

Here's the thing,

I have only been in Homer for a bit less than a week (my 4th visit in total over about 6 years), but I have foolishly claimed the Spit, Land’s End, the kittiwakes, gulls, polite crows, sea otters, harbor seals, snowshoe hares, eagles and mist-cloaked ridges and peaks for myself. I've also lain claim to nearly darkless nights and a winter that won't quite relent. I selfishly claim all of this as privilege and sovereign right with lovely lonesome walks on rocky kelp-strewn beaches as my domain of solitude.

I tend to do that in wild places, from Edisto salt marsh and the Pink House fiefdom I hoard in February to Camp Denali tucked away from most where I've leased by love, a dozen grizzlies in a single day and sinuous waves of sandhill cranes flying between peaks that shall always bear First Peoples’ names and not those of hateful fools. Of course the farm at Tokeena Crossroads is an especially coveted semi wild place, but then I own that. I can be out of the back door and into a wonderland of southern wildness where migrating birds, deer coyotes, and forests and fields and creeks actually don't seem to mind my claims to them.

But these other lands, so far away from home, I covet into a special kind of home away from home, where just wildness and I can commune without so much interference from…people. Well, I can take a few people, you know, those folks who get the outdoor introversion like I do. We don't hate humanity, just the dregs of how it can so easily drag us down into not so desirable depths of their profit-making depravity.

So back to Homer. I have been here for my second Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference as an instructor. Invited both times by my dear friend, Erin Holliwell, the soon-to-be retiring Director. I've also been to two shorebird festivals and even gave a keynote at one where whale bones shook and shuddered as I spoke about loving nature. Maybe I took that night in the auditorium when that happened as a sign? Or maybe it'sjust been the embrace of people up here who treat me with a kind of love, respect that'sdifferent. There's something in the sea air. Or maybe in the convergence of so much; fresh, saline, high, low…

I have grown deeply attached to the stark edges here - sea, mountains, mud flats, and so much more. Everything is edgy and thin here. Magic and woo-woo happens here. I heal and re-energize (with little sleep) here. But alas, I'm not Alaskan, even as I've been “in country” from Artic Circle to Kodiak and much in between, at least 10 times by my count. I've said I'm trying to build up ex-patriot points, so I can rightfully by literary lein at least, claim a bit of the Big Dipper.

But I was reminded this morning, as I opened my blackout curtains to view my perfect Kachemak Bay morning from the best little room on the port side of the Land's End Hotel, that I am still just a visitor. It wasn't the wave hugging flights of guillemots or the wildly echoing calls of glaucous-winged gulls that reminded me. Nor was it the peaks I still can't call by name, or the whitecaps whipping up on the bay. And it wasn't a reclining sea otter riding aforementioned whitecaps calmly cracking breakfast open on its chest. I wasn't even convinced by the intrepid fishing boats heading out to maybe give some monstrous halibut a go at become the most delicious blackened fish tacos or creamy broiled Halibut iliamna with sea beans and grilled asparagus over rice pilaf. It wasn't that at all. In fact these things made me want Homer to be mine even more! No, I don't have to visit (and shut down) the Salty Dawg Cafe with Jamie, Zoe, Bathsheba, Chris and Chip every night to chat about all things this wondrous writing life imbues to us (though I wouldn't say “no” very often). And I wouldn't have to necessarily drive backroads back in town to see moose kneeling in ruminant prayer or sandhill cranes sailing in to Beluga wetlands or bald eagles soaring around at midnight like it's midday or the telltale silhouettes of shorebirds on an extra low tide or an ivory gull that refuses to be seen or even spy the Aleutian tern that I somehow missed during my therapy session with crows yesterday.

But I would have that choice; a kind of other worldly wildlife tapas on the daily and it would almost be as good for my soul as home down South. And when I choose to people, I would even have the chance to talk to perfect strangers fishing on the beach or in messy little second hand stores who shake my hand with a firmness that says “We get you, you're one of “us”. I haven't even been followed by a single patrol car here.

What convinced me of this current itinerant ownership ending as I layered up for another day of lusting after all this edginess, was the appearance of a behemoth on the horizon that blocked views of peaks, pushed pelagic cormorants out of swimming repose and paid no attention to the wind and waves that made smaller such things wary. This leviathan, no cetacean, mind you, rose above a monstrous white hull that flattemed the water. Above that hull rose dozens of square eyes, uniformly arrayed as if some sort of omniscient power could be cast by its slow crawl into the harbor. I wondered what the gray headed harbor seals thought of its intrusion? Did the sea otters loose themselves of kelp tethers and dump abalone breakfast overboard to avoid what must be killing teeth below the waterline?

As I prepped for my final day in this wondrous place, I knew it was time to go, when that Viking cruise ship appeared. In no time flat, those well-heeled interlopers (I've officially been upgraded to visitor, excuse me) would disembark and crowd the strreets in designer Alaskan wear, maybe a few sporting Xtra Tuff boots they brought along to play the part, and they'd be loud, gawky and touristy. That meant they'd crowd places like the Dawg, and the streets would be full and the gulls would get handouts and the kittiwakes would scream at them (and hopefully shat on their heads too). At that moment in Room 107 standing half-naked in my doorway, air-drying post shower watching the mammoth glide through my sacred view, and waving to it with my own flag waving too in rude protest, I realized that it was time to go home.

I do love it there, too. And I promise to never allow a cruise ship, to ply our 46 acres. Ever.