Becoming Frozen Read online

  Becoming Frozen

  Memoir of a First Year in Alaska

  By Jill Homer

  *****

  Distributed by Arctic Glass Press

  Cover photo by David Shaw, Wild Imagination Photography

  Chapter photos by Jill Homer © 2005 and 2006

  Copy edited by Tonya Simpson

  This is a work of narrative nonfiction. Dialogue and events herein have been recounted to the best of the author’s memory.

  Note: This book is a love story, recounting the exhilaration and awe of being swept up by a place. The narrative was derived from daily journal entries that appeared on the blog “Up in Alaska” between November 2005 and August 2006. Each chapter begins with a excerpt from this blog, and expands on the adventures and challenges of a young woman forging a new life in the fishing village of Homer, Alaska. Today, the author lives and works in Los Altos, California (and remains heartbroken about her separation from Alaska, vowing to return someday.) She continues to update her decade-old blog — which contains archives of every post she wrote in Homer — at http://jilloutside.com.

  _____

  Alaska, Again

  September 11, 2005

  So this is my new journal about moving to Homer, Alaska — a place where it snows in October, where moose traipse through my backyard, and where everyone can spell my last name but if you can’t spell “Xtratuf,” well, so help you God.

  This is the obligatory first entry where I have to explain to people that I live in Alaska. I lived for a while in Idaho Falls, Idaho — home of potatoes and the self-proclaimed “northern” Mormons, and life was good. But after a brutal hot summer and several months of distant coercion from Geoff, I somehow was talked into moving to Alaska — home of grizzly bears and the self-proclaimed “northern” Libertarians. And life’s still good. I guess it’s possible to be happy anywhere — just as long as those studded mountain bike tires and stack of DVDs arrive soon.

  *****

  We arrived, on a windy day in mid-September, at the far edge of the world. Three thousand miles, a similar number of days of adulthood, and every decision I’d ever made all came to an abrupt point on a roadside pullout overlooking the ocean — the final mile of the North American highway system.

  “We made it!” I announced as I walked across the parking lot. The pavement abruptly ended at a sheer bluff that dropped directly into the sea, several hundred feet below a crumbling ledge. Winds stirred up a cloud of sand that rained into the roiling surf. I turned to my boyfriend, Geoff, and shouted over the gusts. “Even the beach is intense in Alaska!”

  I was too enamored with the dramatic cut of the coastline to acknowledge that this country had already been claimed by countless halibut fishermen, artists and photo-snapping retirees in RVs. Wind whipped my hair into a frenzy as I stood on the cusp of the cliff, surveying my new kingdom. Far below, a promenade of white waves rippled across the Cook Inlet. To the east, a narrow spit of land lolled like a tongue into the calmer blue waters of Kachemak Bay. To the south, a cone-shaped volcano appeared as a menacing silhouette. A ring of snowcapped mountains wrapped around the horizon like a fortress, encapsulating this place as the final bastion of civilization. Homer, Alaska. The End of the Road.

  “Wow, this is where we live!” I yelled as Geoff sprinted around my sagging ’96 Geo Prism to tie down a tangle of flapping straps on top of the car.

  “Are you going to help me?” he called back.

  “Sure,” I muttered, turning away from new discoveries to refasten the canvas carrier for what must have been the forty-seventh time. Only a few more miles remained in our thirty-two-hundred-mile journey from Idaho to the last town on the Rand McNally map. Why not let the straps fly free?

  But I couldn’t complain because the contents of my entire life, not Geoff’s, were stashed away in the red sedan. And it was my career, not Geoff’s, that brought us to this isolated community of three thousand people at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula. Although Alaska had been Geoff’s dream, Homer was my decision. I quietly believed it was our last best hope — a place to rebuild our lives beyond the trajectory of past missteps.

  I already felt like a rugged Alaskan, but from a local point of view, I was still an obvious outsider. I was twenty-six years old with dirty blonde hair, freckles, hints of a tan, a Bad Religion T-Shirt, and black leather shoes that were far too shiny for this muddy town. Geoff was twenty-nine and looked more like an Alaskan with a hippie vibe: Long auburn hair, a trim beard, cargo pants and flannel. He had the muscled, slender body of a runner — although at the time, his passions were whitewater rafting and technical mountain biking. A free-ranging soul who refused to be tied down, Geoff had spent the past few months rambling around the Last Frontier while I worked late nights as a copy editor at a newspaper in Idaho Falls, Idaho. My most recent passions included riding my road bike for long distances alone, and staying up until dawn at riotous parties with my co-workers.

  Geoff’s and my relationship had spent the past year on the rocks, twisted around four years’ worth of unbounded adventures and subsequently incompatible attempts at domestic partnership. I’d come to believe that our shared passion for the outdoors might be the only thread still holding us together, which is why I moved from Utah to Idaho one year earlier. Living in separate states only served to slow the unraveling of our relationship rather than sever it entirely. I still traveled to Utah every weekend, holding onto the strands of a fun but ultimately unsatisfying weekend relationship. Then, just before summer came, Geoff announced he was traveling to Alaska for three months, and had no plans to return in the fall. August rolled around, and I was still working up the courage to make the split official when Geoff showed up at my doorstep in Idaho. I hadn’t expected to see him — he’d flown all the way from Alaska just to talk with me. We went camping in the Salt River Mountains of Wyoming and let soul-rending scenery open an honest discussion about our fractured love.

  After that weekend, Geoff remained in Idaho with me for a few more nights. He raved about his life in the North as the hot sun cast Idaho Falls in unfavorable light.

  “Don’t you think you should just come to Alaska with me?” Geoff suggested nonchalantly, as though he were asking me out to dinner. Wildfire smoke filled the August air, and I’d arrived at the conclusion that I had little to lose. Geoff sat next to me at a computer in the public library as I scrolled through journalism jobs in the northern state. At the time there was only one listing for which I was qualified — an arts reporter, page designer and copy editor (all one position) at a small weekly newspaper, the Homer Tribune.

  “Homer?” Geoff said with an air of strong disapproval. “I mean, it’s okay, but it’s really touristy. Remember that night we spent on the Homer Spit?”

  I did. It was two years earlier, on the Fourth of July. Geoff, two other friends, and I were traveling dirt-bag style across Alaska during a summer-long road trip. We just happened to end up in Homer on the most popular day of the year for tourists. Tents were crammed stake-to-stake on a narrow strip of sand between Homer Spit Road and the sea, which was the only place available for visitor camping. Fireworks exploded and children screamed into the dusky hours of morning. The four of us huddled together in a single small tent — because the campground charged by the tent — and didn’t sleep at all. We fled town early the next morning without even bothering to explore the community beyond the crowded spit. Still, the four of us felt confident in our assessment that Homer was the worst town in all of Alaska.

  “It’s probably better than we remember,” I said. “Plus, it’s really the only good job on here. I can’t move to Alaska without a job.”

  I typed
in my basic information and attached a resume to the e-mail. Within an hour, I received a call from the Tribune’s editor, who conducted an interview on the spot. She sent me a job offer the following day. I put in my two-week notice at the Idaho Falls Post-Register, and then broke the news to my parents in Utah.

  “It’s a long story but I decided I’m going to move with Geoff to Alaska,” I blurted into the phone. “Um, in about two weeks.” The call did not go over well.

  Just two weeks earlier, I celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday with friends in Idaho and toasted my freedom with new certainty that Geoff and I were done for good. That was August 20. By September 5, I had quit my job, broken an apartment lease, packed up or sold all of my belongings, and committed to live in a region three-thousand miles away from anything familiar, in a town I remembered with strong disdain, with a man who continued to make no promises about the future. Somewhere in the stratosphere of renewed optimism, this plan was completely reasonable. At the very least, change was moving too quickly for logic to intervene.

  *****

  After Geoff was satisfied with the latest strap configurations, we started up the Prism’s overworked engine. The car made its final descent of the journey with two bicycles swaying on the roof rack and stray canvas straps still flapping in the breeze. Cassette tapes, Subway wrappers and potato chip crumbs were strewn about the floor, and the contents of my whole existence — clothing, dishes, camping gear and a few small appliances — were crammed in the trunk and back seat. We had been driving almost nonstop for five days, relying on books on tape and obscure Canadian radio stations to avoid more difficult conversations, including most of the specifics about building a life in Alaska. Only when we discussed Hillary Clinton’s autobiography, or laughed at “Car Talk,” did I feel glimmers of hope that I wasn’t sitting next to a stranger. We had spent the better part of a year living apart, and in many ways we needed to re-acquaint ourselves.

  All through Canada we slept in our tent, and I’d wake up shivering and drenched in sweat. I told family and friends that my current lack of commitments and the promise of great adventure were the impetus for moving north. But these assertions were largely a veil for the less glamorous truth. My love for Geoff meant a lot to me, and this was the last chance for our sputtering four-year relationship. Admitting this, even quietly to myself, only perpetuated the well-worn cliché of a hapless woman following a man to the Last Frontier. So I stuck to my adventure story.

  We pulled the car into a parking lot on the Homer Spit, at the same horrible campground we fled two years earlier. It was the only place we could conceive as a starting point. A few tattered tents were scattered along the beach, adorned with hallmarks of long-term residency such as makeshift driftwood tables and tarps flapping in the wind. Fishing boats bobbed in a harbor across the road. The boardwalk was quiet; the shops were shuttered. Just a few days earlier, I was still wilting through an unseasonably hot summer in Idaho. Here, a brisk wind tore along the coastline, carrying a wintry bite. Summer was already over, and most of the tourists had gone home.

  “I don’t really want to camp here again,” Geoff announced, and I agreed the beach looked more like a homeless encampment than a campground. “Let’s go find a phone book.”

  At the town’s first (and possibly only) gas station, Geoff sifted through the phone book for campground listings while I walked inside the convenience store to buy a newspaper. The printing quality of the Homer Tribune was colorful and clear, but the shape of the newspaper — tabloid, which is about half the size of a regular newspaper — caught me off guard. I skimmed the articles with trepidation — I was scheduled to report to the office the following morning. Remembering this obligation made me feel queasy, so I flipped to the classified ads.

  “Check this out,” I said as I walked outside to meet Geoff, who had just used the pay phone to contact a private campground owner. “There’s a rental ad for a cabin in town. It’s two-thousand square feet on two acres of land for just eight hundred a month. It says there’s another tenant in the basement, but it sounds like a really good deal.”

  Geoff squinted at the text. “Diamond Ridge? Where’s that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. The address is in Homer. How far away could it be?”

  I took Geoff’s place at the pay phone and called the number listed in the ad. A woman named Robin answered, sounding harried and more than a little distracted. “Of course, in Homer,” she replied after I’d told her our entire story and finally read the newspaper ad verbatim. “You’ll have to forgive me. We haven’t had a call on the house in days. In fact, I just dropped the price from nine hundred. We live in Hawaii, so I’m not there, but I’ll give you the address. Check it out and if you’re interested, call back and I’ll have someone come up with a key and show it to you.”

  Even with Robin’s instructions and directions from convenience store clerk, it still took us forty-five minutes to find the house. We drove up a steep, switchbacking road that led to a ridge twelve-hundred feet above the coast. From there, a narrow gravel road passed wooded properties and rustic homes. Every structure had a haphazard look to it, as though the money ran out before construction was finished. Some cabins were wrapped in Tyveck insulation; others were accessorized with plywood outbuildings or mismatched additions. Some of the dwellings were outright strange — there was a bright red barn, a two-story structure with an uneven hexagonal shape, a cabin with a roof covered in sod and grass, and several yurts.

  “Guess Homer doesn’t have much in the way of building codes,” I said as scanned the side streets. We drove down several cul-de-sacs that ended in empty lots filled with stacks of downed trees and broken appliances. Finally, we found the one we were looking for — Trail Court. The fittingly named road cut a narrow passage through alder branches and spruce trees. Geoff feathered the steering wheel to keep the car’s bald tires from veering into muddy ruts. We passed a small clearing surrounded by a wire fence. On one side, a shaggy horse munched on grass. On the other, a moose lifted her head from a grove of fireweed stalks and blinked.

  “Look,” I whispered, afraid any sudden movement might scare the moose into darting in front of the car. “Look!”

  “It’s just a moose,” Geoff said dismissively. “There are a lot of those around here. They’re like squirrels.”

  “But this one is practically in the front yard,” I said. “What if we’re just taking out the trash someday and she decides to stomp us?”

  “That’s unlikely,” Geoff said. “These are suburban moose. They don’t care.”

  Diamond Ridge was unlike any suburb I had ever seen. Around the corner from the horse pasture, Trail Court dead-ended at a pyramid-shaped cabin. It was massive for an A-frame, at least three stories high, with the upper section painted brick red and the lower a yellowing shade of white. It had its own plywood outbuilding and a seemingly inoperable outhouse leaning against two spruce trees. The yard was a sea of white fuzz — fireweed stalks that had gone to seed.

  No one answered the door at the lower level apartment, and the front door was locked. We circled around the porch and peered into the landscape windows. The entire first level was a single large room, with a set of stairs in the center that seemed to lead to a loft. The interior was lined in thick wooden beams and a finished pinewood floor. The walls were painted rust orange. There was a small kitchen in one corner and a door to what I presumed was a bathroom in another. These were the only features that gave it away as a home; otherwise, it looked like the empty lobby of a ski lodge, with a high ceiling and a grand view of the Kenai Mountains to the west.

  “It’s perfect,” I gasped, almost beside myself with excitement. In a tourism-focused community like Homer, I would have expected to pay eight hundred dollars a month for a grimy studio apartment in a bad part of town. But here was two-thousand square feet of secluded cabin located on two acres of land surrounded by miles of open space, and it was afford
able on a journalist’s salary.

  “Let’s do it,” Geoff agreed. “We should call that landlady now, before someone else comes to look at it.”

  Diamond Ridge had no reception for our out-of-state cell phones, so we got back in the car and raced seven miles back to the gas station pay phone. I breathlessly counted fourteen rings before a harried voice finally answered, “This is Robin.”

  “Robin, this is Jill. We just called about your cabin in Homer. Yeah, we want to move in. How do we apply?”

  “Did Jen show you inside?” Robin asked, referring to the woman who lived in the basement.

  “No, no one was home,” I said. “We looked in through the window. We like it. That’s enough for us.”

  Robin was silent for several seconds, clearly mulling the situation as my anxiety spiked. “Well great,” she said. “Sounds good to me. I have a friend in town who’s holding onto the keys. I’ll have her drop them off at your office tomorrow. Where did you say you worked?”

  “Um, Homer Tribune,” I said. “But I don’t know where exactly it is. I still need to look up the address. I, um, I haven’t started work yet. I actually start tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Robin said. “I’ll let her know. She’ll have a lease you can sign too. It’s a year lease. I’m looking for someone who wants to stay through the winter. Eight hundred dollars a month.”

  “Do you want us to fill out an application? Or background checks?”

  Robin laughed. “Oh, no. That won’t be necessary. You can move in anytime.”

  Geoff shook his head as I hung up the phone. Based on my side of the conversation, he thought she turned us down.

  “She pretty much just said we could move in, like tomorrow.”

  “Wow. Really? That’s trusting.”

  “I guess in Alaska they have less reason to be suspicious of people,” I said. “I didn’t even prove to her that I have a job.”

  “Works for us,” Geoff said. “Where do we sign the lease?”