Time Bandit (2 page)

A
ndy and I started our usual crab fishing season in September last year in the same place where we started our lives. A sleepy fishing village that wanders along a low bluff facing the Kachemak Bay in the Lower Cook Inlet, Homer is rooted in the same character that the Sourdoughs brought with them when they settled Alaska back in the day. Barely a week goes by when I do not remind myself of just how different Andy and I might have turned out if we had been born elsewhere. I would probably be in jail; Andy would be a cowboy. We
are
different from the rest of mankind, for better and for worse, because of the influences that started out with Homer Pennock, a charming—and none too clever—nineteenth-century confidence trickster whose cussedness and eccentricity put a stamp on his namesake town forever after. Barely a soul in Homer—there are 5,000 of us now—has not invented the narrative of his life, just like Pennock. The trick of adapting on the fly makes the hard Alaskan climate and harsh terrain easier for people, who come up to Homer—and Alaska in general—to meet their full expectations of independence and hardiness. A place like Homer offers them just the right measure of freedom to breathe as they see fit.

One feature dominates Homer with the same force with which Pennock pressed himself on the town. My brothers and I grew up living on a narrow finger of sand and rock laid down by a retreating glacier eons ago. Called the Spit, this odd geological feature juts five miles into Kachemak Bay, and put us boys
out to sea,
on land, as soon as we could crawl. We grew up with salt air in our lungs and sand between our toes. We played with eels and crabs and dog sharks. Instead of bicycles, we moved by skiff and raft. We did not play at being cowboys. We were pirates of yore. We knew an endless sea as other kids knew their backyards. The sea formed the stuff of our make-believe lives. We dreamed of ships and sails, demons and dragons.

Our father fed us and bought our clothes out of the ocean’s bounty. His friends went to the sea. My grandfather Earl, who was a lawyer and politician and a weekend fisherman, had built the Land’s End Inn on the Spit and owned the legendary Salty Dawg saloon, a cavelike log-cabin haunt where, as kids, we played in the sawdust on the floor and overheard drunken sailors’ yarns. Huckleberry Finn had the Mississippi River, islands in the streams, and woods on the shores. But we had the sea, which gave us his same utter freedom to explore, dream, and be boys without adults to shrink us down to their size. Huck had his thing, but he never had sharks to poke with a stick and shrimp and salmon to catch and cook over a rock fire in tinfoil and skiffs to push into the water from the front door of Miss Watson’s house.

Sometimes we would trap Dungeness crabs and trade them with Max Deveney, who owned a small seafood shop in Homer. He gave us one cooked crab for two fresh ones, and we went back and forth from the Spit into town several times a day, checking our pots and trading with Deveney, who sometimes even paid us a dollar a fish for salmon. Once we saved $109. We thought we were millionaires. We bought a case of Ding Dongs, a case of Mars bars, and a case of Hershey bars. Candy by the case! That was the stuff our dreams were made of.

Once, at night, camping on the other side of the Inlet, we pitched our tents at the base of an embankment. We lit a fire and roasted a crow and a squirrel. We were sitting on some of the best-tasting mussels on earth but we did not know that they could be eaten. Nobody had told us. We went to bed. It was dark, of course, and we were more scared of the dark than we would admit. At some point, I woke up when something hit my tent. Then something else hit my tent. I did not know what it was, and I was afraid to find out. In another minute, I felt something furry crawling on my face. We began screaming like girls in a scary movie. These creepy things were all over the tent, inside and out. I turned on a flashlight. It was raining
lemmings.

Over the years people who lived in Homer acquired another quality that was a by-product of the sea. It was a sense of impending loss. The feeling was ancient, as old as when men first ventured off land. Nobody ever got used to the premature death of men at sea but after a long time and many losses, a certain resignation had seeped into the collective Homer mind. The men tried to deny it. They thought of drowning as tragic but honorable, as a tribute that had to be paid to nature and the devils of the Bering Sea. The fear of loss never left some part of the thoughts of every man and woman in Homer, whether or not they earned their livings off the sea. It created a pervasive mood of melancholy. But loss at sea also made men of the sea wild, with an abandonment of normal habits and thoughts. We were here today and gone tomorrow because we knew that was what we were, and we lived the here today to its fullest. Yet death followed us, like a spy.

About the time I came into the world, in 1962, Homer was going through rough times. A dirt road that connected the town to the outside world was not paved until the 1970s, and people came and went more conveniently by sea. In those days, Homer meant a hardscrabble existence. But soon its natural beauty and isolation attracted eccentrics fleeing conformity, the law, and convention. Hippies discovered the town early in the Sixties and spread their anarchist gospel. Artists and a sprinkling of poets and writers followed. A colony of “Barefooters” pitched up with the vow not to wear shoes, to let their hair grow, and dress in cotton robes until peace was achieved in the world. “Old Believers,” nonconformist sectarians of the Russian Orthodox Church, came next with their own peculiar devotion. The most celebrated local eccentric now is a sweet older woman named Jean Keene, also known as “The Eagle Lady.” She lives on the Spit in the tiniest of log cabins where she cares for the feeding of bald eagles, which flock around her house from as far away as Kodiak. She is a savvy, rugged septuagenarian, Alaskan to the core, who drives a rusted, beaten Chevy pickup and works in a cannery. She would not live anywhere else.

Getting away from government drew others to Homer like Cook Inlet sockeye draw me to the sea each summer. That was surely the case with my old man and his friends. LeRoy Shoultz, for instance, a neighbor and friend, decided to leave the Lower Forty-Eight when the Indiana police called to warn him of a summons. A neighbor had turned him in for leaving his trashcan out by the curb. That same night he told his young wife, Rita, “OK, that’s enough of this stuff,” and packed up his young family without further deliberation. With $1,100 in his wallet and a credit card for gas he hit the highway, not that he was leaving that much behind. To his way of thought, Indiana was old and settled. Alaska was wild, and he yearned for its promise. When he and his family reached Alaska, even the air tasted free. He was flat broke, with four young kids, a couple cans of beans, and some oatmeal to live on, but they all considered nothing too hard in exchange for adventure and freedom from in-your-face government.

New friends in campgrounds gave them salmon to get by on. “We weren’t complaining,” I remember Rita telling me. She assumed that work would turn up for LeRoy. A local carpenter saw their Indiana license plate and invited them home to a moose dinner. He recommended LeRoy to the local cannery. With LeRoy now employed, they rented a one-room shack in town for $50 a month, with one bed. Rita told me, “We thought we were living high. We had electricity and a rain barrel for water. In a little while we had enough to build a small log cabin. After we first moved in, my mom came up to visit us from Indiana, and I was just totally excited that we had a driveway. We had no water, just electricity. But
we had a driveway.
My mom could not get that into her head. She just couldn’t understand that up here you are fighting everyday things all the time. You have to be young
all the time.
”

As Rita said, nowhere more than in Alaska, the land formed people with sharp, chiseled features. The extremes of weather—minus-80 degree temperatures, Williwaw winds that blew 130 mph, and 90 inches of snowfall a year—made Alaskans seem almost foreign to their more genteel cousins in the Lower Forty-Eight. Alaska presented a blank slate to write lives anew. All that was needed was grit. The cold and dark of Alaskan winters made us naturally cussed, independent, and self-reliant, which in turn gave us a lottery mentality—if somebody was going to win, why shouldn’t it be me?

And, in keeping, we strictly did not ask for outside help. In Alaska, people reached out to their neighbors. Charity and neighborliness were not virtues that we practiced only on Sundays. And nothing brought that home to us in Homer more than the loss of the trawler
Aleutian Harvester.

At the time, Thanksgiving 1985, I was fishing with my dad by the Augustine volcano, and we had sheltered up in a storm. With not much else to do but ride it out, I talked on single sideband radio to a friend aboard the
Aleutian Harvester
named Danny Martin. I had worked for two or three seasons with Danny on a gill net boat named
Sea Hawk II.
That day he was fishing near us, and I asked him how it was going. He said, “It sucks, man. This is my last trip.” He was net dragging in forty-or fifty-foot waves, and he should not have been out there. A while later I heard a Mayday on the radio.
Aleutian Harvester
had been on radar, and then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone. She had rolled over and vanished like a stone down a well. No one at first could understand. She went too quickly. Nobody in Homer, where three of the four
Harvester
crewmen came from, wanted to believe that a ship of that size could vanish in plain sight with its sister ship only an eighth of a mile off. There were no survivors, no flotsam, no jetsam, not a single trace that the
Aleutian
had ever existed. The Coast Guard searched for three days with helicopters, airplanes, and boats before they quit. But the people of Homer were not yet ready to abandon their own sons. If you are a relative or friend of a man lost at sea, there can be no time limit on loss. Homerites stuffed money in hats, emptied savings accounts, liquidated stocks, and held fund-raisers to pay for private search helicopters and airplanes that cost $5,000 a day. That effort to find any trace of the
Harvester—
and nothing was ever found—started the Aleutian Harvester Fund, which since 1985 has paid for pilots to search for lost airplanes, stranded tourists, and hunters, and sadly, other sailors on ships lost at sea.

A family friend tells a story that my brothers and I repeat often. Ken Moore, who owns the Northern Enterprises Boatyard in Homer where I dry-dock
Fishing Fever
over the winter, owed a debt of gratitude to a couple named Mudd and Stinky Jones who had come to Homer, as Ken says, “without a sink.” Stinky was a carpenter whose idea of finished work was with a chain saw. Later, after Mudd left him, he lived in two partially buried steel tanks. At the time, the couple owned a devil’s half acre out of town but more often than not stayed in Homer in a house borrowed from a friend named Poop Deck Platt. Ken was working two jobs at that time, driving back and forth between Homer and Kenai, up the peninsula. One day, Stinky asked Ken to pick up something in Anchor Point on his weekly commute. Several days went by, and while driving through Clam Gulch, Ken remembered the favor. He had forgotten the specifics. He stopped at the Anchor River Inn to call Stinky on the phone. There, he faced an embarrassing dilemma. Who
was
Stinky Jones? In a phone book he found six Joneses with telephones in the Homer area, but Ken had no idea who Stinky was. He called each Jones, asking, “Are you Stinky?” After three numbers he heard a familiar voice. His first question, “What’s your
name,
Stinky?” It was Karl.

Ken, who is my father’s age, knew men who went by Popeye, a sailor; Pappy, Popeye’s pappy; Packsack Louie; Ike the Kike; and Hundred Log Tallis. That was how mail was addressed to them. Hardly anybody knew Poop Deck as Clarence. He used to say, “Nobody remembers Clarence, and nobody forgets Poop Deck.”

But Homer was not all sweetness. Everyone knew everyone else, and that was good in a crisis. But there was no anonymity like city dwellers enjoy. Gossip crushed even people who were strong. And privacy was difficult to come by. A few years ago, a local Homer character, a drunk and a vagrant, acquired an annoying habit. He would drop by houses unannounced at unexpected times and act as if he owned the place. He would pour a cocktail, stay awhile, and leave when he was ready. That went on for years. Most people locked their doors. But some never bothered to. They complained to a judge who ordered the man to behave. On the next Thanksgiving, a family in town was sitting down to a festive meal when the drunk arrived and refused to leave. The father politely rose from the table and went for a gun. He shot the man dead in the living room. Pondering what sentence to give the killer, who pled guilty, a local judge sentenced him to one month in the town jail. In Homer, hospitality and neighborliness should be expected but not taken for granted.

Only the wild animals were run out of town. Around Homer, bears killed people and moose chased people, and that brings to mind my Grandmother Jo, who feared neither man nor beast. She and her husband, our maternal grandfather, Ernie Shupert, were Alaska homesteaders, original settlers after the Second World War to whom the United States government gave land. In return, they planted alfalfa and later, rhubarb and strawberries and built a small log house on eighty acres. Grandfather Ernie had served with Col. Lawrence Castner’s “Cutthroats,” officially the Alaska Combat Intelligence Platoon: sixty-four scouts, snipers, and irregulars who fought the Japanese forces garrisoned on two islands at the western end of the Aleutian chain. He decided, after the war, to stay in Alaska.

Grandma Jo came from Southern California. She is a delicate woman with the heart of a dragon who tarred the roof of her house when she was in her eighties. After Ernie died, the government forbade her to bury him at home. She stormed down to the county offices and told the supervisor, “I’m doing it. If you want to dig him up, then dig him up, but he’s
going in.
” Grandpa Shupert still lies there by the driveway.