My summers are spent in an 8 by 6 ft shack sitting atop a conex. I miss it. I would fling open my plywood door, step out of my levis, stumble for my slumberjack sleeping bag, and let one whimpered pray loose - that the whale watching tour would be quiet on its way out of the Homer harbor. You have little other desires after cleaning dishes untill midnight. I smelled of bleach, alba body butter, sweat, and steamed king crab. I am rarely happier. It is only a gravel lot on the back end of the tourist trapped Homer spit that I call part-time home. This small slender slash of land unfurling like a black bears tounge into perfect hypothermic water. Things seem raw. Emerging, submerging - depending on the tide. I have been knee deep in the spit fishing hole in September straining to collect sea urchins for a friend's wedding - green, black that gives way to orchid, and white. My feet shod in hybiscus patterned flipflops. A pale, heedless child balanced on muck covered rocks -knowing any second could be her last dry one.
That is how it is. The spit should dissapear - driven into a winter storm. Sucked to the bottom at the next earthquake. You stand in the middle of the two lane asphalt covered road at one am. on solstice and you can see ocean rolling around you. I have emergency plans for the next time a jolt or tremor doesn't stop. They involve a boat, a rouge Irish captain, him saving me, and then me saving him. The rest is censored.
But we stay - on this fragile platform in the sea. We all stand on the edge of a quaint but inadequate show and Grewingk glacier screams from the other side of the bay. We stand on the edge. The glass may be dark but the bits of light we can see - who can turn away? I have never stood anywhere else where I felt I could walk over the waters and into Zion.