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| Ice Moon, Homer, Alaska |
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| Photos: Van Stein |
Awakening in
Homer to a lashing rain, we roll to Captain’s Coffee for infusions of caffeine and
local color, the latter painted boldly on this emporium’s ceiling, each
panel its own visionary universe.
“Keep Homer
weird,” says a bumper sticker on a car parked outside. (Portland, Oregon uses the same slogan,
though if you truly want weirdness i.e. eccentricity forget homogenized/pasteurized USA and
aim for the UK, where people are people not sheeple.)
Next, a diner
for eggs and biscuits smothered in gravy.
This
being a Sunday, everything is closed except an old movie theater showing National Treasure at three and six
o’clock.
Back at spit’s
end, bald eagles congregate, commiserating, perhaps, the mis-state of the
union.
You can get as near as five feet
to these stern creatures, which, this day, are all rain-drenched, and none too happy for it.
One of them
glares at Van Stein, turns, lifts its back end and spurts a stream of
green dookie straight at the artist.
Van Stein responds by painting the Aleutian Mountains while trying to adapt to weather that changes every five minutes,
and at 2:30 I venture off to Homer Theatre, where half the town turns out for
the matinee (the other half is coming at six).
My imaginary
friend, who reconnoitred while I movied, awaits me in the slushy parking
lot.
We navigate
through puddles and snow banks to a bar named Kharachters, whose patrons
celebrate Homer’s motto:
A drinking
village with a fishing problem.
Draft beer for
my imaginary friend; George Dickel bourbon for me.
Immediately,
Fred and Willy engage us.
Fred (everyone’s
image of a rugged Alaskan with full beard, plaid flannel shirt and suspenders) has
been drinking most of the afternoon and is probably stoned on pot as well.
He sidles up to
me, pool cue in hand, about to miss another shot. “Hey there, you silver-tongued rascal—you
think we’re all crazy up here?”
Either word has
gotten around this small town about my big mouth at Cafe Cups the evening before or he knows what they are.
“Of course,” I
say. “And that’s why we’re here.”
Willy nurses a
long whisky, which is to say a little whisky and a lot of water.
"This way I can
make it last,” Willy says earnestly.
“I’m done with shots.”
Willy likes to
sit at this bar for hours and hours, will probably close the joint tonight—and
reopen it tomorrow afternoon, drinking alcohol as if he was on an IV drip.
A bulletin board
post behind him identifies Willy as “Mis-manager” of Homer’s port.
"What's that about?" I point it out.
“It’s a joke,”
sighs Willy. “We had a problem with a
police chief, getting the city sued, but he’s gone now. It’s a long story.”
We have to be
gone, too, farewell to a bar so true to its name.
After a lonely
dinner at Land’s End (the cross-country skiers had skied off) featuring salmon
and halibut cryogenically preserved since the gold rush era, we head to Duggan’s
for draft bitter and an old jukebox.
Exiting, Van
Stein cannot resist spinning a propeller, which rings a bell,
causing a character named Digger to run forth from the pool room, hooting,
“That means you buy everyone a drink! Hell, I’ve been waiting all night for
somebody to do that!”
Digger gets his
due and we move on to Downey’s, “Homer Red” beer, and Neil Young crooning Harvest Moon from a jukebox while Dex, a
local dude in a boony hat, plays pool with his
imaginary friend.
A guy down the
bar throws back Schnapps, offering shots to anyone who wants to join him. No one does.
The management
evicts us all at midnight—and our plan to re-visit Kharacters is circumvented by the
advent of a clear sky with shiny Full Wolf Moon, which beckons us back to
spit’s end, where Van Stein reels in the moon to paint his finest work this trip while, in
the distance, killer whales converse in whistles and squeals.
Next day, we
retrace our tread to Anchorage where Captain Cook feels like an old
friend.
Following a
round of cannabis-laced lollipops, we hoof to a restaurant called Orso, bourbon-ing at the bar until escorted to our
table, where the salmon is wild.
Afterwards, a
taxi to Chilikoots: musky, dank, a touch
of skank.
Draft bitter in
hand, we roam Koots’ nooks and crannies—a carnival of grunge, pierced bodies,
tattoos, bouncers with Mohawks, and a room featuring women’s panties dangling
from the ceiling.
Leaving Van
Stein with my imaginary friend by a fireplace, I take a bar stool far across
the long room.
Ten minutes
later they prance over.
“Something
wrong?” asks my imaginary friend.
“Not a
thing. Sometimes I just need to be on my own.”
Alaska is a good
place to be alone; a good place to understand aloneness, as vastly different from loneliness as Alaska's vastness.
