In 1954 my parents, Robert and Doris James, filed a homestead claim to one-hundred sixty acres thirteen miles east of Homer, Alaska. Over the next few years, they made the required improvements--consisting of a 12' by 14' log cabin and a garden plot--and were awarded the deed. The property is in an exquisite location about a mile above the bluff overlooking Katchemak Bay; from every open field are views that cause today's tourists to stop suddenly on the edge of the road and grab video cameras. In the early '50s, of course there was no road. Mama and daddy hitchhiked from town to the end of the dirt tractor trail, then loaded two babies, groceries, and tools on pack boards for the two-mile trek through spruce forest underbrush, down McNeil canyon and up through thickets of head high Devil's Club. It was another mile to the cabin site, a clearing surrounded by stands of black spruce and alder. A nearby spring provided fresh water and "refrigeration," and cooled the second-degree burns on my arms when, at two years old, I fell against the barrel stove.
The first summer we spent in a cabin-tent--scant shelter from the elements of weather and wildlife. Ask mama about the bear who visited while daddy was in town three days after we moved into the tent. Picture a young mother with a toddler and a babe-in-arms, facing a curious young black bear. Does she attempt a shot? (You should know that my mother closes her eyes when firing a gun.) With two babies, does she climb a scrubby spruce?
Daddy picked good land. It rolls from wide benches of open meadows and wooded creeks to gentle, south facing slopes, one-hundred sixty acres in an upside-down "L" shape. The topsoil is eight feet deep in some places, and he always brags that there isn't a rock on the place. As far as we can tell, no one had put a shovel in the ground since Noah's flood, and given the long hours of summer sunlight, seed tossed in newly tilled soil grows like you wouldn't believe.
The folks soon moved the cabin and garden to the top of the property on a lovely flat meadow with one of those stunning, 180 degree views of the bay and glacier-topped mountains. On a clear day we can see the outline of Cape Douglas, 200 miles away across Cook Inlet to the west.
In that location, daddy plowed acres of natural clearings, turning the aromatic soil with a single bottom moldboard plow behind a used 1940's Ford tractor. By this time there were four children; our job was to run behind the plow picking up the occasional willow root and birch branch. We grew potatoes in that good earth: White Mountain, Alaska Russet, Red-eyed Pinks, and Norwegian Banana. For a few years we used a mechanical digger pulled behind a slightly newer Ford tractor, but the occasional skinned and bruised potato offended daddy's purist instincts and we returned to the old hand methods. Those were hard years and those were good years. We built a twelve foot living room and kitchen addition on the cabin, dug a cellar underneath and filled its wooden slat bins with several ton of potatoes. People in town wanted daddy's potatoes and he made the day-long trip often, the tractor box packed with carefully sorted and washed spuds in 50-pound gunny sacks.
Our kitchen garden covered about an acre. At that latitude tomatoes and corn were out of the question (as was plastic for a greenhouse), but root and cole crops did exceptionally well. One year we made jack-o-lanterns from the huge turnips. Always there was Swiss chard, cabbage, beets, and peas.
From one Gurnsey/Jersey cow, daddy started a small herd till we were milking four or five cows and selling the milk twice a week in town. Winter trips were not so easy; sometimes we had to give the extra milk to the cats and even the chickens. Mama made everything out of milk: churned butter, cottage cheese, lots of rich gravy, and ice cream. You might not think ice cream would be a big item on long winter evenings with the snow blowing under the door, but it was. Mama says that we were disappointed if she didn't keep 4 or 5 kinds of ice cream in the freezer at all times. Saturday nights she made 3-gallon milk buckets full of sugared popcorn and we'd crowd around the old army cook stove eating ice cream and popcorn while the wind howled and mama read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie or Ralph Moody's Shaking the Nickle Bush.
By 1962 the rural electric co-op had run lines to our place, we had close neighbor's (1/4 mile away), and there were cars going by on the main road (also about 1/4 mile away) that we didn't even recognize. That was the summer that mama and daddy decided to accept her mother's offer to share the commercial salmon fishing business. Mama and our oldest brother went away to Bristol Bay to go fishing. Everything changed after that. Some summers we all went fishing, earning more in two months than the farm did in two years. We paid off the tractor and bought new shoes. We children were growing up, going to school downtown and at a distant boarding school, and the farm lost some of its magic--especially after the summer of 1970 when our oldest brother drowned in a fishing accident.
I went Outside to school and my brothers followed. One moved out for
good and lives near Goldendale, Washington, where he and his family grow
the things we never could on the homestead: corn, tomatoes, melons. The
other--after a year Outside--is homesick for the glaciers and the shining
water, for the snow and the freedom. He is going back. I too, after a long
and winding road, will return home this spring. Home to our parents, still
growing strawberries, potatoes, and a new experiment: blueberries. Home
to the land, where the topsoil is still eight feet deep in the untilled
meadows, where the native grasses and fireweed grow head high and there's
fresh bear scat on the McNeil canyon trail. For after all, it is a way
of life we yearn for, not to re-create the past but to build our future--a
future on the land.