Roads

"When we come to the place where the road and the sky collide
Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide…"
--The Road and the Sky
Jackson Browne

Living in Homer, we are fortunate by Alaskan standards. We have a road.

I can actually get in my little truck and go some place else.

Well, we could do that in Nome, too. Nome was a unique Bush community in that roads of substantial length trickled out from town in three different directions. But going on a road trip in Nome would leave you cast up in such exotic locales as Teller or Kougarok or Council. Those roads existed primarily so people in those settlements could get to Nome, not so the folks of Nome could get to out. We used to laugh about a road that looped across the north end of town, from west to east—the Nome By Pass. As if someone would drive the rough, difficult fifty miles of road from Teller to Nome and decide that they needed to go around Nome and continue on to, say, Safety or Council.

A major facet of Homer’s existence is due to the fact that the road ends here. I owe my job to that fact.

We are a minor transportation hub. Mail, groceries and people come to Homer from the world at large. Here they are put into airplanes or on boats and taken to their destinations. All day long, I sit at the airport and talk to the air taxi planes as they taxi out and depart for Seldovia, Port Graham, or English Bay in an unending cycle. The narrow gravel airstrips that serve those communities are their link to the outside world and all that keeps them in the 21st Century.

At Homer--we have a road.

The fancy struck me after I got off work this afternoon to drive to Soldotna--seventy miles up the highway toward Anchorage. I stopped by the house to check on the cats and picked up some tapes to listen to and a notebook to jot ideas down. Then I pulled out onto the two-lane Sterling Highway and headed north.

Some wag said we have two seasons in Alaska: Winter and Construction. Gravel trucks and logging trucks and recreational vehicles trickled past me heading south. The northbound traffic seemed to be mostly pick-up trucks. The road is in good condition after major resurfacing in the past decade. I made good time.

The route follows the coastline of the Kenai Peninsula past old homesteads and cabins sinking into the moist earth. The route was chosen by the pioneers for utility, not beauty, but there are occasional views out across the width of Cook Inlet to the west side, where the Alaska Range turns south and becomes the Aleutian Range.

These mountains are the northernmost extension of the coastal mountain ranges that run north and south up the west coast of North America--rugged mountains pushed upward by plate techtonics and dotted with active volcanoes. Looking west toward the Alaska Peninsula, I could see four volcanic peaks, deceptively serene under their snowcaps: Mt. Spurr, Mt. Redoubt, Mt. Iliamna, and far to the south, the volcanic island of Augustine.

Where the view to the west was obscured, the natural world shimmered with the energy of our condensed spring. Birch and aspen just putting out their first leaves, the wild rye along the road sending shoots skyward, and even the occasional early-blooming lupine. The energy of the emerging lifeforce was palpable, almost intoxicating.

Two hours after leaving work, I was standing in the Fred Meyer store in Soldotna, surrounded by an embarrassing abundance of American material wealth. Even in what most Americans would doubtless consider “the sticks”, I can buy the latest computer games or a DVD player, get produce from around the world or even pick up some fast food.

All because of that two-lane strip of pavement that snakes along the edge of Cook Inlet and connects my little town to the world.