Homer and Kachemak Bay. First Visit in 1968, Part 1

The first time I visited Homer, Alaska on Kachemak Bay was in early May of 1968. The trip was impromptu, the decision made after a Saturday night of bar hopping. Some might conclude the midnight adventure was nothing more than an impulsive, alcohol fueled piece of foolishness, but people of northern latitudes would recognize such an act with sympathetic understanding. Those who have endured a dark, seemingly endless winter, will appreciate the need that wells up when longer days and cloudless skies clearly register the impending spring; when cabin fever finally breaks, when the need to get outside, to do something, go anywhere, becomes overpowering.

So, Wes Warner and I were off on our first look at the Alaska that exists outside of Anchorage. Wes and I shared an apartment with two other guys. We had been friends since the previous September. He was a recent divorcee just arrived from Idaho, and I had pulled into the state over the ALCAN a couple months before.

I don’t remember why we arrived at a Homer destination, but were, never-the-less, driving through a moonlit night along Turnagain Arm, climbing the long incline onto Turnagain Pass, and going by landmarks that we would revisit hundreds of more times in the years to come. The road through the mountains was narrow and tortuous as it followed the contours of the land, but oil money, flowing from the North Slope, would eventually transform it to super-highway quality.

Fatigue replaced exuberance after three hours. Morning light showed behind us as we cleared the mountains and preceded through the “Kenai Burn”. We figured the fire had swept through the forest, maybe a year or two before, but were surprised to learn those white skeletons of dead trees, thousands of them, had been standing there for more than twenty years. I discovered at a later date that there were as many trees crisscrossed on the forest floor as were standing - obstacles, one after the other, to step and climb over.

I don’t remember Soldotna, partly because there wasn’t much there, a filling station, maybe a restaurant, but mainly because I’d dropped off to sleep with my head resting against the front passenger window. Wes, driving his little foreign car, bumped to an abrupt stop, and announced that we had just ran out of gas. I roused from slumber to see a “Y” intersection, of which I’m still trying to figure its location. He said the gas station in Soldotna, only a short way back, was closed and he had hoped to make it to the next one - where ever that may have been. I gallantly offered to stay with the car, and rolled into the more comfortable backseat as Wes took off down the road with a gas can in hand.
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