ALASKA: A Homer Odyssey

Traveling without Walter is just not the same ☹

I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so ridiculous—all of it. The sound bubbled up, throaty, deep, and pure. My husband Andy joined in, laughing at me laughing so hard. It was like when you have silently borne some personal grief for so long that the dam can’t hold it back any longer and it spills over—a little trickle over the top at first, then a fissure appears and the dam starts to crumble until, with a mighty roar, the whole thing bursts and you can’t stop the flow and your shoulders heave and you weep until your eyes finally stop leaking and your sobs are spent.

Yeah. It was like that, but way more fun.

Not all of the laughter was joyful. Some of it was just raw emotion with nowhere else to go. But suddenly, it was funny, all of it—even the parts with the bitter edge. Bust-a-gut funny. It rumbled from somewhere deep in my chest and echoed throughout the back of the borrowed Subaru.

We wrestled out of our narrow sleeping bags, bumping into each other and bouncing unnaturally on the air mattresses—which, I am pleased to report, had remained inflated overnight. You never know with these things. Getting in and out of a mummy bag in the confines of a two-man tent is difficult enough. Wriggling out while inside a compact hatchback, unable to sit up more than halfway, was pure comedy.

I’d hoped to just grab a change of clothes and my toothbrush, slip out of the car, and walk to the lovely little restroom over by the baseball diamonds. But that was not to be.

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The previous night, after a visit to the Twisted Goat for pizza and the Salty Dawg Saloon for its famous quirky charm, we had crept around charming Homer, Alaska, at the southern end of the Kenai Peninsula, for nearly an hour, looking for someplace—anyplace somewhat private—where we could park for free overnight.

Alas, that town is locked up tight; you either pay for a campsite or book a room. They know what they’ve got in that drop-dead gorgeous corner of the world—and it is indeed worth paying for. But as I have mentioned a time or twelve, I lean hard toward frugality. If there is a cheaper way to do something, I am generally happy to rebrand discomfort as ⓐⓓⓥⓔⓝⓣⓤⓡⓔ and put up with the resulting inconveniences. Rather than paying for expensive lodging—the only kind that exists in Homer—or even a campground where we could pitch a tent (in the rain), we decided to just fold down the back seat and see if we fit. Spoiler alert: we don’t, haha.

Finally, at midnight’s twilight, we’d stumbled upon this little league baseball park at the end of an unfinished housing development—down a gravel road so new and pristine it hadn’t even been named or added to Google Maps yet. No signs forbade us from camping or overnight parking. No houses looked out at the fields—nothing but woods and a parking lot and an after-hours construction site. Ideal. We parked at the furthest edge of the lot, next to a row of large boulders laid out to mark the boundary, then grinned at each before declaring our customary statement of finality, “Home sweet home!”

I had walked over to the restroom, housed in one of those little modular buildings you generally only see at higher class outdoor events. Delightfully clean, it had plenty of toilet paper, a real porcelain sink, and a high-velocity turbo hand dryer—the kind that always reveals just how thin and loose the skin on my aging hands has become. For a full-time nomad who spends most nights boondocking, this was a luxury amenity.

As I walked back to the car—bladder empty, hands and teeth clean—I nodded my respect to the only other vehicle in the lot, a lone truck camper, tall and dark and quiet with the window shades already closed up for the night.

I envied those window shades. When we camp in Walter, our big yellow adventure truck, we, too, are secure and tall and private—a one-bedroom mobile fortress with a bonus kitchenette. The borrowed Subaru—grateful as we were that our friends let us use it—came with no such extravagance.

Back at the car, Andy was already in camp set-up mode. The inflatable tandem kayak, in its wheeled canvas carrying case, had to be relocated to the front passenger seat. The little Yeti cooler we’d likewise borrowed went to the driver seat. Our bags of clothes and basic toiletries, food, raincoats, down jackets, hiking boots, the tent (just in case), the folding table, and our hiking poles were all stuffed and stacked onto the floor of the backseat area, under the folded seat so we could make maximum use of the cargo area for sleeping. We placed our tall muck boots up front on the dash, careful to keep them upright so we didn’t dump out the cans of fruity seltzer water they contained. Finally, we balanced the cardboard box containing that night’s leftover pizza on top of the cooler.

Next, we inflated the air mattresses—individual camping pads, not a big mattress with an electric pump. Both are manually filled by forcing ambient air through a one-way valve. Andy’s involves some ingenious method of waving an external bag around, then snapping it shut, and rolling it tightly to force the air into the mattress, then doing it all again several more times. Mine involves repeatedly pushing on a spongy cushion at one end of the mattress like I’m performing violent CPR-style chest compressions on the poor thing, pushing air into its lungs without ever allowing it to exhale.

You can imagine the scene with both of us trying to inflate our mattresses simultaneously. Whoosh, snap, squeeze, whoosh, snap, squeeze. Push, push, push, push, push, push.

By the time we had inflated our mattresses—and at such awkward angles, in such a cramped space—we had each accomplished a full-body workout. Finally folding ourselves into our sleeping bags, we noted the windows of the Subie were all steamed up against the increasing darkness. The casual observer might have assumed something more romantic was happening inside the bouncing and lurching vehicle.

The resulting sleeping space wasn’t entirely long enough for two full-grown adults to completely stretch out, but it was close enough. One or two nights would be fine. And, of course, if the first night of a particularly rustic arrangement is horribly sleepless, the second night usually tends to be better, just out of pure exhaustion. So, that’s always something to look forward to, I suppose.

As I lay in my makeshift bed trying to bring my heart rate back down from aerobic mode to rest mode, I pined for Walter, our beloved big yellow adventure truck. I miss that big brute. But ever since our recent trip to the Arctic Ocean, Walter has continued to have issues—serious issues.

We’ve made the hard decision to ground him as much as possible until we can put him on a ferry south. He needs a doctor, a specialist—a surgeon, actually—and the right person for the job is in Victoria, British Columbia. Our ferry, however, doesn’t sail until mid-August, so we are finding ways to make the most of our remaining time in Alaska—even if isn’t quite what we’d hoped for.

In regular life mode, after all, one expects to have frustrations and setbacks arise occasionally. When doing regular life at home, the dishwasher floods the kitchen. Tree branches come down in a storm. The car needs new brakes.

Only in vacation mode, when we are attempting to escape regular life and all its hassles for a week or two, do we expect things to go exactly according to our plans. In vacation mode, a cancelled flight or feeling under the weather or five straight days of rain can feel like a disaster, like everything is ruined.

But we are not on vacation. Nomadic travel is our regular life. We’ve been on the road full-time for nearly a year now. Things are bound to go wonky once in a while. Walter is down, and we will have some big expenses to get him fixed back up again. But that’s life. At least we have generous and kind-hearted friends who have loaned us a Subaru and a Yeti cooler, right? Ⓐⓓⓥⓔⓝⓣⓤⓡⓔ.

After a less-than-stellar night’s sleep in the baseball diamond’s parking lot, it was time to continue our Homer odyssey. Andy extricated himself from his sleeping bag first, then completed the required gymnastics to get his feet and legs out the passenger door conveniently located next to his head and shoulders. It was not something we could possibly do at the same time, so I waited my turn, giggling at the image in my imagination of a panel of Olympic judges raising scorecards to rate his clearly subpar performance.

In the process of attempting to exit the vehicle, he somehow accidentally set off the car alarm.

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

He scrambled to find the keys.

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

They had to be somewhere. In his jacket pocket? But where was his jacket?

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙆

He finally found them and made the dreadful noise stop.

My laughter at his antics, at our terrible night, at our overall situation and lifestyle choice, at the absurdity of it all, taken together and shaken down to its elemental essence, bubbled over, spilling out uncontrollably for quite some time until it eventually came in shorter bursts, finally running its course and petering out.

When he had successfully made it out of the car, Andy offered for me to just stay put until he drove us back over to the restrooms across the lot. No need to walk all that way and back again when we were just headed out anyway. I accepted his offer and snuggled back down into my cozy bag.

Hero that he is, he transferred the cooler, boots, and pizza box to his now vacated sleeping space, then chauffeured me to the porta-potty building while I lounged in bed. Don’t be jealous. It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it might sound. Andy grabbed a full change of clothes and his toothbrush and walked up the steps to the restroom.

I then did the Hokey Pokey thing to turn myself around, fighting against my own body weight to pull the top edge of my air mattress up whilst still leaning on it so I could reach past it and rummage through my own bag of clothes on the floor beneath. Before I could finish contorting my legs up next to my head to exit the vehicle, though, Andy returned, grinning. The bathrooms were now locked. The green vacant signs were still visible, indicating the doors had been locked from the outside while we slept. We’d apparently been discovered and gently informed we were not welcome.

Whoopsie.

In need of a place to pee at the very least, and feeling suddenly exposed and under surveillance, we looked up other nearby options online. The visitor center wouldn’t open for another hour. A gas station, or perhaps the grocery store, would suffice. But on our way, we passed a place called Captain’s Coffee. The neon sign in the window blinked O-P-E-N. Several cars were already in the parking lot. Bingo. We discreetly shoved clean underwear and our toothbrushes into our jacket pockets and strolled inside like we were the most normal people in the world—just your average tourists out for a morning coffee.

Oh, if they only knew.

What a weird little life we lead. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I do miss Walter, though.

Until next week,

Sherry

P.S. The stories that got away this week—the ones I’ll have to save for the book—include:

• the entertaining conversation between two fishing boat deck hands we overheard at the Salty Dawg Saloon

• getting picked up on (!!) at said saloon when Andy had slipped away for a moment

• the Kenai Peninsula’s quirky oddities

• the five-mile hike through serious bear country and even more serious black fly country to watch the salmon jumping up a series of waterfalls

• kayaking in the most impossibly clear turquoise waters through lush granite coves decorated with bright orange lichen and wildflowers

• meeting a young nomad named BeBop whose only life goals—funded by cryptocurrency—include seeing his mom is well-cared for and organizing “midget wrestling” events featuring the guy who played R2-D2 and the guy from Willow.

Even without our beloved Walter, it’s been quite a week for collecting stories. And the fishing village of Homer was especially lovely. If you’re going to Alaska, I recommend it. Here are a few photos, including a lovely poem by Alaskan poet Wendy Erd and our visit to the Salty Dawg Saloon:

If you’d like to read more about our recent trip to the Arctic Circle, read:

ALASKA: Confronting hard truths in the Arctic Circle

And if you enjoy entertaining stories involving unexpected comical chaos, check out this gem—one of my favorite memories:

USA: Barnyard Church; plus a big, blustery bonus animal