I write. In Homer.

This is it! I write this post from a coffee shop in Homer, Alaska! I am sitting in the Spit Sisters Café on the Homer spit. It is raining outside, and nearly every person who comes in is decked out in rubber boots, yellow rain gear, and warm, wooly hats. People don’t seem to be concerned with appearance so much here. They wear what they’ve got to wear.

Out the window – which is glazed with steam from coffee-warmed air kissing drizzly rain through the pane – there are boats coming and going and rocking and bobbing. Some are sleek. Some look like Victorian houses set upon a hull and set adrift. They are green and white and red and blue. I imagine some are used for weekend wanderings, while others are a person’s very livelihood. As we in Montana and Wyoming look to cattle for our meat, milk and money, residents of these small fishing towns look to halibut and salmon. People here are wet, rubber clad, and smell of fish, while our skin flakes off with the desert dryness and we smell of hay and manure beneath the straw brims of our cowboy hats.

Look at me. This long-awaited writing destination has brought forth strokes of cliché. Ah well. There must be a reason so many writers write sweeping prose about the stuff of nearly extinct ways of life. As our culture progresses rapidly into this technological age, we are bound to look back fondly at work that maybe wasn’t so syrupy sweet as we make it out to be. But that is what memories do: They polish off the scratches and dirt and reflect back to us a shiny remembrance that somehow helps us to face a murky future.

I have to pee. My bladder has always interrupted my most philosophical thoughts. I also grow anxious to go see this town of legend and lore. I am going to go walk the Homer spit and breathe in the misty, salty air until it fills my memory with images of steam and coffee-driven creativity and the time I sat here in the Spit Sisters Café and fulfilled a silly – but strong and long-held – dream.

Goodbye for now, world. I go back into the wild.