BARBARA PETERSEN lives in Homer, Alaska, a tiny town on the lower Kenai Peninsula to the south of Anchorage. She and her husband Lance lived in Anchorage when Art Davidson had first arrived there, and she got to know Art pretty well from giving him rides whenever she saw him hitchhiking. Barbara is in her mid-thirties; she's a sensitive, articulate woman who refuses to try to be sophisticated and who insists on smiling even when there's pain in her eyes. She worked this summer in Homer's only industry, the Alaska Seafoods cannery, along with a group composed mostly of students who came to Alaska for the summer and ended up in the cannery. Barbara did more than her share of salmon-gutting.
Barbara's husband Lance was the foreman of the unloading crew at the cannery, operating the hoist that carried loads of fish from the boats up to the unloading dock, and tallying the weights. In his dirty white Levis, his quilted parka vest, with his wavy black hair combed back and a Camel firmly in the corner of his mouth, Lance looks about the way you'd expect an unloading foreman in a small town on the coast of Alaska to look.
Lance is a writer; as he puts it, he and Barbara "came out of retirement" for several weeks this summer to make some money. In the middle of August, when they'd made enough, they went back into retirement. One of his friends describes Lance's personal philosophy of labor in this way: "Work early, work hard, and then retire."
Last summer, before going into retirement for the first time, Lance drove gasoline trucks through burning timberland in the Kenai Fire to supply the vehicles of the forest-fire fighting crews; it paid very well. When the fire was out, Lance published an article about it in a fireman's magazine.
He spent most of last winter writing a novel, Memoirs of Captain Brown, based on the life of a man who ran away to Alaska in the thirties at the age of thirteen to become a fisherman. Captain Brown has had the kind of experiences that are more likely to be passed off as fiction than as fact.
Lance has mixed feelings about the two years of graduate study in writing that he's done- "Graduate writing courses are mainly concerned with teaching people how to teach other people how to write. They get involved in the question of whether it's really possible for a writer to communicate, and things like that. When they get to that point, they're not going to get anywhere. I had to getaway from a lot of what I've learned in writing courses when I wrote my book, and concentrate instead on how to tell a good story well. Writers today get so involved with other things that it's hard to set down experience simply as a story you want to tell."
Barbara and Lance live in an uncompleted summer cabin that belongs to friends. Inside, insulation bulges out from between, the exposed uprights of the walls; partition separate the interior into three small rooms at the front and a large kitchen-dining-living-bedroom that looks out through windows over a tidal inlet of Kachemak Bay to the village of Homer and the bluffs above the town. A big, black, Franklin stove warms the cabin, burning lumps of soft coal that are washed from an exposed vein in the cliffs on the other side of the inlet and carried by the waves to the beach by the cabin. Their dinner table is a huge telephone cable spool, sanded, stained and polished to a rich shine; a bunch of dried wildflowers and some fresh ginger hangs from a rafter; neatly assembled shelves and counters of scrap wood line the kitchen walls.
Barbara bakes whole-grain sourdough bread every day; she has a small garden, and wild peas and berries grow on the point, Lance can skin and butcher a moose so that almost all the meat is steak; they keep their yearly moose in a friend's freezer in town. In the summer, fresh salmon, shrimp and crab are easy to come by in Homer.
Though they made the same wages as the transient young people who worked at the cannery and camped on the beach nearby, Barbara and Lance often managed to put together magnificent dinner-feasts-fresh shrimp, Dungeness and King Crab, hamburgers, Lance's spiced back-of-the-stove beans, and fresh fruit-for some of the cannery workers. Their home became a home for those who had none other in Alaska.
In the winter, Barbara and Lance don't have so many visitors; when there's snow, most cars can't make it over the road to their point of land. Those people who do make it in for a long visit have to learn a few things. "When people come here to stay with us here in the winter," Lance explains, "it takes a while for them to unwind. They get here and they seem to be waiting for something to happen. After a while they begin to relax-they find out that they can just live and take their time to do things. I spent hours last year just watching an eagle catching air currents by the cliffs out there. It was really remarkable-he'd balance in the air, tilt and dip, and rise again forever without moving his wings.
Ask Lance what he and Barbara will be doing a year from now, and you won't get much of an answer. The future doesn't impose on them from too great a distance. "I'm trying to get my novel published. We'll stay here in Homer through this winter. After that..."