In rural areas of Alaska like Homer, cabin fever has been known to drive even the most peaceful of souls to hysteria. So with the sanity of our volunteers dear at heart, we’ve been focusing on excursions that get us out of the house and into the Alaskan wilderness.Just over a week ago, Casey and Andrew led half of the Collective on our first trip across Kachemak Bay. This was a momentous occasion, as the hefty cost of a water taxi ($75/person!) had kept us snug on our side of the Bay for the first part of the month. Luckily Casey and Andrew managed to tap into a deal with the National Park Service, allowing us to do park cleanup in exchange for a discounted ride across the way. So we woke up at the ungodly (yet sunny) hour of 6 AM, piled into our respective water taxis and cleared a ragged trail for the first four hours of the day. As terrible as all that might sound, the view from the deck of our water taxi as it charged towards the opposite shore justified everything. Wind and adrenaline in the morning put coffee to shame.
Cutting Trails

After our park cleanup duty, we hiked to a nearby lake and the sight of my first glacier hit me right in the face. Words don’t begin to suffice here; slap your cheeks a couple of times and dump a bucket of ice over your head, and the effect should be something like what I felt. We attempted to walk around the lake to the glacier, but dive-bombing birds and the setting sun put a stop to our plans. We hiked back to the yurt that was kindly donated to us for the night. There, I realized that I had ingeniously locked the key inside the yurt, so TTT pulled his first yurt break-and-enter. It was pretty nifty. We made a fire, had a face-making contest and slowly dozed off to sleep. The next day a couple people hiked all the way to the glacier, and ran into two bears on the way! The bears ran away, and Andrew swears he “wasn’t scared at all.” Mmmhm.

Photo by: Andrew Otto

This past weekend another small group celebrated summer solstice with a trip to Seldovia for the folk festival. Seldovia is a tiny town with a slick marketing plan (the site advertises it as “Alaska’s best kept secret” above a plug for “UFO Day”) (http://seldovia.com/). It turned out to be a stunning little seaside ditty with 300 locals and a few tourists (a local told us there would be 3,000 people in town for the festival…I’d estimate there were 350. Total.) During the day we went to various workshops on harmonizing, playing the didgeridoo, and understanding music. Afterwards we found an awesome island-like oasis at the edge of town. It was inexplicably warm compared to the rest of Seldovia, so we played and napped until the evening. The festival itself was fun, and we spent the night roasting apples, singing and playing ukulele on the beach. We camped out on the black sand next to the bay.

Seldovia Solstice Sunset

Our return to the collective house was greeted by our new chef Nick’s first meal, which was delicious, to say the least. Things are speeding up as the week begins, and I’m rejuvenated and excited for the future in our little cottage.

-Laura

When you live with lots of people from different parts of the world with different lifestyles, the food situation can become a bit hairy: you have vegetarian & meat eaters, the lactose intolerant, the vegans, those who are allergic to soy & dairy, the whole foodists, the junk foodists, the raw foodists, the kosher, the picky, the calorie counters, and the banana haters. There’s simply no way around it. This results in 4 different kinds of milk (the regular, the organic, the soy and the almond). I won’t get into the rest of the pantry & fridge, but I think you get the idea.

Then there’s space. I have 3 roommates. Other rooms have 3 people total. One room here, has 2. It’s slightly cramped, so the eventual tension of wanting to kill each other comes up from time to time. Trying to stay as diplomatic as possible sometimes involved running out of the room & avoiding eye contact lest you be eaten. Most of all you have to come into it with the innate understanding that IT IS NOT PERSONAL . At this Collective, I am in the very lucky position of having the only bathtub in the house attached to our room. I am in the unlucky position of being in the snoring/narcolepsy/sleeptalking room. Fortunately, as a sleep-talker myself, I also sleep like a rock in a coma, so it doesn’t actually keep me awake.Living with lots of other people means you have to be more conscious of other people’s comfort levels, you have to be patient with other people’s idiosyncrasies, you have to balance yourself & maintain your awareness of other people’s feelings. You also have to put up with smelly socks, dirty laundry, & interpersonal drama.

We’re lucky here in Homer: there’s not a lot of drama – there’s certainly some tension from time to time, but that comes with the territory. We’re all here volunteering for CouchSurfing, so it’s a lot meetings, brainstorming, & sitting behind our computers. It’s an intentional community, temporary, with an incredible view. & the occasional moose in the backyard.