Most of you probably think summer is the best time to visit the northlands, and you’re not wrong. May and June have beautiful weather, and things are just starting to get growing and going.

I’m up for about two weeks in Homer, Alaska, which is my hometown. It’s a popular tourist destination these days, and its most famous landmark, the Homer Spit, is encrusted with little shacks selling trinkets. None of them, of course, were there when I was a kid. My father, who moved here in the late seventies, recalls it being nothing but the harbor, the ferry terminal, and half a dozen halibut charter operations.

The Spit is a basically a big ass pile of gravel left by a retreating glacier an era before humans moved in, and it is slowly eroding. The tsunami following the 1964 earthquake diminished its size considerably, and there’s a certain portion of the local population waiting for the next one to wash away the RVs which congregate there in the summer months.

Alaskans have a love-hate relationship with tourists, really. Give us your money, but quit crowding our space. I remember a t-shirt someone had in high school that said ‘if it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?’ A friend of mine would pull her car over and point into the distance to see how many cars would stop to look for the purported eagle or moose.

We get tired of being asked if we take American currency, or what the altitude is at the harbor. ‘Bout four feet above sea level…

But I spent two summers working as a kayak guide at a wilderness lodge and made good money showing people sea otters, telling them which volcano was which, and answering their questions about bald eagles.

(People have a lot of questions about bald eagles, by the way. One set of guests would want to know what their home range was, and if I didn’t know I’d look it up in the evening. Then the next people would want to know how much they weighed. I’d add that fact to my knowledge store, and then get asked how long they live.)

And now I’m home, but I haven’t lived here for many years. I notice how quiet it is, without the city noise. I snicker a little bit in the coffee shop when the barista is telling everyone that it will be a thousand degrees and the forecast is for a high of 75. A massive spruce bark beetle infestation while I was in high school killed all the biggest trees, and everything looks subtly different. I still know where most eveything is, but I have the vague feeling that the locals are looking askance at me. I’m practically a tourist myself.