On an Alaskan Beach, a Basket Burned

A great fire blazed on the hearth and the smell of cedar
cleanly split and sweetwood burning bright
wafted a cloud of fragrance down the island…
there birds roosted, folding their long wings,
owls and hawks and the spread-beaked ravens of the sea,
black skimmers who make their living off the waves.

— The Odyssey, Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)

Homer, Alaska is a small town at the southwest tip of the Kenai Peninsula on Kachemak Bay. Homer knows by heart the epic voyages, losses and returns of its fishing fleet. Among the vessels in port, I noticed the skull-and-crossbones adorned Time Bandit, a Bering Sea crab-seeker with its own reality TV series, Deadliest Catch.

The Bering Sea snow crab harvest collapsed in 2018-19 due to a rise in sea temperature, although a limited season for the lucrative crustaceans was permitted again in 2024. Alaska’s Bering and Chukchi seas had lost so much ice cover in 2018-19 that the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration termed it ‘a cascade of impacts that abruptly transformed the regional marine ecosystem, compounding challenges faced by the communities that rely on it.’ Crabs lost the deep ‘cold pool’ habitats where their young could hide from predators. According to a NOAA study, ‘The disappearance of the cold pool affected everything from zooplankton to whales. It drove a massive northerly range expansion of large predatory fish species such as subarctic Walleye pollock and Pacific cod, contributed to an unusual mortality event for three species of ice-associated seals, spurred novel and massive harmful algal bloom events and at least seven consecutive years of multi-species seabird die-offs due to malnutrition.’

With crab so scarce, halibut charters and salmon fishing are other important income and subsistence food sources for Homer and other Alaskan coastal communities but those fish populations are at risk in the Bering Sea as they become by-catch of factory trawlers scooping up Walleye (Alaska) pollock, a type of cod used for processed food products.

Uphill from Homer’s harbour a small museum’s exhibits include the 1989 Exxon Valdez petroleum spill in adjacent Prince William Sound, with accounts of oil-blinded otters, oil-drenched seabirds. Alaska’s settlements are thin along the edge of immense roadless wild, but human life there teeters atop a pyramid of resource exploitation.

Homer is at the western terminus of the US highway system. Floatplanes bring passengers to even more remote communities and water taxis shuttle hikers to the glaciers receding up the mountains of a jagged horizon. I hiked to a closer view of Grewingk Glacier where turquoise icebergs floated in a lake of meltwater. And inland on the Kenai Peninsula, I hiked to Kenai Fjords National Park’s Exit Glacier overlook, a place which provides a dire commentary with signs indicating where the glacier’s edge was in previous years. President Obama visited Exit Glacier in 2015, remarking, ‘This glacier has lost about a mile and a half over the last couple hundred years. But the pace of the reductions of the glacier are accelerating rapidly each and every year. And this is as good of a signpost of what we’re dealing with when it comes to climate change as just about anything.’ The retreat is going faster and faster, with Exit Glacier now described as ‘shrivelling’.

Alaskans are diverse, with Indigenous peoples of many languages and cultures (Homer is on land of the Dena’ina.) The state’s stories are told by survivors, old timers, fortune-seekers, refugees. Artists and misfits are cherished in Homer, a town of patched boats and rusty trucks. With about 5,000 residents, Homer takes ‘all are welcome’ particularly seriously and LGBTQ+ Pride gets a whole week of celebration there every year.

The narrow Homer Spit extends into Kachemak Bay

I was in Alaska during August-September 2024, looking for musk oxen (the Kenai Peninsula is one of the places where they are kept in captivity) and following trails of black spruce and glittering ice and caribou lichens. I just happened to be in Homer the weekend of Burning Basket, an annual community art event.

For our whole human history, bonfires have drawn communities closer, sometimes burning a bound-together effigy, sometimes reflected in the sea. This one in present day Alaska does not incinerate a personage, a creature or a building. This one puts flame to an ephemerally woven container, as imagined by Homer artist Mavis Muller to provide a yearly ritual of unburdening. Fishing villages on all the world’s coasts need all the protection they can summon and every way to commemorate the lost. Each has its own traditions: Sicilian fleets will be blessed, Vietnamese prows painted with eyes, the Chinese goddess Mazu bathed in incense smoke, and in Alaska the Basket burned.

For our whole human history, bonfires have drawn communities closer … This one puts flame to an ephemerally woven container

On the shore of Kachemak Bay, school children installed a walking maze of stones, shells and branches near the Basket at Marine Park. Volunteers had woven the Basket with locally gathered materials like alder branches, seagrass and, appropriately, fireweed. Because basket-weaving was one of her artistic skills, Muller had decided a basket would be the structure for her first art work of impermanence in her home town. The container has been a group effort ever since, weaving together friends and strangers.

The day before the 8th September 2024 burning the volunteers were adorning the Basket with peonies, lush, soft blossoms that thrive in Homer’s brief summers however harsh the winters may be. The word ‘give’ in a heart-shaped twig frame topped the Basket. Homer keeps a lot of volunteers busy year-round, putting on a Winter Carnival and a summer event that crowned a ‘Zucchini Queenie’, packing charity food boxes, painting murals. ‘Give’ would honour them as well as Burning Basket’s own loyal weaver/builder/decorators.

Finishing touches on the Basket, the day before the burning

A few hundred people gathered, dressed in layers for the damp chill. It was time for a consoling hug, a warming drink, admiring a new baby or a teen’s phone video. As the participants arrived many inserted or attached to the Basket their scraps of paper inscribed with memorials, obstacles to overcome, dreams. Some of the paper messages were folded into origami birds, meaningful in a town that’s a major stopover for migrating sandhill cranes. Mornings and evenings you could hear the clacking of the cranes in a wetland adjacent to this park.

Mavis Muller, the artist who’s made these Baskets burn in Homer since 2004, addressed the crowd, calling the annual projects her ‘life’s work.’ She led us in a chant of ‘give’ and the 21 previous one-word themes, including ‘renew’, ‘inspire’, ‘recover’ and ‘shine’.

Noting that the burning was simultaneously celebratory and solemn, she commented, ‘Many here, including myself, are grieving.’ Attendees mourned longtime supporters of the event. Florence Penrose, a former nurse who baked cookies for the volunteers every year, had died at 101 in July. Barefoot philosopher Steve Gibson died at his Small Potatoes Lumber Mill in January. He’d always donated scrap wood filler which burned slowly enough to keep the Basket from just combusting in minutes. In his youth Gibson won a case for conscientious objection exemption from military service on moral grounds.

Homer’s other losses over the year since the previous burning had included a small plane’s pilot, a tourist family of four on a capsized fishing excursion and a local wildlife photographer killed by a moose. Brianna Hetrick, who had been a local sports star, was murdered. In August commercial fisher Lauren LeFree of Homer had fallen from a trawler named Faithful and vanished into Icy Strait.

As well as the wide range of death from natural and other causes, Homer lived with environmental pressures: the inescapable glacier attrition, storm surges eroding the Homer Spit, marine plastic pollution, where the hell had the crabs all gone. A young sandhill crane was found strangled by debris that year. Many Homer dwellers (bird protectors or genderqueer kids or immigrants) sensed a different kind of storm approaching as the US presidential election loomed two months ahead.

Just at dusk, the Basket was lit at its base. The onlookers stood far enough away to seem safe but close enough to feel the warmth, to turn golden in the firelight and to perhaps get zapped by flying cinders. As the Basket crackled into full flame, its paper messages curled to ash and fireworks hidden in the interior shot the sky with sparkles.

The day before, I had asked a volunteer if it was OK for non-residents to come to the burning. ‘Oh yes, everybody is welcome,’ he replied. So my own scrawled bit of paper was mixed in with Homer’s skyward messages. Being from Oregon there is a lot of persistently ‘hippie’ culture around that I manage to avoid (like Naked Bike Rides and the Country Fair). Burning Basket had plenty of that vibe going on, but the absolute need for it that I could sense, the so eagerly awaited annual spectacle on that cold beach, made me very grateful to be included.

Once the Basket was completely consumed, fire dancers circled its embers, hoops and spinners searing their orbits. It was dark when the crowd left the beach, pebbles, sand, mud, road. The glaciers crumble. The salmon hide and the snow crabs fade away. Time will be borrowed or stolen.