Sara Loewen

Kodiak's hidden treasures include a remade WWII bunker and a liberty ship-turned-turned-cannery.

Living here is like that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Name anyone, and eventually you’ll find a connection among our shared histories and friendships.

Here’s a formula for raising good kids: Every year, pack up the family and head to a remote cabin. Spend the summer working outside. Go without television, telephones or internet. Invite grandma.

It's been 10 years, three kids and two dogs since Sara and Pete first began building their cabin on Amook Island, their summer home during Kodiak's commercial setnetting season. While moving between Kodiak and Amook hasn't gotten any easier and cabin fever is a rainy day reality, Sara still celebrates the uninterrupted time she gets to spend with her growing family.

"Salmon are the story of both my birth family and the family I’ve made. They are incentive for living a life that is materially simpler and raising children with an ecological conscience."

June in Kodiak is a month of endless light. Even after midnight, the sun softens more than sets. But one hundred years ago, late in the afternoon on June 6, 1912, daylight was snuffed out completely.

On a recent gray, rainy day at our fish site on Kodiak, my husband carried the mail up from the skiff. Inside a slightly soggy envelope from my mom was a present, Stacy Studebakers' field guide, "Wildflowers and other Plant Life of the Kodiak Archipelago" (Sense of Place Press, $25).

In Kodiak snowstorms usually make winter's arrival hard to ignore. It's a subtler shift from spring to summer. Except for this year, when May blazed in with several weeks of sunshine.

Kelp, sea anemones, jellyfish, waves and gulls. Add multiple blizzards and you could be on any Kodiak beach this spring. Except that I was at a dress rehearsal for the Woodland Dance Studio spring recital. These seagulls were wearing tap shoes.

We traveled to Bolivia in March, and while we were gone there were several uncommon visitors to Kodiak Island. We missed seeing an elephant seal at a beach right in town and trumpeter swans at Lake Rose Tead.

Our son's favorite book is Blueberries for Sal, a story about a mother and daughter and a sow and cub berry-picking on the same hill. I don't think Liam connects the bears in the story to the bears we live with all summer; I think he just loves blueberries.

I feel hopeful about the new year, the new president and the daily gains of daylight, but I still fight winter blues after days of slush and rain and wet snow slopping onto the driver's seat. January in Alaska always makes me crave color and light.

KODIAK -- "No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow." That quote by Lin Yutang was especially true for my parents in December when they finished their vacation with several nights on the SeaTac airport floor. The passengers broke into applause when their jet finally took off from the snowy runway.

It is hard to stay inside on a sunny day in Kodiak. Everyone knows how quickly our island weather changes and that the next blue sky might be a long time coming. We may wake to fluffy new snow, but it is often a bruising snowball consistency by lunch and then melts into a citywide puddle over the ice.

After the salmon season ends, we like to stay a month or so out at the cabin in Uyak Bay. There is still work to do, but there is also a quiet that settles around the bay. It is more than the fact that the radios go silent once most of the setnet families have stored their nets and boats and left for other homes.