Alaska: Homer and Wake In Fright

"Are you here? I'm the idiot in plaid rain boots in front."

I had my suspicions that was who Becca was- there were only two girls at the Homer Concert on the Lawn that seemed to fit her couchsurfing profile - but it was useful to get in text nonetheless. As my third host, Becca, didn't so much offer me a couch but a place to park my car (and sleep in) and seamless integration into her social life. In the days that follow, I'm John Grant's inverse. He finds himself held financially captive in Bundanyabba owing to 2up and falls in with drunks and yobbos in the ensuing days and weeks (Wake In Fright). His arrival at The Yabba is only for it to be a port to somewhere else. Likewise, Homer becomes my port of call on the way to Seward, its on-the-way nature owing only to the vagaries of couchsurfing hosts and their relative availability, not any sort of geographical convenience.

Our stories are of course divergent. Wake In Fright - even forty something years on - remains one of the best and most chilling representations of the Australian outback I've ever seen. It's confronting. The Yabba's inhabitants want to inhabit the screen as caricatures but for every moment that seems an Australian stereotype, somewhere or sometime, I've seen it in the Pilbara, Kimberley or Territory. Homer has these people too, but they inter no terror. Both places hold you captive but it doesn't take losing all my money and being in a perpetual state of inebriation (OK, the latter probably did happen) for me to find Homer as inescapable. After a day or two - firm friends already made - you welcome its embrace. Nothing is so much planned but characters drift into each other with a charming regularity as if it were scripted. Becca the seeming anchor to my days, Sarah's tales of tattoos, hunting and Wyoming, Joe's case for Superman to be taken more seriously as a hero over the course of two nights of heavy drinking, Kelsea with her easily won affection and a chorus of barflies who make cameo roles through the last gasp moments of evenings or carry the atmosphere of the world cup final, they become the fabric to my time in Homer.

I came for two days and stayed for five. Maybe it was Stockholm Syndrome.

Let's face it, Homer is not the most unappealing metaphorical jailor.