Old Harbor Creative Writing

Old Harbor is split into three distinct areas: Uptown, Middle Town, and Downtown. I live near the end, towards the airport, in Uptown. From my driveway you can walk down the hill that the entire area is located on. Taking a left at the intersection, the ocean comes into view. To get to my favorite place in the village, you need to take another left, and go down the dirt road until you hit a small cliff. The lighthouse is the name we use for this area even if there is not a typical lighthouse there. Near the bottom of the cliff, piled on top of each other, there is a fairly stable pile of large rocks. Perched on these rocks, I can see many different aspects of the village. There’s Sitkalidak Island, the hills towards the east that hang over

I had always enjoyed swimming, something my parents had gotten me into at an early age, and my grandfather knew this. When the temperatures rises I was either playing with the hose, or swimming. Considering that taking us swimming was far less costly than the hose, my family would take us to the beach or the “pumphouse” (a name everyone in the village knows). The beach was closer so most times we would end up at the lighthouse swimming at high tide with either my siblings or my cousins. There are countless summers there were I swam in the chilly ocean water or where I just beach combed for interesting shells or rocks. One more prominent memory that I have is after spending hours in the water with my neighbor, my grandfather told us it was time to go. We reluctantly gathered our items and got into the back of our pickup truck. By then we were shivering from the ocean water combined with the wind (not to mention our exhaustion from swimming for such a long period of time). There was a large blanket that we covered ourselves with while we drove from the lighthouse back home; all the while we were soaking wet and had rocks/ sand sticking to us. I continued to go out towards the lighthouse even as my grandfather had stopped taking us as we grew