Reflection

In my story, I chose to focus more on the people rather than the place itself. Throughout the entire text adventure I was trying to focus on what its like to live in my home town and what its like growing up there. Where I am from, Homer, Alaska, is probably one of the most beautiful places in all of Alaska. Tourists travel from all around the world to see the mountains and the oceans. Visitors enjoy going fishing, hiking around, and just seeing the sights. People come to the small town to experience what its like to live in a small town, if only for a few days; but the truth is that they can never fully experience what it’s like to grow up in such a tight knit, small tourist town like that in just a few days.

When ever I hear people who have visited or lived in Homer for a few months, or even a few years, talking about how horrible it was to live in such a small town,or how there was never anything to do, I think to my self, “This place isn’t their home.’ I feel very different about Homer. Visitors come to see the mountains and the ocean, but the people are the reason they never leave. It such a perfect melting pot of hippies and hillbillies that the ratio is nearly perfect. Almost everyone is genuinely nice and down to earth, and there is rarely a conflict. Again, it’s not the beauty of the place thats the best, its the people.

In Homer, everyone seems to be either an artist, a fisherman, a tourist, or some sort of mixture of the three. When I was working on the story I wanted there to be kind of a choice between staying and leaving. If they chose to stay I wanted it to be clear that there is not a wide variety of occupations available, but they were good ones. If they chose to leave I wanted it to be clear that they could pretty much do whatever they want with the line, “Life is what you make it.’ By doing that I wanted to sort of replicate the decisions I was trying to make coming out of high school, and still am dealing with now. I wanted to emphasize how hard the decisions can be when the outcome of each is not quite clear.

I am still not one hundred percent sure if focusing more on the people rather than the place was the best decision. I almost feel like I am not doing Homer justice by describing in detail it’s beauty, but at the same time I feel like if I did that then the reader would feel more like a tourist than a resident. I hope that the story got the point across of how hard it is to leave a small town when you were born and raised there, and if you do leave, how hard it is to stay away.

Painting by Kerry O’Gorman

This is the link that works:  https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/tcav5qojmukwoe278aougg/the-end-of-the-road

-David Woo