To survive in Homer, you have to make your own way. You have to want to be here because you've fallen in love with Homer and can't imagine living somewhere else. Amazingly, once you figure that out, things happen. Jobs appear. Opportunities cross your path.

Which is kind of how I came to Homer 15 years ago.

I first visited Homer in early October 1982, a few years after coming to Anchorage in 1979. I drove down with my sister Helen, my brother-in-law Charlie, Mom and her second husband, Vin. Mom and Vin stayed at Land's End. Helen, Charlie and I camped on the Spit. We drove out East End Road past McNeil Canyon on a gorgeous fall day. My sister took a photo of me and Mom with Grewingk Glacier in the background. I have this crazy-wild grin on my face. Yeah, I'd found the real Alaska I'd been looking for.

The summer I met my wife Jenny at the Nilnunqua archaeological field school near Funny River, one weekend we drove down to Homer. We camped on the Spit and bought Dungeness crab, three for $10. Some tourist has a photo of us trying to cook a huge Dungie in a teeny little pot on a backpacking stove. I knew I wanted to live in a place where you could cook crab on the beach. Jenny and I fell in love and stayed in Anchorage, though.

After college, Jenny got a job at the old Book Cache bookstore chain in Anchorage, where she met our good friend Sue Post. Sue's mom Joy and her brother Lee owned the Homer Bookstore, and so we began coming down to Homer -- a lot. After my first novel, "After the Zap," came out in 1987, Joy and Lee put it up in the "local authors" section of the Bookstore.

"But I don't live in Homer," I told Joy, and she said, "Well, you might as well."

So when the Posts offered Jenny a job at the Bookstore, we jumped at the chance to move down here. Sue had been wanting to come back home, too. With Sue's boyfriend (and now husband) Jim, in the summer of 1994, the four of us bought a nice little four-lot subdivision on Diamond Ridge.

I'd been teaching distance education classes at the University of Alaska Anchorage and talked my boss into letting me teach classes from Homer -- it was distance ed, right? We could make it work.

Fifteen years ago last Aug. 27, we hauled all our gear down in two cars, our sled dogs in sky kennels jammed in our VW Westphalia camper van. We put up a wall tent. We dug a hole for an outhouse. We reassembled the greenhouse our friends had given us for a wedding present and used that as our temporary kitchen. When we got a driveway in, we shivered in the fall cold in the van, our cat TC crawling under the covers for warmth.

Stud by stud, joist by joist, in six weeks of a building dervish, we closed in a 16-foot-by-20-foot cabin, beating the first serious snowfall. By New Year's we had the cabin insulated, even sheetrocked, and we were home.

We built another cabin for Sue and Jim. Over the years, our prove-up shack grew, acquiring running water and flush toilets, until it became a genuine house with guest bedrooms.

My life in Homer didn't happen overnight. It took 12 years to move here after first seeing Homer. Once here, though, I fell more in love with the town. I made friends, and the community welcomed me, accepted me. I got a few teaching gigs at the college, and then I fell into this job at the Homer News.

Homer's charm is that life is hard in Homer -- and it's also its curse. The usual rules don't apply. Alaska challenges everyone with its climate, its dangers and its distance from homes we've left behind. Homer challenges you even more. You can't expect to make a lot of money here, and if you do -- if you're blessed with a job that pays really well -- then you should be grateful for what you have, and know that not everyone is so lucky.

Maybe we can build an economy that offers every Homer-raised child a sweet job in this town, and maybe we can do that without screwing up the place, too. If we do that, though, I worry that the good jobs would go to artists from California who don't have the gumption to figure out how to live here without a cushy job.

"Homer, Alaska: We're here because we're not all there," it says on the bumper sticker Ginger VanWagoner sells. Homer selects its own, by luck of birth or stubborn determination. If you can figure that out, you'll make your way here one way or another, and you'll stay.

You'll stay and be welcomed by your fellow Homerites -- welcomed, loved and embraced, like I have been. Thank you, Homer, for making me feel at home.

Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong.@homernews.com.