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To Give and To Get

The Story of Huck & Sam Bishop
Ingenuity Nourishment
strengthgrowsustenancenurturechildrenFamilyfuturemotivationresourcefullivelihoodCommunity

They had signed onto what sounded like a lovely adventure: two years living in and managing a B&B in a small coastal town in Alaska. Huck Bishop, who was 28 and had grown up among corn and soybean fields in Indiana, had always harbored an unlikely desire to live in a fishing village. And, Sam, Huck’s 22-year-old wife, who had skipped her college graduation ceremony to attend their wedding rehearsal, thought Homer sounded like the right place to begin life with her new husband. To be together and work together in a place that was a clean slate for them both. The day after their wedding in Bloomington, they were on a plane to Anchorage.

But halfway into their two-year agreement, the out-of-state owner of the B&B suddenly fired and evicted them. They had 30 days to leave the inn—their home, workplace, and the center of their lives in this new, far-flung place. Thousands of miles from family and friends, they didn’t have a fork, let alone wheels and a roof, to call their own.

Sam forced herself to the front of their congregation at Homer’s Christian Community Church. And church members answered their call. They offered a dry cabin for low rent as well as a loaned car. They gathered up dishes, pots, and pans. And a couple from the church offered Huck a deckhand job on their Bristol Bay drifter.

Huck’s memories from that summer still flow clearly. He remembers the stunning run across Lake Iliamna. He remembers a 7,000-pound haul in a single net. He remembers huddling in his raingear in an empty fish hold to gather scraps of sleep.

“That’s when our lives actually started to change,” Huck said about coming home from Bristol Bay with $10,000 in his pocket. Huck’s first fishing job led to the next and soon after they conceived their son, Basil, now a year and a half old.

"That’s when our lives actually started to change."

What they had thought of as a two-year adventure in Alaska has become something more. “I really want to raise our son in a place where he can be catching fish, fileting fish,” Sam said. Soon after the baby was born, Sam strapped him into a carrier on her chest and took a rod down to the Homer Spit when the silvers were running.

Fishing got them out of dire straits. But for Sam and Huck, salmon became also a connection to the people around them, to their community, and to a way of life they want for their family. Every summer they borrow waders and dip nets from church friends so they can fill their freezer. “It’s about being humble and vulnerable with people,” Sam said.

We ask, we give, we receive.

Now, settled into an apartment in town, Basil toddles around pulling board books off the shelf for mom and dad to read. These days, Sam and Huck are able to give a filet to others when they are in need. Salmon has become a kind of currency for them that has nothing to do with money. We ask, we give, we receive.

Ingenuity Nourishment
strengthgrowsustenancenurturechildren
Story by

By Miranda Weiss

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