WHITTIER
If you are fortunate enough to travel to various parts of the world, you may eventually begin to notice that some places feel a lot like other places, even if they’re thousands of miles apart. There are blocks in Madrid that could be transplanted to the Bronx without causing a stir. The marshes of central Botswana and the Amazon jungles of Peru look (and smell) like the Everglades. Whittier, which is frequently referred to as the Weirdest Town in Alaska, could be the sister city of Pago Pago, in American Samoa. Both are situated on lush, horseshoe-shaped harbors, enclosed by steep green mountainsides that rise nearly vertically from the sea. Both contain a lot of decaying infrastructure left behind by the U.S. military. Both get a lot of rain almost daily. And both are home to a lot of Samoans.
This last thought occurred to me as I sat in the lobby of Whittier’s one large residential building. While I waited for my laundry to dry down the hall on a blustery gray summer day, three different women walked past wearing traditional Samoan lavalava wrap skirts. I asked the last of them if there was a Polynesian-themed party going on, perhaps a luau for a visiting cruise ship. She told me that, no, a couple of dozen people had made the move from American Samoa a few years back, starting with a pastor who had felt called to serve the Lord in Alaska. It was a classic case of lighting out for the Alaskan territory, though in this case the pioneers had traveled five thousand miles northeast, from a South Seas paradise where I had swerved to avoid coconuts in the road to a town that owes its existence to the strategic value of its crappy weather. She said she was getting used to it and gave me the name of a store in Anchorage that sold taro root.
Whittier may or may not be the Weirdest Town in Alaska—I’m guessing that none of the people who make that claim have been to Yakutat—but it’s certainly unusual. Its deepwater port doesn’t freeze during the winter, which made it a prime spot for a far-north Pacific military base during World War II. Two mountain ranges converge near Whittier, trapping a semipermanent cloud cover that hid its waterfront from Japanese bombers. Those same mountains sequester Whittier from the rest of Alaska like a geographic safe room. To establish access, the U.S. military had to carve a 2.5-mile-long tunnel that accommodated a single rail line. Until 2000, the train was Whittier’s only land access to the rest of the world. Since then, it’s been possible to drive through, but since there is space for only one lane of traffic, cars are allowed through just once an hour in each direction.
Since the tunnel is the sole road out of a town that can feel a little claustrophobic, its schedule is the hourglass by which time passes in Whittier. People say things like “I’m out on the next tunnel,” and the other person understands that this means “I’m leaving in twenty minutes.” The passageway is closed from 11:00 P.M. to 5:30 A.M. (longer in winter), making the last openings of the day in and out a little stressful to anyone who stops for dinner and a movie after commuting to Anchorage (sixty miles away). For some residents, a tunnel run feels like crossing Checkpoint Charlie, in West Berlin, except the wall is six thousand feet high and, instead of smuggling microfilm in their socks, Whittier’s citizens carry trunkloads of cheap toilet paper from Target. “I see the tunnel as a portal between two worlds,” Ted Spencer, curator of the museum located on the first floor of the Anchor Inn, told me. “I get a sense of calm as I emerge into all this natural beauty.”
Spencer isn’t exaggerating, about the scenery anyway. One genuinely weird thing about Whittier is the juxtaposition of its cracked asphalt, abandoned fishing boats, and hideous buildings (including, truth be told, the Anchor Inn) against a backdrop that anywhere else in America would merit national park status. When the sun is shining, which happens only 133 days per year, you can stand in the center of the large parking lot that constitutes much of downtown and see glaciers, cascades, green mountainsides, snowy peaks, and the deep blue waters of Passage Canal.
Aside from its access limitations, the primary reasons for Whittier’s oddball reputation are a pair of buildings left from the Cold War era. The Buckner Building, built in the 1950s as housing for a thousand enlisted military personnel, was known as “The City Under One Roof” because it included a movie theater, a bowling alley, a shooting range, a bakery, and even a jail. When the military pulled out of Whittier, in 1960, the Buckner was abandoned to Whittier’s notorious weather, which is terrible even by Alaska standards: an average of sixteen feet of snow on top of all the rain and winds that frequently top fifty miles an hour. The abandoned Buckner now looks like a set from a postapocalyptic movie, filled with graffiti and water and toxic sludge. It’s a favorite of urban explorers and the backdrop to countless hours of poorly lighted GoPro footage. Some skiers shot a slick Warren Miller–inspired movie of themselves slaloming the Buckner’s snowy stairwells and jumping out of its broken windows. When I walked past, two excited European tourists were taking pictures of each other as they slipped through a hole cut in the flimsy chain-link fence.
Whittier’s other relic of military housing is the fourteen-story Begich Towers, built at the same time as the Buckner. The Begich is still very much alive; it was getting a new boiler and a fresh paint job in cheerful pastel colors when I was there. The exterior could pass for one of the nicest buildings in Pyongyang; the interior is a 1950s time capsule. (The pink bathroom in the condo I rented was nearly identical to the one in my grandmother’s ranch-style house, except for the earthquake crack in one wall.) The Begich is also famous for being self-contained, and is home to not only most of Whittier’s population but its post office (where I inquired about sending a package Priority Mail and also the location of the laundry room), police department, mayor’s office, and medical clinic, plus a mini-mart and, in the basement, a church. The building is connected underground to Whittier’s school, to shield children from the snow and wind. In winter, it isn’t uncommon for everyone to stay inside for days at a time. Begich Towers is perhaps one-eighth occupied—it was built to house a thousand people, and Whittier’s current population is just over two hundred—and even on a busy day it’s eerily empty. One resident I met said she frequently runs for half an hour up and down its staircases and hallways without seeing anyone.
My primary purpose in coming to Whittier was to get a look at Harriman Fjord. I booked a charter with Ben Wilkins aboard the Explorer. Wilkins was young and bearded and cool in the way one can be only after years of captaining boats in Hawaii. (To answer the obvious next question, the money is a lot better in Alaska.) Ben knew all about the Harriman Expedition. He told me that so many landforms in the area were available for naming in 1899 that even the less famous members of the Elder crew saw themselves immortalized on maps. Point Doran honored the poor captain whose warnings to stay away from the rocks left him cast as the Chicken Little of the expedition.
“I don’t blame Doran at all,” Ben said as we made our way into Prince William Sound. “That is some sketchy water. There are spots near Barry Glacier”—the ice mountain that had initially appeared to block the path to Harriman Fjord—“where the water might be a mile wide and six inches deep.” Wilkins had a depth finder on his console and checked it constantly. Varying measurements were represented by vivid contrasting colors, and the closer we approached a receding glacier, the more the onscreen swirls resembled one of Peter Max’s trippier paintings. “They haven’t updated the charts yet,” Ben explained when the coordinates briefly indicated that we had taken flight over a promontory. “There are places on this GPS that show us two miles inland.”
We passed a petrified forest that was younger than the state of Alaska; when the ’64 earthquake hit, the ground dropped several feet, and trees calcified from absorbing salt water. A solitary lump of rock that served as a puffin rookery appeared to have hosted a violent paintball battle. The weather was typical for the Whittier region—lousy verging on terrible—so we decided to skip College Fjord, where visibility was close to zero. “There’s been so much calving off of Columbia Glacier that you can’t get within five miles of it anyway,” Ben said.
As we headed northwest, the numbers on the depth monitor kept sliding up and down, dipping to twenty feet and then surging to two hundred. “This is where Doran freaked out,” Ben said. “Every time I come through here, I wonder how they did it in a giant steamship.” Barry Arm, which had once been nearly cut off by the glacier of the same name, was now wide-open. A sixty-foot-high rock island rose out of the water near Barry Glacier’s face. “Ten years ago, that was under ice,” Ben said. “This is the fastest-retreating glacier in Prince William Sound right now.”
We finally entered a long fjord obscured by low clouds. At its terminus was a very wide, very flat, very blue mass. “There’s Harriman Glacier,” Ben said.
Until the 1990s, the Harriman had been one of those rare glaciers that was still advancing a century after the end of the Little Ice Age. A decade ago it seemed to be stable. Over the past several years, Ben said, it had been retreating two hundred yards a year.
Because the Harriman was relatively low and less prone to catastrophic calving, it was possible to approach much more closely than I had at any other glacier. The ice had the cracked face of a Sun Belt centenarian. New soil peeked out around the edges of the glacier where it had recently withdrawn onto land. “Do you see that dirt underneath?” Ben asked, standing and wiping fog from the window for a better view.
The Harriman had been the last serious glacier seen from the deck of the Elder before the steamship turned for home, and I suspected it might be the last one I’d get a good look at in Alaska. I opened the front hatch and stepped out onto the bow with binoculars. A river of silty water gushed out from the glacier’s underside.
“We might be some of the last people to see this glacier while it’s still tidewater,” Ben said, meaning the ice soon would no longer reach the water’s edge. He plopped back down into his captain’s chair. “That’s nuts.”