Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  Reluctantly, Lanier agreed to give me a quick tour of the dike. As we continued along the bottom of a particularly long gap, Lanier told me more about the structure. He explained that in the thirty years since it was built, much of the original clay had washed away, significantly weakening the dike.

  “Why don’t they make the dike out of concrete or something stronger?” I asked.

  “Way too expensive,” said Lanier. “You know how much that would cost?”

  “Why not make the dike bigger, then?”

  “A lot of reasons,” said Lanier. He didn’t want to talk about it in detail, but later on that week I contacted a woman at the Army Corps of Engineers who gave me the rest of the story.

  Apparently, members of the Tarboro Town Council got together and drafted a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers, objecting to any modifications on Princeville’s dike. The council members knew that if Princeville’s dike was elevated much higher, the Tar River would flood onto their shores instead. Not long after the letter, Tarboro’s town manager issued a clear warning in an interview with a local newspaper called the Daily Southerner: “We want Princeville to rebuild its dike—we just don’t want them to build it any higher.”19 And just to make this point perfectly clear, Tarboro’s attorney issued a thinly veiled threat to sue the town of Princeville if it didn’t heed this warning.

  The threat was never acted on, but it didn’t need to be. For more than a hundred and thirty years, people in Princeville had been deferring to their neighbors in Tarboro. It was deeply ingrained in their past, and that wasn’t about to change now. Besides, Mayor Perkins was currently being threatened with impeachment by a band of disgruntled citizens, and the last thing she wanted was a lawsuit. She had no interest in battling with Tarboro, and to make this clear, she imposed a gag order barring any Princeville official from even discussing the idea.20 The final blow came in the spring, when Congress denied the Army Corps of Engineers money to conduct preliminary tests on the effects of a bigger dike.21

  By the time Lanier and I finished our tour, we were both in a sweat. I turned to Lanier. “Do you think this town is safe?” I asked him.

  “Safe as it can be,” he replied.

  “But would you live here?”

  Lanier sighed—it wasn’t a fair question and we both knew it. Still, I waited for his answer. “We’re building a good dike here,” he said finally. “As good a dike as we can.”

  I headed back into town through a steady rain, letting the water wash the clay off my shoes. By the time I made it back to Thad’s, a serious storm was brewing. Outside the sky was illuminated in a perpetual flicker of lightning—as if by giant stadium lights shimmering out their last bits of filament.

  There would be no sitting in the carport tonight. Instead we sat in Thad’s living room, watching Seinfeld reruns and waiting for the storm. It arrived with a shotgun blast of rain, which hit the roof with startling force. Only intermittent bursts of thunder, which rattled off like nearby artillery fire, broke the beating of the downpour. The bombardment of noise drowned out the conversation on TV and left Thad and me looking at each other awkwardly.

  “Do you still worry about flooding?” I asked finally.

  “I think God will take care of us in the home we are in, just as he always has,” he told me. Thad’s large, timeworn hands were shaking, and suddenly he struck me as both tired and frail. Thad knew his health wasn’t good. Besides his heart troubles, he also suffered from diabetes and gout. Even when Thad spoke of events just months away he would stop to add “If I’m still around.” Often his conversations drifted to talk of the afterlife, something that seemed to hearten him. “I’m hoping and I’m praying that I have a home up yonder when I leave here,” he said, pointing to the sky.

  Thad believed strongly in the idea of having two homes—one on earth and one in heaven, assuming everything worked out for the best. In fact, Thad didn’t even use the word heaven; he just said “my home up yonder.” Home and heaven were synonymous as far as he was concerned. This point became even clearer when he showed me his psalm book from church. I was immediately struck by the number of titles about home—“O Think of the Home over There,” “O Happy Home Where Thou Art Loved,” “God Give Us Christian Homes,” “O Happy Home,” etc. Here too the word home was substituted for heaven, a phenomenon that seemed to have two effects. On the one hand, it put the notion of an earthly home in perspective—after all, it was only temporary. But it also reinforced the notion that there was something divine about any home, which like heaven was a reprieve from the worries of the world. As far as I could tell, for Thad, heaven was a place almost identical to his earthly home—only without the floods.

  Thad stood up and turned off the TV. “I just plan to stay here the rest of my life,” he told me as the rain continued to hammer against the roof.

  That night as I lay in bed, I listened to the hissing of the rain and watched the tombstones flicker with the lightning in the windows. For some reason, I thought of Commissioner Anne Howell’s mother, Anna Belle Brown, whom I’d met earlier in the day. I’d found her standing in the rain beside the empty lot where her house once stood, checking the one structure the flood hadn’t washed away: her mailbox. Somehow Anna Belle had convinced the post office to deliver all her mail to this old box. Initially I found this somewhat puzzling, but then I thought again of Thad—sitting beside his destroyed house throughout the winter—and suddenly Anna Belle’s arrangement made more sense, because I knew that sometimes home existed, even if only as a ritual.

  The next day the weather cleared, and in the morning I walked up the road to a small convenience store called Darlene’s. Inside I met the owner, Darlene, a plump, middle-aged white woman with thinning blond hair and a ruddy face with hundreds of burst capillaries. I picked out a carton of orange juice and chatted for a while at the counter with Darlene. She told me that she had lost a thousand cases of Budweiser in the flood and that overall she had sustained some $250,000 in damage. “Are you a reporter?” she asked me finally.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “Well, this town got a lot of attention because of its history,” she said, somewhat accusingly. Then Darlene leaned a little closer: “But there are a lot of people who had it worse than these niggers.” Just then an elderly black woman teetered into the store. “Hey there, you keeping your feet dry?” Darlene asked her sweetly. Then she waited for the woman to pass.

  “You don’t think it’s fair, all the attention they’ve gotten?” I asked her.

  Darlene looked at me hard. “Do you think it’s fair?”

  “But you’re glad people are coming back?” I asked her.

  “Look,” she said, “I profit from it, so I’m not complaining.”

  Darlene said hello to another customer.

  “Are you worried about people moving away?” I asked her.

  “Tell me,” she said softly, “where else these niggers gonna go?”

  I paid for my orange juice and walked back toward town. In the distance I could hear the beeping of a giant tractor backing up. Down the street, several young men in work clothes were laying the foundation for a new doublewide. And across town, Sam Knight was starting to roast a pig for a busload of Air Force volunteers who were coming to town to help clean up trash.

  When I arrived back at Thad’s, I found him standing in front of the house, holding his three-footed cane. As usual, he was dressed in black slacks, with a collared shirt and a sturdy pair of suspenders. I held up my carton of orange juice, but before I could offer him anything to drink, he suggested we enjoy the nice weather and take a walk in the cemetery.

  I agreed, and soon the two of us were strolling down the gravel road alongside Thad’s house, which led into the verdant undergrowth of the cemetery. Thad’s walking was slow and labored, but eventually the sound of passing cars receded and we found ourselves in the silent company of the town’s deceased. Many of the tombstones were overgrown with weeds. Other plots were still freshly piled with
dirt, a result of the massive reburying effort.

  Thad and I stopped at a series of modest tombstones that all read, “Knight.” Thad showed me the graves of his mother and father, and then he walked over to the graves of his three deceased brothers. “This one lived in New Jersey, this one lived in Jamaica, New York, and this one was in Greensboro,” he said. “They all wanted to be brought home.”

  After I had spent a week in Princeville, Thad and I shared one last breakfast together in his cramped eat-in kitchen, and then he watched as I packed up my things. “You’re always welcome back here,” he told me as I disassembled the swampside tent that I hadn’t slept in. Just before I left, he presented me with a parting gift: a small, creased headshot of himself. It was one of his only photographs to survive the flood. I tried repeatedly to give it back, but he refused.

  Later that day, as I headed northward on Interstate 95, I pulled into a rest stop around dusk and watched the sun sink over the back of a McDonald’s. My weeklong vacation was officially over. In a day’s time I’d be back at the office, fact-checking the stories of people I would never meet. For the moment, however, I thought again of Thad—closing out another day on his carport, presiding over Princeville as the owls called on for night.

  More than anyone else, Thad Knight launched my journey. He literally opened the door for me, and after visiting him in Princeville I was determined to keep going. Within days of returning to work, I was again flipping through my giant three-ring binder, pondering: Where would I go next? Whom else would I meet? And could I find some common explanations for why these home-keepers refused to budge? Yet all of these questions would have to wait. Despite my best efforts, a full year passed before I found the nerve and the means to continue on my journey. In that time, I left my job at the New Republic, moved into my brother’s small apartment in Boston, and came upon the transportation deal of a lifetime.

  The remaining places that I hoped to visit were as far away as Hawaii and Alaska. My brother had an old beat-up minivan named Bertha, but I doubted she could make it more than a hundred miles, and she certainly couldn’t cross the Pacific. I would have to fly, and that would be costly. Yet before I had a chance to worry, my problem was solved by a relative who worked for the airlines. Through the family grapevine, she heard about my travel aspirations and quite generously agreed to give me her most prized job benefit—a flying pass—which allowed me to travel anywhere in the world for free as long as I went standby. Almost overnight I was transformed into an aerospace hitchhiker, a flying hobo. I just showed up at the check-in counter with my carry-on bag, flashed my driver’s license, and waited for the next flight to wherever I was going.

  By late March of 2001—roughly a year after I’d met Thad Knight—I was ready to recommence my journey. From Boston, I caught the last seat on a five P.M. flight to Seattle. From there I flew to Anchorage, Alaska. With layovers and one missed connection I made the trip in roughly twenty hours, which gave me plenty of time to thumb through my three-ring binder and read up on my final destination: Whittier, Alaska.

  Reportedly, somewhere in the remote coves of Prince William Sound, there was a fourteen-story high-rise nestled among the glaciers. This single, snowbound building was the “city” of Whittier, Alaska. Almost all of the town’s residents lived in this monolithic bunker, and everything they needed was just an elevator ride away. In the summer, the high-rise offered spectacular views of whales rising offshore and waterfalls plummeting off glacial crests. But in December, the sun set for several months, a punishing winter arrived, and it became clear why this city existed indoors.

  Perhaps what intrigued me most was Whittier’s lone entranceway—a two-and-a-half-mile-long railroad tunnel that burrowed beneath a surrounding wall of mountains and brought a train into town several times a week. Recently, however, the state of Alaska had modified the tunnel to install an accompanying road for cars and buses. People in Whittier were miffed. From what I read in the Anchorage Daily News, most residents treasured their fortified isolation. They didn’t want the road, and a few, including an outspoken diehard named Babs Reynolds, promised to fight it to the bitter end.22

  Tower of the Arctic

  Whittier, Alaska

  THROUGH THE BEAMS of our headlights I could see the walls glistening, sweating streamlets of icy mountain water. The tunnel’s contours were jagged like those of a mining shaft, roughly chiseled, arcing upward to a ceiling that dipped and rose along the backs of countless hanging boulders. The air had moistened to a musty cellar scent, the light thinned to an orange flicker, and my eyes strained to watch for bits of rock that were known to fall and crack windshields. We were passing through the bowels of a four-thousand-foot mountain, and slowly the car radio began to hiss with static.

  My taxi driver, Kent, had timed our passage to get himself in and out of Whittier as quickly as possible. The controversial new road into town—which had just opened the previous spring—was only one lane wide. There simply wasn’t enough room for a second lane in the narrow, two-and-a-half-mile-long entrance tunnel. Consequently, the road operated on a tight timetable, alternating its traffic flow every half-hour until four-thirty. At that time, two massive metal doors slid shut, sealing off Whittier for the night like a modern-day portcullis.*

  Kent, a heavyset man in his fifties, was worried about getting stuck in Whittier. It was now almost four P.M., and as the two of us drove down the longest vehicular tunnel in North America, Kent’s eyes remained fixed on the dashboard clock. * “I really don’t want to spend another night in Whittier,” he told me for the second or third time. As it so happened, Kent was a former Whittier resident. I met him quite randomly at the Anchorage airport, and after a bit of haggling he agreed to drive me to Whittier for eighty-five dollars. This meeting was a stroke of good luck. Few if any commercial vehicles are willing to take passengers to Whittier in the winter. Kent, however, knew the sixty-mile drive well. He navigated us through the snow-packed turns of Portage Valley, alongside an imposing chain of mountains that eclipsed the sun, and past a series of small road signs that read, AVALANCHE ROAD CLOSURE INFO 273-6037.

  Before entering the tunnel into Whittier, we drove past a lonely wooden tollbooth and stopped for a moment in front of a large steel A-frame that sheltered the mouth of the tunnel. Near the A-frame was a warning sign:

  AVALANCHE!

  Breaking loose with savage power, snow can become an unstoppable instrument of destruction. A fully developed avalanche can attain a mass of over a million tons—this mass can hurdle downhill at tremendous speeds, pushing an invisible blast of air up to 200 mph in front of the avalanche, threatening life and property. The Portage tunnels A-frame portals are built to withstand most avalanches.

  It was currently late March, prime avalanche season. I had already noticed several mountains that were scraped clean with giant skid marks. Roughly a year before, a particularly large down-rush had cut Whittier off for days. “If we wait here long enough we’ll probably see a slide or two,” Kent told me. Then he steered our taxi into the darkness of the tunnel.

  It was the tunnel that first brought Whittier to my attention. Back when I was still working at the magazine, when I was still pumping every living person I knew for any leads on intrepid home-keepers, I got a curious tip from an otherwise withdrawn and crusty editor about a newly built road that ran through a tunnel and led to an “indoor city” in Alaska. He claimed to have read about it in the Los Angeles Times. I took all such leads with a grain of salt. Early on I’d gotten quite excited about a town in Texas that was allegedly invaded each year by a horde of rattlesnakes, only to discover that it was largely a tourism gimmick used to lure reptile enthusiasts.1 But after doing a little research I discovered that the editor was right. Improbable as it seemed, this indoor city did exist.2

  Whittier owed its existence to the United States military, which initially conceived it as a fortified seaport. Anchorage had traditionally relied on port towns like Seward for shipping. Yet as World War II b
egan, the military insisted on a closer and more secure port for its operations. In August of 1941, engineers began drilling a two-and-a-half-mile hole through the mountains to a narrow shelf of rock on the other side, which they called Whittier. The name came from the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose poems often described the rugged beauty of the seasons, including the awesome power of winter.

  By 1954, roughly a thousand men were living in Whittier, mostly inside a giant six-story complex called the Buckner Building, which included a library, a hospital, a photographer’s darkroom, a hobby store, a post office, a barbershop, a jail, a 350-seat movie theater, a four-lane bowling alley, and an indoor shooting range. In 1956 the military completed a second complex, a fourteen-story high-rise that qualified as the tallest building in Alaska. The Pentagon hoped Whittier would be not just a secure port but also a lookout onto the Soviet Union, which sat a few hundred miles to the west. But just a few short years later, the entire project was abandoned. In all likelihood, Whittier’s strategic value was overestimated from the start, and the Pentagon was simply trying to clamp down on one of its many cold war spending sprees. In any case, by the early 1960s there were just thirty-two people living in Whittier, all of them civilians.3

  In the ensuing years, officials across Alaska debated what to do with the former fortress in Whittier. There were a number of ideas proposed, from developing it into a resort to making it a prison. One of the most seriously considered plans was to turn Whittier into a giant mental institution. Yet according to a 1964 issue of Time, opponents to this plan successfully argued that “a psychiatric center in such forbidding surroundings would set mental health back 50 years.”4 Ultimately, Whittier was left to the handful of civilians who claimed it as home.