Braving Home

by Jake Halpern

  According to the 2000 census, precisely 182 people lived in the city of Whittier, and I wanted to know more about them. Naturally, I was curious about Whittier’s avalanches and its harsh, wintry environs, but that was just part of it. Whittier promised to offer something new—not a story just of man versus the great outdoors, but also of man versus the great indoors. There was something both claustrophobic and otherworldly about Whittier, as if its residents were preparing for life in some distant space colony, and I wanted to know what kind of psyche it took to deal with these conditions—and, more importantly, want them.

  After about seven minutes of subterranean driving, Kent navigated our taxi out of the tunnel and into a blinding flash of snow-reflected light. We emerged into the crook of a narrow valley with mountain walls rising straight up several thousand feet. In front of us lay Passage Canal, one of Prince William Sound’s many handsome inlets, and its waters covered most of the valley floor except for a narrow stretch of ground where a road headed out along the inlet and around a bend. Kent pointed across the water to a little black spot. “Sea otter,” he said with a smile. “Only one who can hunt that boy is a native.” Kent sat upright in his seat, giving his large belly some clearance from the steering wheel. “It’s beautiful out here, all right,” he added.

  “So what made you leave?” I asked finally.

  Kent just laughed, then shook his head. “You ever hear of the experiments with all the white lab rats in the same box?”

  “Don’t think so,” I said.

  “Well they put all of them rats in one big box, and they got along okay for a bit, then just started killing one another.”

  Before I could respond, we pulled around a bend in the road and Whittier slid into full view. The whole town stood on a narrow shelf of rock that jutted off the canyon walls like a giant soap dish. First came the railroad yard, eight or nine tracks across, loaded with ice-covered boxcars stretching down a good mile or so to a loading dock, where a barge idled alongside chunks of floating snow. As we drove away from the water and inward along Whittier’s rock shelf, we came upon a series of warehouses rising out of the snow in a dreary procession. They were easy prey for a tough winter. According to Kent, a few years back so much snow accumulated on one that its roof caved, blowing the front door across the street. Sprinkled between these structures was a wasteland of heavy equipment—radar dishes, front-enders, beached boats, giant spools of telephone wire, and a crane—all firmly entrenched in snow. At last came Whittier’s fourteen-story high-rise, sitting flush against the canyon walls. It was a grim concrete slab, speckled with a few hundred small windows, the uppermost ones disappearing into a cloud of light snow. The whole scene had a definite sci-fi feel to it. With a few well-placed props, Whittier might easily have passed for a mining colony on Pluto. Kent jolted me back to reality with a heavy foot on the brake.

  “This is it,” he said as I hauled my backpack out of the taxi and into a gusting wind. I had sentenced myself to two weeks here, and suddenly my mind was swarming with second thoughts. Kent must have caught the look of apprehension on my face, because just before he motored away, he imparted some final bits of advice. Much of it was lost in the wind, but I heard the last few words crisply: “You’ll want to find Babs Reynolds—she’ll take care of you.” Then with a sprightly honk of his horn, he was gone.

  The first-floor hallway is the center of daily life in Whittier, the equivalent of Main Street in a normal town. Along this vast, windowless stretch I found a series of rooms containing the post office, the laundromat, the general store, the weather station, city hall, police headquarters, and a shop called Cabin Fever. At both ends of the building were elevators leading to the “residential” floors above. By the time I arrived, the first-floor hallway had pretty much shut down for the night and there wasn’t a person in sight.

  Eventually I wandered into Cabin Fever, which occupied a very cramped one-bedroom apartment at the far end of the hallway and functioned as the town’s video store and tanning salon. It was here that I met Babs Reynolds. Babs was sitting in a walk-in closet outfitted with a small desk and a wraparound bookcase with several hundred movies, including a great many horror and action flicks. She was of medium height and buxom, a hearty woman in her early sixties, whose face was daubed with makeup and whose skin was deeply bronzed from the generous use of liquid tanner. Her clothes were all denim. Between her breasts rested a lone ornament: a small leather holster for her lighter, which hung as a necklace on a piece of rawhide. We exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, during which time she used her necklace to light a long brown menthol cigarette resembling a small cigar. This was her brand of choice, she explained. They were tightly rolled smokes, the sort that put themselves out if you didn’t really haul on them. Babs worked the cherry as we chatted, occasionally flicking off the ash or glancing around the corner for any would-be customers. “So what do you think of Whittier?” she asked me finally in a deep, throaty drawl.

  “When I first came through that tunnel I was a little spooked out,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, well, who wouldn’t be?” said Babs with a laugh. She reached into the desk drawer, pulled out a deck of cards, and began dealing herself a round of solitaire, which she played effortlessly, as if for the ten thousandth time. “When I first got here I couldn’t believe it either,” she said without looking up.

  “Did you think of turning around?”

  “Not for a moment,” replied Babs. “I had an ex-husband on the other side who was trying to kill me.” Neither of us spoke for a moment. Babs glanced up at a small TV that was hanging from the ceiling, and as she did I noticed several scars on her chin. Later she told me that these were the traces of reconstructive surgery. Before she came to Whittier her ex-husband used to beat her. On one occasion he broke her jaw, and the scars marked the places where a doctor had drilled several magnesium bolts into her mandible and connected them to a fiberglass brace.

  “There’s the ace of spades,” said Babs. She flashed me a sweet, almost girlish smile, as if I’d brought her this luck, and then offered me a seat on a footstool in a corner of the closet. As I sat down, Babs began retelling the story of how she came to Whittier. “I started off in Maine, but I moved to Alaska in the late sixties, and I became the first legal girl bartender in Anchorage,” said Babs, pausing for a drag on her menthol. “I was the hottest bartender in the state.”

  Babs continued to pluck cards out of the deck, all the while recounting the details of her years working the bars on Fourth Avenue in Anchorage, intoxicating and beguiling the city’s toughest men, sweet-talking the cops and cabbies, brawling with the whores, and heaving in the tips. Those were the party years, Babs recalled. During this time she married her first husband on the top of a Ferris wheel at a carnival in the Sears parking lot. The judge, who was perched precariously in the car below, hollered them man and wife; the best man and lady, who sat in the car above, slid the rings down on a carefully rigged set of wires; meanwhile, Babs and her new husband teetered awkwardly in the wind, above an expanse of circus tents, bumper cars, and newspaper reporters.

  “It was the third husband that nearly did me in,” she explained. By then Babs was almost forty. She had been working on Fourth Avenue for more than a decade. The bar scene was losing its charm, and so was Anchorage, which was overrun with the business of the oil boom. Meanwhile, her third husband had begun to beat her. “He broke my jaw, hit me with a baseball bat, then he ran over me with the truck and broke my shoulder, so it was just a matter of time before he finished me off,” explained Babs. “That’s when I decided to get out.” What she really wanted, Babs recalled, was to vanish, to disappear, to hide away in some far-off nook. Then, as luck would have it, she heard about Whittier—nestled at the foot of a valley, protected by an immense tunnel, and in need of a bartender.

  Upon arriving in Whittier in the summer of 1978, Babs showed a picture of her third husband to the train crew and explained that he was out to kill her. “Back then th
e train was the only way into Whittier, and that train crew controlled who got in and who got out,” said Babs. “So I told them my situation, and they told me not to worry.” In the coming years the crew made good on its promise, never letting Babs’s third husband aboard an incoming train. Still, Babs worried. She heard rumors from mutual friends that her husband was trying to hike the tunnel into town, and at night she often found it difficult to sleep. For the first nine years in Whittier she slept with her clothes on, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice, even though there was really nowhere to go. Gradually, however, Babs began to relax. She came to know her neighbors. She opened a business. “I even started wearing a nightgown to sleep,” she told me.

  I chatted with Babs until closing time, and as she locked up Cabin Fever for the night, I asked if I could help out with her newspaper route the following day. In addition to working the video store, the tanning salon, the weather station, and a small restaurant that she owned, Babs was also Whittier’s papergirl. “Sure, that’d be nice,” she said. “Be downstairs at nine o’clock tomorrow, and we’ll head over to the tunnel to pick up the papers. And if you’re lucky, I’ll make you breakfast afterward.”

  As we parted, I couldn’t help but marvel at the pure Tom Sawyer beauty of what had just happened. I was genuinely excited at the prospect of lugging newspapers for this woman. She seemed to be Whittier’s de facto spokeswoman. During the whole road crisis, reporters invariably found their way to her. Babs’s many jobs and outgoing demeanor gave her an almost ubiquitous presence in Whittier. What’s more, she was one of the few residents who had lasted more than twenty years, an accomplishment that I found both remarkable and perplexing. Babs seemed to be part of the town’s bedrock, and I felt drawn to her—much the way I’d felt drawn to Thad Knight.

  From Cabin Fever I headed upstairs to the local B&B, where I’d made reservations (quite unnecessarily, as it turns out, for I was the only guest). I rode the elevator to the ninth floor, where I met Kathy Elliot, a timid, white-haired woman who helped run the B&B. “How’s the weather outside?” she asked. Cold, I told her. “I’m sure it is,” said Kathy, who went on to explain that she hadn’t left the high-rise in weeks. “I like going outside, but it drains you,” she explained. “When you come back indoors to a man-made situation, you have to acclimate. I guess it’s something like what the astronauts go through.”

  “So you just stay inside for weeks at a time?” I asked.

  “I’ve stayed inside for months at a time,” explained Kathy. “In the wintertime I hibernate like an old bear.”

  I took my key and proceeded to the fourteenth floor, where the B&B was located. The elevator doors opened onto one of the building’s many long, linoleum corridors. The inside of the high-rise was a hybrid of several institutional styles of architecture—part 1950s college dormitory, part aging mental institution, and part nuclear fallout shelter—the effect was immediately confining and at times creepy. The halls were built with heavy yellow cinder block that echoed my every footstep. Nothing seemed to stir. Then suddenly the wind came, gusting off a distant glacier, slamming into the back side of the high-rise, squeezing its way into the building, then whistling up the elevator chutes, through the utility shafts, and along the expansion joints. The tower has two major “joints” or “gaps” that allow the structure to flex properly in the event of an earthquake. The practical effect, however, was that of a massive wind vent, causing the entire building to creak and groan through the night. “Sometimes,” one resident told me, “in the middle of the night, you’ll sit right up in bed and ask yourself: What do I hear? And the answer is: nothing. The wind has finally stopped, and it’s enough to wake you.”

  Luckily, my room was equipped with a great old sound system, complete with a turntable, radio, eight-track, and cassette player, all sleekly mounted along a six-foot wooden cabinet. It was the sort of gigolo accouterment you could imagine advertised in Playboy for a few grand in the early 1960s. The accompanying albums looked to be from the same era. I grabbed Elvis’ Christmas Album, put it in the eight-track, and cranked up the volume to drown out the wind. The only real downside was the apartment’s stale air. Like a jumbo jet, the high-rise recycled its air. This tended to spread an ailment known as the “Whittier Crud,” which much of the high-rise’s population came down with each winter. To get a fresh breeze I cracked open a window, but this created a series of crazy convection currents within the apartment that opened and closed doors randomly. For a light sleeper like me, it was hard to doze off, and at one point I became so frustrated that I got up and walked the high-rise’s empty hallways, which were even creepier than usual in the dead of night.

  Determined to better understand the intricacies of the building’s airflow, I eventually paid a visit to Dennis Limpscomb, the high-rise’s chief custodian. Dennis told me the biggest problem with the wind was when it caused a lock-in. “When the wind is really blowing,” he explained, “you’ll get this vacuum where you can’t get out of your apartment because your door is sucking shut. So you either call a neighbor, or just keep pushing until you manage to get it open. Once the seal is broken the door swings open real gently, but as soon as you let go, that door slams shut so hard it could take your hand off.” Dennis also told me about some of the high-rise’s supernatural problems. “Some of the units are haunted,” he explained. “Cam Bender up in apartment 607 said he saw someone in the apartment, and the girl who lived there before him, Angie, used to see somebody all the time too. The incidents where we have problems are usually where somebody has died in the unit.” Talk of hauntings was common in the high-rise. I met one woman who referred to the building as the “Overlook Hotel,” a reference to the snow-covered resort in Stephen King’s novel The Shining, which eventually drives its overseer mad.

  After a restless first night, I met Babs at nine A.M. the following morning to help out with the newspapers. She drove her weatherbeaten pickup truck out toward the tunnel, and together we struggled to see through the steadily falling snow. As if we didn’t already have challenges with visibility, the cab of the truck was soon filled with a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. “I’ve been smoking since I was fourteen,” Babs told me. “I’ve done everything possible to abuse my body. By the age of twenty-two my hair was white and by twenty-four I was almost bald. Yet people can’t believe how old I am.” She shrugged her shoulders, as if the secret of her youth was a mystery even to her.

  We continued along the narrow stretch of road that hugged the mountain walls and led to the mouth of the tunnel. Finally we pulled up to a red stoplight, indicating that traffic was on an incoming route. Currently, however, there wasn’t a car in sight. Together Babs and I peered into the mouth of the tunnel, down its dark shaft. From our vantage point, it was impossible to see the distant gleam of Bear Valley, the first of several passes that led the way back to Anchorage and the world beyond.

  “How’s this road working out?” I asked finally.

  “Well, it’s here, so we use it,” she said. “But right until that first car came through, I had to believe it wasn’t going to open. We fought it hard—got thousands of petitions. The kids at the school were even talking about blowing up the equipment and stuff, but I told them it wouldn’t do any good. I think they were disappointed, but I told them that if they were really serious about it, I could get them the explosives.” She gave me a deadpan look and then cackled. “And they wonder why all the kids come and talk with me.”

  Babs dug into the depths of her winter coat, pulled out her necklace-lighter, and lit another of her menthols. “The day the road opened it was raining like a whore,” she continued. “They had to do the whole ceremony inside the tunnel. They brought in all the dignitaries. The governor shows up, drives in, says a word or two, makes a U-turn on the tarmac, and drives right back out.”

  “Was it hard on you?”

  Babs nodded. “You got to understand, I came here more than twenty years ago, running for my life. Coming here I found safety and some of
the most beautiful country you’ll ever see. And I wasn’t the only one. A lot of people came here running from something.”

  This is something I would hear again and again in Whittier. People came through the tunnel on the run from a whole gamut of troubles: ex-husbands, ex-wives, parents, jobs, warrants, child support, God, or perhaps just themselves. Alaska was as far away as they could go and still speak English, and Whittier was a good safe leap beyond that. For years before the road arrived, the town’s mayor, Ben Butler, who was also the ticket-taker on the only train into town, regarded his title of mayor as something of a misnomer. “I was always, as far as I looked at it, the gatekeeper of Whittier,” he later told me. “Before you could come into or leave town, you basically had to give me a ticket, so I pretty much had the ability to keep track of everybody who was in town. In fact, people would call me at home at all hours of the day or night and wonder if a certain person had left or come in.” With Butler as the lookout man, no one got into town unnoticed, and if it looked like trouble was on its way, one of Whittier’s three cops would be waiting on the other side.

  Babs popped open the driver’s side door and stepped out into a powdery patch of knee-deep snow. “I’m going to check to see if the tunnel crew already dropped off the papers,” she told me. I followed her through the snow to a partially submerged phone booth. I helped her pry open the door, and inside we found several dozen copies of the Anchorage Daily News. We carried the newspapers back to Babs’s truck. By now the wind was really howling, and both of us hurried into the front seat. “The way I see it, this road was done to us—not for us,” concluded Babs. “They brought us the world. Hell, we could have had the world if we wanted it, but we didn’t—that’s why we all ended up here.”