by Jake Halpern
Babs spun her truck around, and as we drove back toward the high-rise, she played a fast-paced country tune on the truck’s stereo. It was her favorite rallying song, her morning pickup. When its refrain came on, she began singing along and cranked up the volume so loud that the CD player began to skip beats. At this point the two of us were both pretty pumped up, and Babs steered us off the road through a field of virgin snow alongside the rail yard. The truck’s wheels threw off a huge spray of snow, the steering wheel slipped momentarily out of control, and Babs’s eyes lit up with a rare look of unadulterated glee.
We motored past the high-rise and along a narrow road that I hadn’t noticed before. It climbed a small bluff and skirted the dilapidated remains of the Buckner Building, which was the first structure built by the U.S. Army in the early 1950s—the one that was six stories high and had a four-lane bowling alley. The Buckner Building was abandoned in the 1960s. There had been some plans to turn it into a prison, and others to use it as a luxury resort, but none of them panned out. Now the windows were all broken, and the metal fixtures were caked with rust. Later in my stay, I ventured inside and discovered that after years of neglect the ceiling was actually hanging with stalactites. The old movie theater, a grand room where Rita Hayworth and Johnny Carson once supposedly entertained the troops, was now shrouded in ice and almost impossible to walk through. I didn’t stay too long, and this was probably for the best, because several locals later told me that bears sometimes hibernated in the basement.
Babs navigated us past the Buckner Building, and a minute or so later we came upon a small, two-story apartment complex called Whittier Manor. Babs was one of the few Whittier residents who did not live in the high-rise. “I spent my first thirteen years living in the BTI,” she explained while parking her truck. (BTI was short for Begich Tower Incorporated, the official name for the high-rise.) “The main problem was the lack of privacy,” she told me. “Moving to Whittier Manor was one of the best decisions I ever made.”
Babs led the way back to her one-bedroom apartment, which was cramped but cozy. The inside was decorated with the skin of a bear that she had killed, thirteen framed photographs of Willie Nelson, and a bed full of vintage Mickey Mouse dolls. “I’ve never seen a Mickey Mouse without a smile, have you?” she asked. “The Mickeys reinforce the positive, and you need that to keep you going. It just lightens the load. I started collecting them twenty-five years ago. My favorite is the oldest—it walks when you hold its hands and squeeze its palms, which have air pumps in them.” Babs lifted her favorite Mickey off the bed and walked it across the room for me, squeezing its palms in a careful, steady rhythm.
Eventually Babs put away the doll and headed over to the kitchen to get breakfast started. As she fished for the correct frying pan, I walked over to her bay window and looked out at a panorama of mountains, glaciers, and the waters of Prince William Sound. It was an awesomely beautiful sight, but after a while the barrenness of it all became a little unnerving, and I returned to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. “The winters can be really tough here,” Babs told me as she cooked up some eggs. “I believe in my heart that if you can make it through three winters in Whittier, you’re tough, and people can’t argue with you—you’re just tough.”
“Why three winters?” I asked.
“I’m not sure why that is—just is,” said Babs. As I would later discover, the three-winter mark was a well-established endpoint in Whittier. According to the local phone company, the average stay in Whittier was just three years. Naturally there was some variation, but the general trend was clear: After a few short years, most people left, no matter what was waiting for them on the other side of the tunnel.
According to Babs, and most everyone I talked to in Whittier, the winter presented two basic challenges: wind and snow. Whittier gets an average of 250 inches (or twenty feet) of snow a year, burying much of the town for the entire season.5 The two-story schoolhouse, which sits just a few hundred feet from the high-rise, often resembles a giant snowdrift. Most of the thirty or so students get to school via an underground tunnel. In a bad winter, the snow may rise well past the first two stories of the high-rise. In the early 1970s, kids allegedly drove their snowmobiles over the City Shop Building, which is more than forty feet high.
The real wickedness, however, is the wind. The mountain walls surrounding Whittier are so steep and narrow that they effectively create a giant wind tunnel, blasting gusts of air at fifty knots (almost sixty miles per hour) for weeks at a time. The moisture makes this air especially heavy and therefore more powerful. When the local phone company first tried to harness this power by installing a series of wind-powered generators, the result was disastrous. “The generators couldn’t dissipate the energy fast enough,” the owner of the phone company later told me. “When I took them apart and did a biopsy, just charcoal came out. It actually generated so much energy it just fried the insides.”
When such winds blow over icy streets, walking outside can be treacherous. Jan Latta, the school administrator, later related this story to me: “I was walking to school one day, and the wind was blowing so hard that I was shoving my arms into the snowbanks to hold my position. I watched a neighbor’s Labrador retriever blow down the road past me.” This sort of wind also creates low visibility and instant snowdrifts. Sometimes cars have to drive directly behind giant snowplows, and if they fall too far behind they are immediately engulfed in snow. The combined effect of all of this is simple: People stay indoors, often for weeks at a time. The first year of dealing with these conditions doesn’t seem to bother most people, but by the third year it often becomes unbearable.
“Did you ever consider leaving during the third winter?” I asked Babs.
“No,” she replied. “I really didn’t. There are different kinds of toughness. I wasn’t tough enough to live in a city anymore, but I was tough enough to live out here.”
After breakfast was finished, Babs fixed me another cup of coffee and led me out onto a small wooden deck off her living room. This deck was the real perk of living in Whittier Manor, she explained. It allowed her to step outside any time she wanted. “It’s not bad out today,” she said, as we stood in a biting wind, sipping coffee and staring blankly at the mountains. “Hey,” she said suddenly, “let’s feed the birds.” Babs stepped back inside, then reemerged clutching a softball-size chunk of frozen chicken, still smoking from the frosty burn of the freezer. Without warning, Babs swung the chunk of chicken well above her head, and then launched it skyward with a soft grunt. Seconds later, the frozen scrap of poultry was spinning wildly against a spectacular backdrop of mountains and sea, until it hit the ground, bounced, and then headed skyward once again, this time in the talons of a bald eagle. “That a boy, Charlie!” Babs hollered from her terrace, eyeing the bird with wonder as he worked his massive six-foot wingspan and flew over a distant curtain of pine trees. “He’ll be back,” Babs assured me.
Over the years, Babs had grown quite fond of her “pet eagle,” she explained. But when she first moved to Whittier, she was more leery of eagles in general. Back then, she had two Pekinese dogs, which, along with other small dogs in Whittier, are known as “eagle bait.” In fact, the following morning, when I was having breakfast with Babs, the Anchorage Daily News ran a story that read in part: “A Sterling woman witnessed five bald eagles feeding on her twenty-pound poodle on Wednesday.”6
As it turns out, Charlie was just one of Babs’s many pets. On a regular basis she also fed a number of other wild animals, including a chipmunk that lived beneath her deck, several stray cats that somehow survived in the engine of an old school bus, and a sea otter named Oscar who lived in the sound. Babs’s favorite, however, was her one domestic pet—a gigantic, 110-pound black dog named Jake, whom she referred to as “the horse I never had.” This designation was rather fitting, because at one point she had actually planned to harness Jake to her “old lady’s tricycle” to create a sort of dog chariot. She even jury-rigged a reindeer hal
ter with a quick release system, but at the last minute Babs decided against it. “I’m getting too old for that kind of stuff,” she told me.
As Babs scraped the leftovers from breakfast off her plate and into Jake’s mouth, she stroked his fur and spoke to him softly. When all the scraps were eaten, she looked back up at me. “It’s just nice,” she said. “I come home, the dog bounds over, the cat snarls, the eagle eats—I feel like I’m wanted.”
For the next two weeks, my days started like this: Babs and I picked up the newspapers at the tunnel, ate breakfast at her house, and then drove back to the high-rise to make our deliveries. Usually, I held the elevator at each floor while Babs flung out a few copies of the Anchorage Daily News.
During the afternoons I often paced the hallways of the high-rise, looking for people or a rare community event. Once I joined a group of ladies for bingo in a grim, concrete rec room. Another day, when the sound of organ music drew me into the hallway, I discovered the local church, which was situated in the apartment next to mine. After the service, I met the members of the small congregation and joined them for a potluck. Several times I visited Whittier’s schoolhouse, a very modern and well-run facility, which has won both state and national recognition for its innovative teaching techniques. Because there are just thirty or so students, ranging in age from three to eighteen years old, the school designs a unique learning program for each child.7 In many ways, this individualistic style of education seemed to suit Whittier.
For the most part, the town as a whole was not very community-oriented. Instead, people tended to congregate in small cliques—the barflies, the senior citizens, the school kids, the church crowd, the fishermen, the bingo players, and so on—and interaction between these groups seemed limited to forced hellos in the elevator. As far as I could tell, residents kept to themselves. Even Babs, as busy and outgoing as she was, rarely had people over to her apartment or spoke of having any real friends in Whittier. Many people simply stayed in their rooms all day long, content not to be bothered. “Whittier’s not the sort of place where you want to know too much about your neighbors, because a lot of them are on the run from something,” one woman told me. “And, well, you’re better off not knowing why.”
In the evenings I would help Babs run Cabin Fever, which involved sitting in the closet, listening to country music, and chatting about life in the town. Once every hour, Babs hustled down the hallway to do some readings at the weather station and left me to man the store. During these regular intervals I either played solitaire or perused the movies on the shelves. Sometimes customers came in. I would take their two bucks and write down their room number. Occasionally a tanner stopped by to spend some time in the booth. Once I tried it myself. I applied Babs’s Ocean Potion: Australia’s Extreme Tanning Intensifier, closed myself inside the long steel coffin, and let the heat work into my bones. As I did this, I was overcome with a deep sense of relaxation that I hadn’t felt since arriving in Whittier.
Light, or the lack thereof, is a serious problem in Whittier. For several months during the winter, no direct sunlight makes it over the mountains. This often causes a funk, clinically known as SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder. According to Babs, however, SAD was just an excuse to get depressed.
“I don’t really buy into that SAD stuff,” she told me one evening as we sat in Cabin Fever. “At my apartment I have fluorescent lights for the plants that work on a timer. They come on at nine A.M. and they make a little sunshine.” Babs shrugged. “I don’t know. I worked in bars so long maybe I’m just used to the dim light. In any case, it does no good to blame the sun. The real problem is that people don’t leave their rooms. That’s why doing the newspapers and chatting with the train crew is so good for me. Same with the video store—it gets me talking to people. It’s certainly not about making money. Last night I rented out one movie.”
Babs turned up the volume on the store’s small TV set, which was broadcasting the Grand Ol’ Opry live from Nashville. A lone fiddle echoed across the walls of the closet in which we sat. Babs lit a cigarette and smiled contentedly. “Two thirds of life is mental,” she said finally. “However you condition your head, says how you are going to make it or not, don’t you think?”
I nodded my head vaguely. It wasn’t that I disagreed with Babs. Her bullish optimism was obviously a key to how she’d lasted so long, but it was also making it difficult for me to understand just how brutal Whittier could be.
The Anchor is Whittier’s only bar, not to mention the only restaurant open year-round with regular hours. It’s located in a dingy three-story building that sits just a few hundred yards from the high-rise. A week into my stay, I stopped in for a beer.
Inside, the Anchor was furnished with truck-stop decor: red leatherette seats, mirrored paneling, and a handful of neon signs. In the center of the room was the “Liars’ Table,” a twelve-foot hulk of wooden tabletop around which a bunch of regulars would sit, chat, and recount the bar’s greatest moments—like the time a fight broke out and a city councilman put a fire axe through their beloved table. On this day there were about half a dozen men in coveralls lounging about, and they heckled me with a number of perfunctory threats as we got to know one another.
“Hey, kid, you know what we do for reporters around here?” one of them asked me. “We give them free rides out into the harbor—one way!”
I considered explaining that I was actually a fact-checker, then thought better of it. I was already in a bad spot because of a magazine reporter who had been there a year earlier and taken special care to lampoon everyone in the bar. Now they all took turns threatening to thrash that son-of-a-bitch magazine reporter the next time he showed his face in town, and I joined in, sharing my contempt, as I was rather disgruntled at the prospect of taking a beating in his place.
“You’ve got balls coming in here alone,” another member of the Table yelled as I sauntered over to the bar (you had to saunter in a place like this). Immediately there was talk of my buying everyone beers.
“Kid, you got an expense account?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
“Somebody get the rope!” another yelled. As I fumbled for my steno pad to take a few notes, someone else shouted: “Hey, put that away!”
“Look,” I said as I paused mid-saunter. “I don’t want to make the same mistakes that magazine reporter made—so how am I supposed to get the story right if I don’t write down what you say?”
An awkward moment of silence ensued. Finally, a veteran of the Table spoke up: “Good for you, kid!” Someone nodded and another called for a toast. “To Whittier!” shouted a man at the far end of the Table. “Where the men are men, and the women are too!”
At the bar, a sturdy blond woman in her mid-thirties poured me a beer and introduced herself as Beverly Sue, the Anchor’s official babysitter. “I take care of everybody, serve them, and drive them home in my little Subaru at the end of the night,” she explained with a warm smile. Later in the evening, I found her comforting a white-haired man whose good friend had drunk himself to death not so long ago. Drinking was a full-time occupation for some people in Whittier. The few times I had breakfast at the Anchor I could usually find someone having a beer. In the days before the road arrived, some of these habitual barflies were referred to as POWs, or Prisoners of Whittier. As one regular at the bar explained to me, these were people who came to Whittier, ran out of money, and couldn’t afford a train ticket out of town. So they worked at the Anchor, ate at the Anchor, drank at the Anchor, bought cigarettes at the Anchor, and at the end of each week they barely broke even. “People really got stuck here like that, for a year or two,” he insisted.
As I sat at the bar, sipping my beer, I met a tall, thin woman dressed in all black and wearing a clunky amulet around her neck. She looked both stylish and mystical, and needless to say, completely out of place amid the other clientele. She introduced herself as Elena Meyers and extended a slender hand. We chatted for a while, and eventually I managed t
o ask her how she’d ended up in Whittier.
“I was running from a husband,” she told me bluntly. By now I had gotten somewhat used to this explanation.
“And how long have you been here?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t live here,” said Elena. “I’m just visiting.”
“So you used to live here?”
“Yes, I used to work here at the Anchor,” she said with a nervous laugh.
Elena explained that initially she was quite happy here, simply because her husband couldn’t get in. “I knew all of the people who worked on the train, and I told them here’s the deal, here’s what he looks like, and I don’t want him in. They said, ‘No problem.’”
“So a number of people had this deal?”
“Yes,” said Elena. “It was easy to block people out. It’s like you’re living in a dorm. You just go room to room, or floor to floor. The police lived down the hall and I just said, ‘Could I borrow some sugar, and hey, don’t let him on the train today because I have to work and I don’t want to deal with him.’ That’s how easy it was.”
“The problem is,” she quickly added, “we have long winters. It’s dark, we have hellacious winds, people are all in the same building, and everybody knows every little thing about you, and it builds until you just go over the edge. That’s when people break—in the winter.”
“How long did you last?”
“Three winters,” she replied.
“Three winters?” I put down my beer. “What’s the deal with three winters?”
Elena laughed. “The first year you like the seclusion,” she explained. “The second year you are sort of in between. By the third year it just overwhelms you—suddenly the little peaceful town gets to be like a prison. You’re either in your cell or you’re in the community area, and that’s all you see and all you do, and by the third year you can’t deal with it anymore. You got to get out. I just had to move. I couldn’t handle people knowing every single thing about me. I mean, they knew what kind of underwear I had on a particular day.”
