by Jake Halpern
“How did they know that?” I asked.
“They would guess,” she said exasperatedly. “The guys at the bar would have these little betting pools to see what color of underwear I was wearing on any particular day, because they had nothing else to do.”
“How would they know?”
“They had their ways. I would usually wind up getting asked by somebody randomly whom I didn’t suspect, or somehow they would catch a glimpse. Then you’d hear this roar: I told you today was pink!” Elena shook her head.
Over the course of my stay, a number of people complained to me about the lack of privacy. They claimed that Whittier was a place where your neighbors could drive you nuts—especially if you lived in the BTI, where Lisa lived. Eavesdropping was ubiquitous. At the post office word would get out about the letter you got from the IRS; at the medical clinic news would spread about your skin rash; or on the police scanner someone was bound to hear about any trouble you had with the law. Even the walls had ears, in the form of air vents, which carried a din of conversation from floor to floor. Smells also carried. “I always know when my neighbors are cooking fish,” one resident told me. This also made it difficult for the occasional pot smoker. “Don’t smoke any dope in your apartment,” another resident warned me, “because the cops will smell it through the vents.” Getting outdoors was no guarantee of privacy either. So many residents in the BTI used binoculars that the building was often jokingly referred to as the “Beady Eye.” Basically, in the winter there was so little to do, and so few things to focus on, that any small piece of information was a treasure, even the color of a barmaid’s underpants.
Elena finished her beer and set the empty glass firmly on the bar. “By the third year you can’t deal with it anymore,” she told me. “It was like I was living in this twilight zone and all of a sudden I couldn’t get a paper, I couldn’t get on the phone, I couldn’t get out of town, I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do, and all of that piled up to the point where I walked into the store, and I couldn’t find any decaf coffee, and I’d already been through this like three or four times, and that’s when I sort of lost it, started screaming. I just lost it, and then I moved.”8
A few days after I visited the Anchor, I accompanied Babs into Anchorage for her weekly supply run. It was a whirlwind tour. We visited several thrift shops, the grocery store, a hardware store, Sam’s Club, a place called Jack Rippies that sold only lottery tickets, a watch store where we got a new battery for Babs’s “Mexican Rolex,” and, lastly, the home of Babs’s bookkeeper, which was distinguished by a large sign emblazoned with a gun that read, FORGET THE DOG, BEWARE OF THE OWNER.
As we drove the sixty barren miles back to Whittier, Babs inquired about my visit to the Anchor, and I told her about my encounter with Elena Meyers. Babs said she didn’t remember Elena Meyers per se, but she seemed familiar with details of Elena’s breakdown. “We get a lot of cases like that,” explained Babs. Working as a bartender in Whittier doesn’t help matters either, she added, because you end up spending your time with the town’s most depressed residents. Babs knew this firsthand, because when she first moved to Whittier in 1978, she also worked as a bartender—not at the Anchor—but at the Sportsman, which is now closed. Within two years, however, Babs had struck out on her own. In the summer of 1979, she opened a small seasonal restaurant called Hobo Bay Trading Company. “I needed a change,” she recalled. “And I was tired of working for other people.”
The following day, Babs drove me down to Whittier’s small boat harbor to visit her restaurant. The harbor is protected by several man-made seawalls, which shelter a few hundred boats owned by fishermen, wealthy Anchorage residents, and charter captains who take tourists out into the sound. During the summer the harbor is often bustling with activity, but today there wasn’t a person in sight, and the only sound was that of wind and the clang of steel rigging cables against metal boat masts.
Hobo Bay Trading Company occupied a tiny cabin at the edge of the harbor. In front was a very large, ornately carved wooden sign that read, CELEBRATING 20 YEARS IN WHITTIER, 10 HARBOR MASTERS, 12 CITY MANAGERS, 23 EVICTIONS, 42 CITY STUDIES, 11 INCHES OF RAIN IN 24 HOURS, 9 NEW HARBORS, 1 FISHING DERBY AND 11 MAYORS. Babs walked carefully around her restaurant, inspecting damage from the winter and knocking off a few large icicles that hung from the roof. “The restaurant is open from eleven A.M. to seven P.M., and is closed on Tuesday so I can get the groceries,” she explained.
When Babs first decided to open Hobo Bay Trading Company, most people didn’t think it would work, she told me. She had no experience running a restaurant, and at the time, there was almost no development along the waterfront—just the boat harbor, a small harbor office, and a long stretch of rocks visited by the occasional bear. The only structure that Babs could afford was a small cabin, mounted on a set of wheels. The building’s I-beams came from the old fuel dock; its windows came from the old railroad terminal; the hood of its stove came from a beached ferry that was accessible at low tide; and its door, which was engraved with the word “Library,” came from the abandoned Buckner Building. The man who actually built the cabin, Jerry Protzman, charged a mere three thousand dollars. According to Babs, this was one of the great things about Whittier—it cost almost nothing to start a business. Cabin Fever, which Babs also owned, came almost as cheaply, she told me.
The term pioneer is something of a cliché in the business world, but it applied quite literally to Babs in her early years at Hobo Bay Trading Company. With a spatula and her trusty .38 snub-nosed police special in hand, she fed people and fended off the bears. One of her most memorable customers in those days was a man who crashed his plane in the mountains, slid into town bloodied and bruised, and wandered over to her stand for help. “I gave him some of the brandy I keep down in the shop for situations like that,” Babs explained. “Then we got him medevaced out of here.”
Ill conceived as the whole enterprise initially seemed, residents and visitors came to like the idea of eating by the water, and they showed up in droves to let her know. Now, after twenty years of flipping hamburgers, Babs’s business was doing quite well—and so was Whittier’s waterfront. In the time since Babs first opened, more than a dozen other shops had opened around the harbor. When I asked her whether the new road might help her business further, she just shrugged and changed the subject.
“You know what I call this whole area?” she asked.
“What?”
“The Great White Beach,” she said with a smile.
“Why?”
“Well,” said Babs, “we’re sitting on a pile of rocks that slopes down to the ocean, right? So why is it the Great White Beach? Because it is! You don’t think I want to work on a pile of rocks, do you?” When I asked Babs if she’d ever considered visiting a real great white beach, she told me that she had been down to Mexico several times, but just for a vacation.
A bitter blast of glacial wind blew across the sound and hurried the two of us back into Babs’s pickup. Together we pressed our hands into the warm blow of the truck’s heaters. Nothing was said for several minutes as we thawed. “Do you ever think about retiring?” I asked finally.
“I had thought about retiring at one point,” she confessed as she lit a cigarette. “I thought I could sell the restaurant, maybe buy a fifth-wheeler and go to the lower forty-eight to a lot of places I haven’t seen. I could stay at those camper parks. They all need help—they need somebody to work the front desk, or sell groceries, or pump gas, or whatever. In the wintertime, I could go down on the southern border, and then when it got warmer, go into Michigan and Utah—places where I’ve never been. I thought that would be kind of neat, but then I thought, boy, I don’t know any of those people down there.”
Two others reasons for Babs not to go anywhere were her younger sisters, Brenda and Carolyn, both of whom had followed her to Whittier. Carolyn Raye Casebeer, the middle sister, was a lifelong wanderer who rarely stayed anywhere for more than a year at a ti
me. She had moved to Whittier five different times, and was currently living in an apartment on the tenth floor of the high-rise, which was furnished with a few spartan items, including a wooden box with an open plane ticket in it. Brenda Tolman, the youngest sister, arrived in 1982 and had been in Whittier ever since. Brenda was a professional artist. She had a studio on the first floor of the high-rise, but she lived in Whittier Manor, just a few doors down from Babs.
During the second week of my stay in Whittier, I spent a fair amount of time with both of Babs’s sisters. I got to know Brenda first. We chatted several times at the weather station, and eventually she invited me back to her apartment. She told me that she rarely had anyone over to her place, so I should excuse the mess.
Brenda’s apartment was teeming with plants. They hung from every conceivable nook, soaking in the colored light that poured through the apartment’s many stained-glass windows. The reverse image of this scene appeared across the surface of Brenda’s indoor fishpond. Much of the apartment’s floor space was taken up by a giant indoor fountain that pumped 350 gallons an hour and was inhabited by six giant Koi carp. These fish—along with two dogs, a cat, a ferret, and a handful of reindeer—served as Brenda’s pets.
Brenda and I sat along the wooden casing of her fountain, where we chatted and watched the fish. Brenda was a pretty woman in her early fifties, with long, braided blond hair that came down over the shoulders of her Mickey Mouse winter jacket. “When I first came to Whittier I couldn’t believe this place,” she told me. “Babs took me for a drive around town and she pointed out this old dilapidated building that had water running down the sides. She told me this was the local phone company. I started laughing. There was absolutely nothing here. And then it came to me: What a land of opportunity!”
Despite Brenda’s enthusiasm, Whittier did not strike me as an obvious artist’s retreat. There was plenty of beauty around, but almost none of it was man-made. “With a few sticks of dynamite Whittier would be a beautiful place,” one local cop had told me. It was an old saying in town, and for the most part I agreed. Very few of the town’s buildings had any aesthetic value, with two notable exceptions: a gorgeous Nordic chalet with a great sloping roof and overhanging eaves, built down by the water; and an ornately carved Hansel-and-Gretel-style barn, which sat at the foot of the high-rise. As it turns out, both were designed and built by Brenda Tolman.
The Nordic chalet was Brenda’s gift shop, where she sold the artwork that she made each winter. Her most popular work were her wildflowers, which she carved on the soft bark of cottonwood trees and then painted in delicate detail. She carved dozens of pieces each winter. “The winters here help me create at my max,” Brenda told me. “For some people it might be a nightmare, but it’s just what I need to stay focused. I was just one of those people who were lucky enough to find a place where they actually belong.” In addition to carving cottonwood, Brenda also painted with watercolors, shot her own postcards, wrote in calligraphy, engraved wooden signs, created her own jewelry (including porcupine quill earrings), sculpted and fired porcelain Christmas ornaments, and offered a full line of handmade leather products.
When Brenda became bored with the gift shop, she decided to build the barn, where she did most of her woodwork, stored her power tools, and kept her reindeer. The reindeer proved useful with the tourists and were also a natural fit amid her burgeoning wildlife collection. They were, however, wild animals, and they could be extremely dangerous. Occasionally they made charges. So far there had been no serious mishaps, explained Brenda, except the time that an antler jabbed through the white of her eye and slammed into her skull. “Luckily I didn’t lose the eye,” Brenda told me.
Later on, when Brenda took me down to the barn to photograph the reindeer, one of them managed to sneak out of the pen, and we spent the better part of two hours trudging through Whittier’s massive snowbanks, trying to recapture the animal. Eventually Babs showed up in her pickup truck. Immediately Brenda rolled her eyes. “Here comes Babs to save the day,” she said under her breath.
Although Brenda and Babs lived next door to each other and relied on each other to do everything from running the weather station to lassoing runaway reindeer, they did not seem to get along particularly well. Once they went for two years without talking, Babs told me. “We used to pass in the hallway or ride the same elevator without even looking up,” she explained. “It was like we didn’t exist for each other.” In addition to being somewhat standoffish to each other, the two were also highly competitive, not just for my attention, but for that of the entire town, it seemed. Carolyn, the middle sister, explained this best.
“My sisters are like celebrities around here,” she told me when I visited her tenth-floor apartment toward the end of my stay. “I mean, sometimes you’d think they’d stopped world hunger or something,” she added with a laugh. “But they are really both remarkable women, and of course that creates some competition.”
Carolyn was a very thin, almost nymphlike woman in her late fifties who fidgeted and chain-smoked through most of our interview. When I asked her how she fit into the Whittier scene, she told me that she didn’t. “I’m just passing through,” she said. “I could never live here permanently.”
“Why not?”
“I never live anywhere permanently,” she told me. Carolyn explained that her favorite places were Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas, Hawaii, and Alaska—each of which she had lived in at least four times. “Sometimes people ask me what I am running from,” remarked Carolyn. “They ask me why I don’t want security. But I tell them: Security comes from the inside.”
“How much longer are you going to be in Whittier?” I asked her.
“I have absolutely no idea,” she told me.
Before leaving Carolyn’s apartment, I made a point to ask her why she thought her sisters were so attached to Whittier. Carolyn didn’t answer me immediately. Instead she sat silently for almost a minute, smoking her cigarette, as if I weren’t even there. “You can get a bit institutionalized here,” she said finally. “Everything here is so simple and secure. When I’ve left in the past, I’ve thought, Oh, shit, what have I done? Suddenly I have to start carrying a wallet again. I have to worry about rent, utilities, jobs, everything. For me, that’s the real world. I need that. But what do I know? Maybe this is really paradise and I am just too much of a damn fool to see it.”
After meeting Carolyn, I returned to the vacant living room of my B&B, made myself some coffee, and listened to Elvis’ Christmas Album for the seventh or eighth time. Eventually I found a deck of cards and dealt myself a round of solitaire. As I played, I thought again of Carolyn and her endless migration between Alaska, Vegas, Tahoe, and Hawaii. In many ways I admired her lifestyle, but I wondered if she found it exhausting—hopping from place to place, free-falling through her life. Later in the evening at Cabin Fever, when I asked Babs about this, she nodded her head knowingly. “Carolyn has never been connected to anything,” she told me. “And never will be.”
On one of my last nights in Whittier, Babs invited me over to her place to watch the Oscars. She said she would make some chili, and I said I’d bring her up to speed on the nominees. “You must be the only person I know who has actually seen any of these movies!” she told me over the phone.
Before I headed over to watch the awards, I met up with Brenda, who had prepared something of a goodbye salute. Earlier in the week, when I visited the barn to help her feed the reindeer, I noticed a large piece of PVC pipe that was hooked up to an air compressor. “What’s that?” I’d asked.
“It’s a potato gun,” she told me. “You can shoot a potato from here all the way over to that building,” she said, pointing to a distant warehouse. Firing off potatoes, she told me, was one of her favorite forms of entertainment. Today, quite graciously, she had taken time to set up the gun. Brenda crammed a good-size potato down the five-foot shaft of the gun, popped on the air compressor, and told me to squeeze in some air. Suddenly the butt of the gun sl
ammed back against my ribs and the potato blasted outward, hurtling into the sky until I could no longer see it. “Yaaa-fucking-hoooooo!” yelled Brenda.
“Got any more?” I asked. We shot off a few more rounds, and Brenda broke out some M&M’s that she’d brought along for the occasion. When we’d sufficiently shelled the town of Whittier, we set down the gun and grinned at each other like two adolescents who’d just broken the rules. “Thanks a lot,” I told her. “It’s a great gun.”
“I think I have a spare one I can send you,” she said. “They ought to like that back in Boston.”
Later in the night while Babs and I sat in front of the TV, I told her about the movie Erin Brokovich and we discussed at length whether or not Julia Roberts had already prepared an acceptance speech for her role in the film. “Oh, you’ll know when the time comes,” said Babs. “Because sometimes they get up there and they don’t have anything to say, and they’re so happy they’re just slobbering.” So we kept watching until Julia Roberts won the Oscar for best actress and sniffled her way through a very impromptu speech.
Afterward we stepped out onto Babs’s deck under the murky light of a crescent moon, which illuminated the glassy waters of the sound and the deep blue arctic ice along its edges. After a while I posed a question that I had been wondering about for the better part of a week, namely, whether she ever worried about her third husband anymore.
“No, no,” she said with a laugh. “He’s been dead for over ten years.”
This came as a surprise. Until now, I had assumed that he was still lurking somewhere on the other side of the tunnel. I had assumed that, on some level, it was this threat that kept Babs in Whittier.
