Gold Rush Whittier
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5 GOLD RUSH WHITTIER ERIN SHEEHY When I went to Alaska in December 2012, it wasn’t the cold that surprised me but the light. The sun still rises in southern Alaska during winter, but it lies low in the sky, making long shadows, and the short days are bookended by stretches of cerulean twilight. It’s a dream for f lmmakers and photographers: the golden hour lasts most of the day. I was in Alaska to visit Whittier, a small town on the western side of Prince William Sound, with my friend Reed, a photogra- pher who shoots portrait series of communities all over the world. It was our third trip together. Earlier that year we’d photographed people in an El Paso neighborhood, and before that we traveled to a f shing town in Alabama that had been affected by the BP oil spill. It’s not the type of work I usually do, but Reed needs someone to write prof les of his subjects, and I need an excuse to get out of New York. He also needs someone to hold the lights. Reed is not a documentary photographer: his shots are posed, lit, edited. I think he makes his subjects look good— luminous, and a little bit proud. When people are on the fence about getting their picture taken, Reed shows them samples of his work, and they tend to agree to a portrait. Sometimes he tells people that they are “pieces of a puzzle”— a benign thing for a photographer to say, maybe, but I always cringe when he says it. We shoot and interview so many people during our two- week trips that it’s hard for me to 042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 54 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 55 know how we’ll possibly combine all those stories into a cohesive w h o l e . Whittier, however, seemed like it would be easy. We weren’t headed to a sprawling city. The town was not racked with any con- troversy that we knew of. Reed had been in touch with the mayor, who said we’d be welcome there. We didn’t even need to search too hard for an angle, because the town was a story unto itself: since 1960, almost everyone in Whittier has lived in the same build- ing— a former army barracks called Begich Towers, built for mili- tary families during the cold war. We wanted to learn what life was like inside the building and to f nd out what sort of person would live there. We planned to photograph and interview at least f fteen residents in two weeks. For Alaska, where many villages are only accessible by plane or boat, Whittier is relatively easy to get to. We drove some sixty miles down the Seward Highway from Anchorage, snaking along an inlet that during low tide looks like a pitted moonscape. The trees that lined the road were white with sparkling frost; fog hangs low there and freezes on their branches. The view is spectacular, but the highway is deadly. In most parts of Alaska, it’s simply too cold to salt the roads: the salt refreezes and creates “chemical ice” that bonds even more tightly to the asphalt. Instead, they use sand and gravel for traction. In wintertime, the Seward Highway is often covered in black ice. Many people only brave it during daylight hours, but this can be logistically diff cult when the sun rises at 10:00 and sets at 3:30. The f nal stretch to Whittier is a two-and- a- half- mile, one-lane railroad tunnel that cuts through a mountain. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to leave Whittier, you had to pay $75 to load your ve- hicle onto a train. In 2000, the tunnel was retrof tted to accommo- date cars, so you can now pay $12 to drive slowly on top of the tracks. During winter months, auto traff c is allowed through twice an hour, at f fteen- minute intervals— one window for inbound 042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 55 03/12/15 1:03 pm 56 ERIN SHEEHY traff c, another for outbound. But when the temperature drops be- low freezing, that window narrows to f ve minutes so that the inter- nal temperature of the tunnel can be kept warm enough (opening the tunnel gates lets the cold air in). When we pulled up, we had just missed the window for Whittier- bound traff c, and our tem- perature gauge read minus thirteen. We waited at the staging area beneath a string of bleak, snow- covered stoplights, while a crew of burly ravens— the pigeons of Alaska— loitered nearby, puff- ing up their hackles. Fifty-f ve minutes passed, and f nally we were let through. Whittier is a product of World War II, when Alaska’s proximity to the Pacif c theater made it an object of interest to both the Amer- icans and the Japanese. In June 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army launched two aircraft carrier attacks on Alaska’s Dutch Harbor, a port town in the Aleutians— the string of islands that run south- west from the tip of Alaska. A few days later, Japa nese forces in- vaded two of the westernmost Aleutian Islands, Attu and Kiska, occupying both until the summer of 1943. (Today, Kiska is one of the most intact World War II battlegrounds in the world, but so much unexploded ammunition is still buried there that visits are restricted.) Soon afterward, the U.S. Army completed a tunnel, a railroad terminus, and a port in present- day Whittier, using the area as its main supply link for the war effort in Alaska. The loca- tion was chosen not only for its access to Prince William Sound but also because the constant bad weather made it diff cult for bomb- ers to f nd. In the summer, Whittier’s population swells as thousands of plea sure boaters, f shermen, cannery workers, and tourists are drawn back to the harbor. Wildlife abounds: mountain goats graze on the green slopes across the water, black bears rif e through city Dumpsters, humpbacks and orcas breach along the shore. But in the wintertime, when the weather turns nasty, industry dies down. Whittier’s har- bor stays ice-free during winter, but sea air isn’t much of a comfort when the wind blows hard enough to shatter windshields; if you’re not careful, it will rip your car doors right off. Sustained winds of 042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 56 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 57 f fty or sixty miles per hour are so common here that they don’t even merit weather warnings. (One night at the Anchor Inn— the only bar and restaurant in Whittier open year- round— a bartender nodded toward the snow whipping sideways past the window and said, “Down in the Lower 48, this would have a name.”) Signs around town read, be careful! always wear your ice cleats! Come October, the “snowbirds”— people who head south for the winter— take f ight, and the population dwindles to about two hundred people. Even if there were demand for it, Whittier would have a hard time expanding, bounded as it is by water and mountains. The city mainly comprises low- lying industrial buildings, and from the har- bor it slopes upward and inward toward Begich Towers, or BTI, the fourteen- story high- rise that sits atop a small hill. Following the war, the military decided to make Whittier a permanent base. In the 1950s, the army constructed what would become the largest and second- largest buildings in Alaska: the Buckner Building, a sprawling compound for enlisted men, and the Hodge Building, a high-rise for military families. The Buckner Building was pro- moted as the “City Under One Roof.” It contained, among other things, a bowling alley, a movie theater, a shooting range, a bar- bershop, a darkroom, and a six- cell jail. Built in seven sections to prevent it from cracking apart in the event of an earthquake, its insides were labyrinthine. Though both residential buildings were occupied brief y, the Buckner Building was abandoned in 1960 when the army pulled out of Whittier because of a decline in military cargo. The remaining residents moved into the Hodge Building. Throughout the 1960s, Whittier’s population hovered between forty and seventy people. During the 1964 earthquake that de- stroyed Anchorage, thirteen of Whittier’s residents were killed, swept out to sea by a forty- foot tsunami. The port, however, sus- tained less damage than the ports of other nearby cities, so for the next few years Whittier’s port facility became the busiest in the state. Whittier incorporated in 1969, and in 1973 the remaining 042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 57 03/12/15 1:03 pm 58 ERIN SHEEHY residents bought the city from the army. The following year they turned the Hodge Building into a condo association and renamed it Begich Towers Inc., after an Alaska congressman who’d died in a plane crash on the way from Anchorage to Juneau. Most people now refer to the towers as BTI. Behind BTI is Whittier Commu- nity School and, behind that, a mountain. The tower has been painted in a weakly cheerful combination of cream, peach, and blue, but when it was f rst completed in 1956, its concrete was left unadorned. Today, about 80 percent of Whittier’s residents call it home. Too full of asbestos and lead to demolish safely, the decaying Buckner Building still lies empty on the hillside, tucked into the trees like some sort of Soviet Overlook Hotel.