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. The building has long been a teenage hangout; its interior walls are covered in graf- f ti, and hundreds of f attened beer cans are suspended in the thick layer of ice that coats its f oors.

The f rst time we stepped inside BTI, we found a gray-haired man in slippers and pajamas scanning the bulletin boards that line the entrance. “You’ll get a ticket if you park your car near the doorway like that,” he snapped, then shuff ed into an elevator. Most of Whit- tier’s citizens are outgoing and friendly, but BTI has a few shut-ins, residents who never leave the building. They never need to: the f rst f oor houses a post off ce, police station, grocery store, and Laundromat. (It used to house a combination video store/tanning salon, but then Netf ix came along, and a resident moved the tan- ning bed into his apartment.) On the third f oor, you’ll f nd a health clinic, and in the basement there’s a church. As comfortable as it is, BTI can’t shake its past as an army bar- racks. The hallways, with their f uorescent lighting and painted cinder-block walls, reminded me of an old public high school, and the condo we stayed in still had its military-issue metal cabinets, pale yellow 1950s electric stove, salmon- colored tile, and rattling wood-frame windows. Like the Buckner Building, BTI was built to

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 58 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 59

be earthquake-resistant, made of three separate concrete sections connected by metal plates: if you run into the hall during a big tremor, you can see the sections swaying in opposite directions. It’s also basically f reproof. On our second day in town, we were down- stairs at the Kozy Korner grocery store when an alarm went off—an excruciating blare that wouldn’t stop, like the horn that New York ambulance drivers lean on when people won’t get out of their way. The man we’d been talking to put his f ngers in his ears and screamed over the noise, “It’s just the old military f re alarm sys- tem. Goes off around once a month. I’m sure the f re department is coming to turn it off.” He tried to keep up a conversation, but Reed and I couldn’t concentrate, so we escaped to the one set of func- tioning elevators. An older man wearing a track jacket got on with us. We explained that we were new to town and asked what he did during these alarms. He shrugged. “It’s quietest inside the condos, so your best bet is to just go to your room and shut the door. It’s a concrete building; nothing’s going to burn down.” When he got off the elevator, we noticed that the back of his jacket read, “Whittier Volunteer Fire Department.” Turnover can be high among newcomers here. Though there are plenty of summertime jobs, there is no year-round industry in Whittier besides the port, and the Alaska Railroad workers mostly commute in from Anchorage. When we visited, all but one of the police off cers lived out of town, and even the mayor had moved to Anchorage. But people eke out a living somehow. The harbor and the tower and the city itself are in need of constant maintenance. Seasonal work is plentiful enough that residents work two jobs in the summertime to soften the lean months. Most of the residents here are transplants from the Lower 48, though recent years have seen an inf ux of immigrants from Amer- ican Samoa, the Philippines, and Guam. They come here the same way people come to Alaska in general: they hitch a ride on a whim, they come for seasonal work, they get word from a family member that money is good here, and they f y or drive up. Then they stay, perhaps because they are stuck, but usually because they fall in

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 59 03/12/15 1:03 pm 60 ERIN SHEEHY

love with the landscape, the freedom, the ruggedness of Alaska living. Whittier is still an anomaly, though. Residents of BTI—and Whittier Manor, the only other residential building in Whittier— lack something that other Alaskans hold dear: privacy. In some ways Whittier is a small town wearing big- city clothes. You’ll f nd nosy neighbors in any small town, but in the high-rise you can hear your next-door neighbors’ conversations through the walls, and most people have a view. All the residents on the harbor- facing side of BTI keep binoculars on their windowsills; when he f rst moved to Whittier, one man was warned to think twice before taking a piss outside. A lot of residents walk around BTI in their house slippers. We befriended a schoolteacher who told us that after she moved into BTI, it took her a long time before she felt comfortable going to a friend’s apartment wearing pajamas or even holding a glass of wine. “I mean, I’m the teacher,” she said. “But then I realized that the barriers were just going to be differ- ent here.” When her students have problems with homework, they just knock on her apartment door.

After the alarm was f nally shut off, we called up the mayor, who gave us a tour of the city in his truck. He drove us to the edge of town, where a new road was being built. A handful of Whittier’s citizens and council members would like to see a resort area built farther out on the peninsula, hoping that it will bring in more tour- ist traff c. He then took us through the rail yards, back toward Whittier Community School— which is connected to BTI by an underground tunnel— and dropped us at our condo. “Well, I’m glad you guys arrived this week,” he said, “because it’s going to be crazy next week when those people from the Discovery Channel and the History Channel get here.” Sometime in the fall the mayor had told Reed that a couple of televi sion production companies were interested in f lming reality shows in Whittier. One company, Discovery Studios, had even started sending out contracts to “characters” that producers were

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 60 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 61

interested in. Reed had planned to visit Whittier later, but when he learned that residents might be signing binding contracts, he changed his plans and moved up the visit. We thought we had beaten everyone else to the punch; we hadn’t even thought of the possibility that the TV crews could show up while we were there. But the mayor had been f elding calls from everyone who was in- terested in documenting Whittier, and now it seemed that by try- ing to get there before the other New York media people did, we’d all accidentally scheduled our trips for the same time. It was just a minor annoyance for Reed and me, but the TV crews were being forced into a sort of showdown. The mayor told us that the city would be holding a special council meeting so that both produc- tion companies could pitch their show ideas to the people of Whit- tier. We were invited to come and watch. “A reality show could be good for bringing attention to our little town,” he said, “but it does worry me, too. I don’t want to be some Alaskan Honey Boo Boo.”* Over the past few years, the number of reality televi sion series set in Alaska has skyrocketed. In 2014, more than a dozen aired on cable networks. Most of the programming is of the “man versus nature” variety: shows like Deadliest Catch, Life Below Zero, and even Ice Road Truckers tend to focus on the strange and dangerous professions of the Last Frontier. But forays into human drama have been made. The Oprah Winfrey Network ran a single season of Married to the Army: Alaska, about the “unique sisterhood” of mili- tary wives. TLC aired the short-lived Big Hair Alaska, a show about Wasilla’s Beehive Beauty Shop, where Sarah Palin used to get her hair done. Alaskans have been both amused and frustrated by the explosion of media interest in their state. For a time the Anchorage Daily News even ran a blog called Hollywood Alaska, which re- ported on the latest industry news and routinely asked whether the state was getting enough return on this media gold rush.

*Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson was the child star of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a reality show on TLC (formerly The Learning Channel) about a poor family living in the rural South. The series has been criticized as crude and exploitative, and the network was accused of ridiculing its own stars.

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 61 03/12/15 1:03 pm 62 ERIN SHEEHY

The Lower 48’s obsession with the Last Frontier isn’t the only cause of the boom. In 2008, the Alaska government began offering subsidies that allowed producers to recoup up to 44 percent of their spending in the state. The subsidy program—one of the most gen- erous in the country—has been controversial. In previous years, shooting an entire feature f lm or TV series in Alaska tended to be prohibitively expensive. (Northern Exposure, the famous 1990s show about a Jewish doctor from New York who moves to a small town in Alaska, was shot entirely in Washington State.) More f lm- ing means more out- of- state f lm crews spending money on food and lodging, and could potentially be a boon for tourism, but the latest reports from the Alaska Film Off ce show that from 2011 to 2013, only around 15 percent of the total wages paid by these tax- subsidized productions have gone to Alaskans. On the seventh sea- son of Deadliest Catch, Alaska workers earned less than $44,000, while out-of- state workers took home more than $1.3 million. And although an Alaska setting is central to the plotlines of most of the f lms and shows that are shot here, some production companies have come under f re for abusing the subsidy. Baby Geniuses 3, a movie about crime- f ghting babies and toddlers, paid less than 6 percent of all wages to in-state employees, and its plot brought little attention to “Alaska issues.” Even when money or recognition does reach Alaskans, its ef- fects are uncertain. Audiences typically tune in to Alaska- based re- ality TV for “real men in danger,” not upwardly mobile characters. “Suddenly there’s a lot of money f oating around Tanana,” a woman told us of the village where Yukon Men is f lmed, “but no one can go out and buy a new Carhartt jacket, because on the show they’re supposed to look like they’re just barely hanging on.” The Discovery Channel synopsis claims that Tanana is “part of an unknown America where men hunt and trap to survive, subsisting like mod- ern day cavemen.” One of the stars complained that after he brought home a deer he’d slaughtered, producers asked him to empty his fridge and freezer so that when he f lled them with meat, it would look as if he’d had nothing to eat before.

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 62 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 63

At f rst I was surprised that people in Whittier were so noncha- lant about being documented—media savvy, even. When we told one man with a Santa Claus beard that we’d like to take his por- trait, he suggested he get a haircut f rst, but then his friend jumped in. “No, they want that swag. They want to see a guy who can hold a job with a beard like that. It’s so Alaska.” As long as the town of Whittier has existed, outsiders have been fascinated by the way its citizens live, but with the recent glut of reality televi sion in the state it seemed that everyone we met knew someone who’d re- cently been on camera. The mayor had a friend on the taxidermy show Mounted in Alaska. A local had worked as a deckhand on a boat that was chartered for Alaska: The Last Frontier, and when she tuned in, excited to see her boat on TV, she was surprised to f nd that she herself was on the show. The day after the episode aired, someone belatedly called to ask for permission to use her likeness. Our f rst week in town, we hurried to f nish as many portraits as possible before the production companies showed up. We weren’t exactly in competition with the TV crews, but we did worry that people would tire of interviews and cameras. “Are you the TV peo- ple?” they asked. So many residents were relieved when we said no that we began to introduce ourselves by saying, “Hi, we’re from New York, and we’re not with a reality show.” Most of the town, it seemed, was murmuring about TV. Some feared they’d be made to look stupid. Others worried that on- screen drama would cause rifts in the community. Most thought the town was too boring for any- one to actually go through with a show. “People get scared about who will be picked to be on the show,” said the city manager (who runs most of the day-to- day operations in Whittier), “because they all think their neighbors are idiots.” One morning we came downstairs to f nd casting call notices on the bulletin boards in BTI’s lobby. “Today I saw a spiky- haired woman in a miniskirt,” said the cashier at the Kozy Korner. “So I f gured she must be from New York.” We overheard the desk clerks at Whittier Community School double daring each other to go to

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 63 03/12/15 1:03 pm 64 ERIN SHEEHY

the auditions that were being held that night. “Come on,” said one, “I want that TV money!”

On the day of the council meeting, big lazy snowf akes fell on Whittier, blanketing the town. Reed and I walked down to the Public Works Building where council members and about thirty citizens had gathered. Cameras were rolling. A couple of men in skinny jeans and brand-new Sorel snow boots were f ddling with a DVD setup. Each production company would be given a chance to pitch its show: producers were to talk about the benef ts of signing with their company and what would happen if the show got picked up by a network. People in town had been referring to the crews as simply “the Discovery Channel” and “the History Channel,” but these labels were a bit misleading: one group was from Discovery Studios, the in-house production company for all Discovery-owned networks (including TLC, Animal Planet, and the Oprah Winfrey Network). The other group, though contracted by the History Channel, was from a small New York production company. The representative from Discovery Studios gave her presen ta- tion f rst, leading off with a short reel of her company’s reality shows. The video cut frantically between clips, from a hoarding show (“We have to clean this place up, starting now!”) to a cop show (“The southern Texas border has become a war zone”) to a diving show (“They want me to swim with sharks—what the hell was I think- ing?”). The producer then explained that she had come to get a “sampling of f avors” in Whittier so she could make a “sizzle reel” to pitch to networks. She kept referring to the people in town as “characters.” The next representative called his Manhattan-based produc- tion company a “mom-and- pop shop” and explained that his show was trying to explore how real people lived in America. He argued that the History Channel was the right choice for Whittier because the network had an interest in “inde pen dent entrepreneurial-type people” and “unconventional lifestyles.”

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 64 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 65

Both teams dispelled the rumors—widely circulating at the time— that if they requested it in their contracts, Whittier’s “char- acters” could prescreen episodes to make sure anything they ob- jected to wouldn’t air. (This option, the producers explained, is typically only given to military and law enforcement agencies so that they can screen for classif ed information.) The f oor was then opened up to questions from the audience. The mayor said he was concerned that not enough went on in Whittier for a reality show to be sustained. “With Gold Rush: Alaska,” said the mayor, “some of them tune in to see the charac- ters, and some of them tune in to see if they strike gold. And the same thing with Pawn Stars. People tune in to see the pawn stars, and they also tune in to see what they’re pawning and what they’re selling. We don’t have gold to f nd or Rolex watches that’s being pawned to us. All we have is characters out here.” Without an in- dustry to follow, and with the main interest in Whittier being its unique housing situation, residents worried that producers would try to stir up interpersonal drama in BTI. People voiced their fears of being made to look stupid. Not at all, said one producer. “You’re Alaska,” she stressed. “If anything, we’d be bragging about your extreme lifestyles.” Some- one asked if there was a difference between the concepts of the two teams’ shows, and both said their theme would be “the story of a small town,” an answer that did little to lessen residents’ concerns about how they might be portrayed. “Well, they’re obviously going to show some of the bad side of Whittier,” said a bottle- blond resident in a leopard- print coat. “That’s what’s going to make a show. But they’re not going to make an intelligent person look stupid. And they’re not going to make a negative, stupid person look good.” A woman in the back of the room spoke up. “This is the f rst time in a long time that our kids are getting conf dence to go out on their own and to seek out new things to do, and I really don’t want to see that damaged. Our EMS department is getting awards; a lot of people are getting awards. We’ve worked too hard for that to

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 65 03/12/15 1:03 pm 66 ERIN SHEEHY

just go down the drain because somebody wants to be on TV.” Schoolteachers expressed fears about how a reality show might af- fect their students. A relative newcomer to Whittier talked about how proud she was to call the town home and began to cry. I kept my eye on the cameras, wondering if the producers were telling the truth when they said that this footage was not for broadcast. Though the meeting offered a forum for residents to raise ques- tions and voice concerns, there was nothing, actually, to vote on. City councils can’t determine whether or not a company should be allowed to f lm in their town. The Discovery producer explained that both companies could potentially go forward with their shows if they wanted to, though she suggested that the people of Whittier choose one company so the town would not be divided. Attendees suggested that everyone meet sometime at the Anchor Inn—not as a city council or a school board or a condo association, but as a community—so that if they went forward with a show, they went forward together. The mayor, despite his reservations, was excited about the pros- pect of a reality show. “I just got back from the East Coast,” he said. “One of my favorite things I did while I was in Boston was go to Cheers. I had my picture taken in Norm’s seat at the bar, and I can see people wanting to come to Whittier and see where people sit at the bar or see where the city has their city council meetings. I could see some positive in this.” The Discovery producer reminded every- one that having a whole TV crew in town, in need of room and board, would boost the wintertime economy. “If you have a favorite seat at the Anchor Inn,” joked the History Channel producer, “you better write your name on it now.” “But they’re going to become townspeople,” protested the pro- ducer from Discovery. “They’re going to become one of you. These are going to be your friends.”

A production assistant was in her workout clothes, doing laps in the BTI hallway, when Reed and I were setting up one of our last shots

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 66 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 67

of the trip. She had her headphones on, so we didn’t bother to say hi. Soon afterward, the rest of her crew walked by and stopped to chat. “What are your names?” said the executive producer. “Maybe I’ve seen your work.” It’s always embarrassing the way media people talk to you when they hear that you are one of them. The local photographer wants you to look over his shoulder while he shows you his website and complains about his small-town neighbors. The f lm crew from New York invites you to the party they’re hav- ing at a “rockin’ space” in Bushwick. Their shoptalk has a com- petitive edge and shouldn’t be mistaken for friendliness: “By the way, are there any cool people in town you think that we should talk to?” These interactions leave you with the same hollow sadness you feel inside an Apple store, but they also check the impulse to believe you’re the tourist who’s less touristy than other tourists. A tide of out-of- towners has come and gone with every boom and bust in Alaska, from the Klondike gold rush to the World War II and cold war military growth that tripled the state’s population. Most of the people we met in Alaska had arrived in the early 1980s, in the fat years after the completion of the Trans- Alaska Pipeline, which carries oil from Alaska’s North Slope down to Valdez, just across the sound from Whittier. These were the people who came not for the oil but for the boom. They started restaurants and hotels and paint shops and craft shops; they stayed on and became Alas- kans. But the people with their eyes on Alaska now are more voy- eurs than adventurers. They are interested not in contributing stories of their own but rather in extracting and exporting the ones here already. The great part about TV is that you can watch all the excitement from the comfort of your own home.

On our last night in town, we went down to the Anchor Inn, but it was empty when we showed up, so we sat in the back with the bar- tender, watching the wind blow snow across the rail yard. “When I was younger,” she said, “I was real thin, and that wind hit me so hard one time, I slid completely underneath my car.” Customers

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 67 03/12/15 1:03 pm 68 ERIN SHEEHY

started trickling in, but the place was quieter than usual; we had all become glued to the huge f at-screen TV, which was playing non- stop tragedy on the late- night news. A couple of guys from a TV crew came in with the bar’s owner and sat down for drinks. A few of the regulars— Russ, Rusty, and Russ (one of the Russes is Rusty’s son)—ambled in. Conversation picked up; the crowd started to buzz. But everything stopped when a woman at the bar whom Reed and I had been talking to all night got a call from a friend in BTI. “Again?” she yelled. “Don’t worry, I’m coming. Call Off cer Dave.” It was a domestic dispute in the tower. She said she’d be back as soon as she could. “Okay,” people called out to her. “It will be okay.” The producer from the TV crew was staring into his lap— texting rapidly beneath the bar. “Are you trying to check out what’s going on up there?” asked Reed. “Yeah,” said the producer, “I’m pretty sure we can get a ride- along.” “You know,” Reed said to the producer. “I think TV people are real shitheads.” The producer was taken aback but didn’t say much in response. We turned back to the f at-screen and ordered another drink. When we left, the crew was still there, sitting at the bar, taking up people’s favorite seats, just as they’d joked they would. The next day, we left Whittier.

Throughout the second week of our trip, we kept seeing another man, all in black, walking through town with a tripod. We’d as- sumed he was with the tele vi sion crews, but we only ever saw him alone. One night we went to the Anchor Inn, and he was sitting at the bar with a woman. We sat down next to them. It turned out that he was a photographer and she was a writer. We were all at the cor- ner of the bar, each pair facing the other; it was like looking through

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 68 03/12/15 1:03 pm GOLD RUSH WHITTIER 69

some existential fun-house mirror. They told us they had met at Yaddo and were opaque about what they were doing in Whittier. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m doing here,” he said. “I’m mostly just taking pictures of piles of snow.” “I don’t really leave the condo,” she said. “I just stare out the window, write a little poetry.” After a while, we sussed out that they’d come to Whittier for a romantic getaway and a few weeks of artistic inspiration. It was such a departure from the mode we’d been in. We’d been sur- rounded by people looking for stories, and here they were, search- ing for something else, something they couldn’t even name. We explained to them that we had thought the photographer was with a reality show, but the couple had no idea what we were talking about. “I don’t even say hi to anyone,” the poet said. We told them about the crews in town and about reality TV’s hunger for Alaska. They admitted that they could see the appeal, that they too were taken with the “realness” of Alaska living. “We’ve been thinking about moving here,” said the writer, “to one of the little empty cabins behind the Buckner Building.” Later I’d keep imagining them up there in the winter to come, freezing in one of those tiny cabins—previously abandoned be- cause they were unlivably cold. Something about it seemed so silly, so arbitrary: if these two stayed in Whittier instead of going home to make their art about it, suddenly they’d have become insiders, or “characters” just like everybody else, and our lenses would have turned on them, too.

042-60274_ch01_5P.indd 69 03/12/15 1:03 pm