Travelers' Tales Alaska (32 page)

Another, less common belief holds that Hairy Man, like Sasquatch, is some sort of primate-like creature that's neither human nor ape, but an entirely different species.

But to Ted Angasan, and many others, no explanations are necessary. “I have no ideas what stories are behind it,” he says, “All I know is that Hairy Man exists.”

A co-editor of this book, Bill Sherwonit has never seen a Hairy Man, but he believes in the possibility of their existence.

MIKE GRUDOWSKI

What's worse than cabin fever? Tenement fever.

T
HERE'S A PAINTING HANGING IN THE HALLWAY OF THE
school in Whittier, Alaska—a framed, folk-art, children's-book vision of the town as seen in winter from Passage Canal, the finger of Prince William Sound on which Whittier sits, fifty-seven miles southeast of Anchorage. The picture gets it right, give or take. White mountains loom over town, adorned with curlicued waterfalls (accurate, though not in winter). Wetsuited divers clutch red king crabs. Apple-cheeked children ride sleds or beam out the windows of a chugging train. Snowflakes hover among the evergreens (dead-on accurate: there's as much as twenty feet of snow each winter). And right at the center, something leaps out garishly from the storybook tableau: a huge, somber, jaundiced-beige high-rise, with row after row of square brown windows. A mistake, you might think; somehow the sketches for
Wow! It's Winter!
got shuffled in with
My Book of Housing Projects.

But that towering hulk actually does exist in the town. In a
sense, it is the town. Almost every one of Whittier's year-round residents—about 300 officially, though skeptics say that's inflating it—calls one of its fourteen floors home. Main Street? That would be the elevator. Town square? Try the lobby.

There's a virtual city ensconced among the polished tiles, institutional-yellow concrete walls, and uniform brown doors. The 13th and 14th floors house (in part) June's Vacation Condo Suites, a bed-and-breakfast. The Whittier Baptist Church parsonage is on 7, the medical clinic on 3. The 2nd floor features the garbage room and the public library, the latter padlocked until further notice for lack of volunteers. A basement tunnel leads to the school, which has a basketball court with green-painted lanes—home of the Whittier Eagles—and a high-ceilinged, concrete-walled playground, where the younger of the thirty-eight students play on the slide and swing set year-round without fear of getting swallowed by a snowdrift. The 1st floor includes the Country Store (a miniature grocery), city offices, a U.S. Post Office, and Cabin Fever Cures, a small enterprise run by a woman named Esperanza. From six to nine there most evenings, townsfolk—Whittiots, some call themselves—can browse the shelves of rental videos or simmer in a tanning booth in the closet-size room adjoining. Also on the first floor is a tiny laundromat, where cabin fever finds a less congenial outlet. A stenciled sign outlines the laundry rules, including this one, hinting that in such close quarters even Our Town neighborliness has its bounds: Clothes that are left in machines after the cycle has been completed by thirty minutes may be dumped on the floor by the person waiting.

Why, someone might reasonably ask, does almost all of Whittier live under the same roof? They have little choice. When the U.S. Army bulldozed Whittier into existence during
World War II, spacious housing didn't top its wish list. It chose this one-square-mile delta of glacial silt because of its advantageous quirks. Passage Canal never freezes, making it the closest fail-safe port to Anchorage. The junction of the Chugach and Kenai ranges traps clouds, making perpetually overcast Whittier a tricky target for bombers. Soon troops and supplies were shuttling through town en route to the Aleutian Islands, host to the war's only combat on U.S. soil. The Army also blasted out two train tunnels—the longer almost three miles—until recently the only land route in and out of Whittier. And after the war, the military put up two hulking concrete monoliths that remain the signature of Whittier: the Buckner Building, a seven-story dormitory that broods, gray and ominous, at the edge of town, abandoned since the Army bailed out in the sixties; and the fourteen-story warren that most of Whittier calls home, Begich Towers Incorporated, better known as BTI.

BTI is a somewhat cozy place, but even if it weren't, people would think twice before venturing outdoors. The climate makes Whittier a forbidding place to winter, even by Alaskan standards. Anchorage boat owners who dock in Whittier's harbor usually hire locals to shovel off their craft after blizzards. One owner's boat was neglected this winter. It sank.

Weather isn't the only plague. Most residents make their living off tourists—sea kayakers, fishers, glacier gawkers—who scatter, along with their money, after summer. Construction crews working on tunnel improvements sometimes make it impossible to leave town. And Whittier's southern flank of mountains makes it impossible from late November on to see the sun from town; not until February 4 (or the next clear day) does it reappear. Together, these combine into a powerful recipe for funk, or worse. “If you're not stable to begin with,”
says Jan Latta, the school's office manager, “things here might push you over the edge.”

If you watch daylight slowly fade into Whittier from the 14th floor of BTI, the place looks like a toy-train village might if they made toy-train sets to resemble Soviet fishing towns circa 1950. On the sound side of the tracks, a few blocks away, boats sit silently in their slips. On the near side, ten-foot snow piles divide a dozen or so bland, low-slung buildings. “In some ways the winters are more beautiful than the summers,” someone remarked to me. “The snow covers a lot of ugliness—rusted hulks and things.”

Sometime between nine and ten o'clock, though, the dark surface of the sound and the all-encircling peaks come into focus, and then you better grasp what draws people here. Bald eagles slice through town like sparrows. Otters and sea lions bob around the harbor. Last summer a black bear infiltrated the school. A few years ago, a family of moose migrated in through the tunnel. And Prince William Sound and its 2,000 miles of coastline—endless bays and bights and spectacular beaches—all of that is Whittier's front yard.

“You go out on these coves—maybe three miles out there,” says Kirk Loeffler, a thirty-five-year-old former software analyst who moved to Whittier four years ago with his wife, “and you'd swear no one had ever been there before. This place in the summer is the most beautiful place you can imagine.” Loeffler told me of a time shortly after he moved to Whittier when a storm churned up six-foot seas. “Maureen and I are staring out at this chaos, and all of a sudden a killer whale came in. He was so close you could've thrown a stone and hit him.”

For some, alas, such beauty is scant compensation for the hardships of the town or the oddities of its housing situation. A few winters ago, Whittier had no local police, so state troopers
rotated in. One day when the skies cleared, Babs Reynolds, a longtime Whittiot who owns a dockside hamburger stand, spotted a trooper brushing snow off his car outside BTI during the brief sunny interlude.

“Boy,” she shouted to him, “it doesn't get any better than this, huh?”

“Lady, you been here too frickin' long,” came the reply. “It gets a lot better than this.”

Each day of my weeklong reconnaissance visit to Whittier, I awoke to the piercing beep of heavy snow-moving machinery backing up in the dark down below. From my 14th-floor bed-and-breakfast aerie, I took a gander at the town through the binoculars thoughtfully included in the living room. Occasionally I'd greet the day by playing one of the eight-track tapes also provided: Bobby Goldsboro, Donny Osmond, Helen Reddy's “Ain't No Way to Treat a Lady.” I'd venture into the bathroom, startled awake by the military-issue pink tiles. (“I've talked to a few guys who tried to rip 'em out,” a BTI resident later told me, “and they said, ‘Wow. The Army did a hell of a job puttin' 'em in.'”) My daily shower
commenced only after the bathtub faucet first spat out a few ounces of Coke-colored liquid, which I assumed—hoped—was some residual Cold War rust in the pipes.

The hallways of BTI can resemble someone's parody of a suburban subdivision. BTI rules state that you can't paint your door, so individuality arrives in more subtle form: a lingering wreath, an anchor door-knocker, a Scotch-taped notice of an exterminator's upcoming rounds. Neighbors gossip on the elevator while taking their dogs down for a stroll. Here in this town there are no lawns, of course, unless you count the artificial turf in the sixty-yard tunnel to the school. Here keeping up with the Joneses means acquiring the latest coveralls from Carhartt, or some really nice calf-length rubber boots. And here, winter's eventual demise is joyously heralded by the arrival of seasonal Mexican and Filipino fish-processors to their rental rooms in BTI: Whittier's answer to the swallows of San Juan Capistrano. “Everybody's happy to see them,” says Dodi Protzman, who with her husband has lived in Whittier off and on since 1947. “It's like you know spring is finally here.”…

“There's a lot of people that lose it,” Jerry Noran announces to me one evening across a table at the Anchor Inn, Whittier's sole restaurant/bar open all winter. “I lost it.”

Jerry, a slightly pudgy thirty-six-year-old harbor technician with mousy brown hair, once made Whittier history by barreling through the Whittier tunnel in his '99 Chevy Tahoe before there was a road. Even the Anchorage paper picked up the story. “I made front-page Metro,” Jerry says with a hint of pride.

The episode began when the erratic train schedule didn't mesh with the office hours of Jerry's doctor, causing him to run out of antidepressants for several days. “A lot of people
here are on 'em,” Jerry says. Desperate, he resorted to a few cocktails, thereby unleashing the proverbial hounds.

“It was 2:30 in the morning,” he says matter-of-factly, between spoonfuls of glutinous vegetable-beef soup. “I figured the tunnel crews would be done working.” It's dinnertime, and the Anchor's regulars line the bar. Arcade-size video games take up one wall, a few of them functioning. Neon signs glow in the windows: “Anchor Inn,” “Budweiser,” “Food,” the last perhaps meant ironically.

“I started out at about twenty, but that was too rough,” Jerry continued. “So I got her going about sixty-five, seventy. I high-centered when I was trying to go around the gondola car they backed in to block me. I whitewalled the tires, but that's the only damage I did.”

Even before this incident, Jerry played a key role in Whittier's rich heritage of spontaneous buffoonery. “My second or third winter here, I drove a truck off the train,” he says. “Then on a Super Bowl Sunday I got hit by the train driving a bus. I was sober then.” He pauses to reflect. “Me and that train don't get along very good.”