Travelers' Tales Alaska (33 page)

Others have chipped in to this legacy. The volunteer fire chief accidentally set the firehouse aflame. A railroad engineer backing up onto the barge dock dumped some train cars into the drink. The self-proclaimed former “town drunk” told me he would habitually stay at the Anchor until closing time, then not feel up to walking the two blocks home to BTI. So he'd sneak into the police station across the street, find the key to the jail, curl up for the night there, and quietly let himself out in the morning.

For better or worse, the isolation that has made Whittier what it is today will soon vanish forever. In May 2000, the revamped tunnel will open to automobile traffic. A thousand people have joined a waiting list for harbor slips, anticipating
expansion. An Anchorage speculator bought the decrepit old Buckner Building, despite rumors of bears in the basement, and vowed to raise $25 million to resurrect it (he's said to be having difficulty).

“People buying BTI apartments now, they're investors,” says Ken Miller, who runs fishing charters in town. “They're not buying one; they're buying five or six. Four years ago you could've gotten one for $8,000, $10,000, $12,000. Now they're going for $45,000 to $60,000.”

One person's renaissance is another's hostile invasion, however. “There seems to be so much suspicion and animosity,” says Carrie Williams, the city manager. “More than anywhere else I've ever seen.”

The road's most rabid opponent is Jerry Protzman, Dodi's husband, who for decades has served as Whittier's crustier version of George Bailey. His shipping and snow-clearing firm, Dojer Ltd., is the largest employer in town, and he's known for putting borderline drunks and welfare cases (among others) to work. He's also known for shouting down adversaries at
council meetings and writing frothing letters to state officials. (“The DOT is saying SCREW THE PEOPLE OF WHITTIER!!!” one of them noted recently.) “Everybody in Anchorage is gonna drive in here one time—been there, done that,” he told me in his office. “The only people I could see coming down more than that is somebody shacking up with somebody else's wife, hiding out for the weekend.”

He shakes his head. “You got half the people here that are on drugs and welfare, and drunk; and then you got the people who work for a living. About half the town can think, and about half the town can't.”

He shakes his head again. “Funny place.”

There were dozens of other stories I heard during my stay—the man who fired his rifle at the barge because it was making too much noise at night; the time the wind spun a Labrador retriever down an icy street like a curling stone—and the days passed quickly. Finally, on a Friday morning in a blinding blizzard, I boarded the eight o'clock train out. At first the only sounds on board were the thrum of the locomotive, someone's cat mewling, and some muttered comment about “the damn public defender.” But once the train lurched into motion, a woman with her two grandchildren in tow struck up a conversation with another passenger. A year had passed, she said, since she'd last tasted alcohol. She began to reminisce at high volume about her drinking days: about how she'd once found herself on a barstool at the Anchor Inn talking to a woman, with no idea how she'd gotten there; about the time she lit out for the tunnel on foot with a pint of brandy in hand. I don't know how that story turned out, because right then my mind drifted off to an amazing sight I'd seen out by the harbor a day or two before. It was an otter, a land otter. He had bounded over a snowdrift and scampered
west on the slushy road, agile as a greyhound. I can only guess, but he seemed to have had his fill of Whittier: He was headed for the tunnel.

Mike Grudowski is a freelance writer living with his wife Kelly in San Luis Obispo, California. A former senior editor at
Outside,
his work has also appeared in
Men's Journal, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Sports Illustrated Women,
and
Rocky Mountain.

TOBY SULLIVAN

Dark water, darker thoughts haunt a Bering Sea fisherman.

I
COULD TELL YOU WHAT BEING AT SEA LOOKED LIKE
, the view across the water on a sunny day, of an empty world beyond the sight of land, or a distant horizontal white line of frozen coastline, when land was close enough to see. The skidding clouds, the waves echoing each other, the mast ticking back and forth as the boat rolled, like a metronome clocked down to some kind of essential proto-rhythm, all of that was part of what we saw and understood. When we were beating it out in a storm a hundred miles from the lee of any kind of shelter in the middle of the Bering Sea, the motion became amplified and distorted, a massive download of experience that was so overwhelming it drove everything else from our minds. The horizon then became an abstract idea hidden by heaving mountains of water for all but the few moments when you crested a wave and could see across the backs of thousands of its brothers, and it read like the jagged line of a seismograph, or the teeth of a saw. But even when it was calm, when we were sliding across the Gulf of Alaska on the flat
calm ocean of a long and brilliant summer day, there was always that ceaseless motion, that underlying rhythmic core of the experience. And even on utterly windless days, when the surface of the ocean was like a polished table top, with the volcanoes of the Aleutians reflected on it like some frozen, spiky version of the grassy bank of a millpond, nothing was for certain. Even when it seemed the boat was perfectly stable and your life on it was a sure thing, you knew in the back of your mind that there was a softness to the edges of that stability, that what you were seeing was a temporary illusion, and that if the boat turned, or someone swung the crane across the deck, the boat would drop a shoulder and heel over a few degrees, and remind you that the world was liquid, that everything could change in a moment.

We were always taking pictures of each other holding up king crabs and wolf eels, or pink mountains far away on some painfully beautiful morning. But the prints always came back with something essential missing, as if the thing we had meant to catch had ducked away just before the shutter snapped. We took videos too, and they at least showed the waves rising, the water surging across the deck, demonstrated that the world we lived in was moving, that it was always moving, a dimension the photographs could never show. But even video couldn't quite fit it all in. “If I just had the right lens,” a friend of mine once said, but we both knew no lens would ever be quite wide enough to show the thing we knew but could not explain.

A series of pictures ran in a magazine once, shots of some crab boat in the middle of the Bering Sea in February, with the rails and the rigging sheathed with six inches of ice. The men on deck were dwarfed by black waves looming just off the bow, their orange rain gear in high contrast against the water, and all of it was achingly familiar, and true as far as it
went. But the part that was missing, the thing the camera couldn't catch, was how our fingers got so cold from being on deck all day in 10-degree weather that they burned for hours while we lay in our bunks trying to sleep afterwards. Or the burned-out adrenalized feeling we got from standing in the wheelhouse all night in a storm, the back of our eyes reverberating from hours of staring at thirty-foot waves coming up out of the darkness, the curling lips shimmering white in the irradiated purple light of the sodium vapor deck lights.

I have a picture of us hanging onto the chart table with both hands to keep from being thrown across the wheelhouse on some wild night trying to get into the shelter behind the north side of Unimak Island. We are grinning madly at the camera, our eyes red in the flash, the green glow of the radar screen and the orange dial lights from the radios and Lorans behind us. It looks exactly right as far as it goes, but just looking at the picture you cannot hear the wind screaming through the rigging above us so loud we had to shout
to hear each other above it. You cannot feel the shudder of the hull slamming into the waves, or smell the stench of diesel smoke back-drafting up out of the engine room as the wind jams it back down into the stack. And definitely the picture does not show the scratching thought that really, this might not be very cool at all, that right now the last wave of our lives was forming up out there in the wind—the seventh son of the seventh son. Our own personal last wave, the wave that would come through the windows and sweep us all away in a million tons of water as black and hard as basalt, leave us smashed, bleeding, and sinking in a swirling white trail of foam.

And missing, too, is the other end of the experience spectrum, the basic animal joy at simply being alive and present in the world as the sun came up out of the sea after a long night. The smell and heat of cups of the first fresh coffee since midnight in our hands, a full load under the hatches, a good forecast for traveling, all of that was part of our lives, too. So little of any of that came across in any of the pictures we took, the emptiness and exhaustion of countless freezing hours on deck before dawn, or the redemptive scent of bacon and eggs and coffee at sunrise. The good, the bad, the horrific, and the sublime, none of that ever got recorded in a way we could bring home and show to people on a screen after dinner. And even the stories we told, that other, older way to explain our lives at sea to people on land, to our girlfriends on the phone from the dock in Dutch Harbor, as wild and exaggerated and true as they were, were like trying to describe the taste of a lemon, or what sex felt like, to people from another planet.