Sweeper’s Cove, Adak Island, Aleutians June 10, 2012 23:30 51N51 176W39
The town of Adak is a surreal place. Wikipedia has the historic details if you’re interested. I’ll try a short version before adding my own impressions. This whole area was populated by the Unanga (AKA Aleuts) for about 6000 years up until the 1800s, when the most of the local hunting population followed Russian fur traders east, and most of those who remained behind starved (guess the fur trade didn’t leave much for subsistence living). During WWII Adak was the staging ground for an offensive against the Japanese who had landed/attacked Attu and Kiska (Islands the furthest west in the Aleutian chain). During the cold war Adak was a major naval air station responsible among other things for submarine reconnaissance. At it’s peak in the 1990s the population grew to 6,000 people, with all kinds of nifty new facilities for the military families living here, swimming pool, new schools, bowling alley, rec centers replete with pottery, auto, and woodworking shops, and yes even a McDonald’s. With the end of the cold war, and the Clinton era military base closures, most of Adak’s buildings and facilities were given to the Aleut Corporation, the entity that owns and runs most of Adak today. Between the 1990 census and the 2000 census, Adak’s population dropped 93%, down to about 300. When we asked in town they said “year-round” residents probably hovered around 80 – a very unofficial number. The result is a modern day ghost town, with everything frozen in 1990’s – a very apocalyptic feel. If you were ET dropped into Adak, you’d assume the Russians won the cold war. Besides the extremes in temperature, remoteness, and ambience, it’s the southernmost city in Alaska, (although city seems a little extreme to me), and it’s officially one of the extreme points in the U.S. as the westernmost municipality.
We rented a car* for two days to see the sights. It was fascinating to drive around these empty streets with mostly empty houses and buildings. What is it about ruins that tickles the imagination? Abandoned cabins or castles pull you into picturing the lives and times witnessed by those structures in a way that occupied buildings don’t. Even historic reconstructions or museums don’t light up the past as clearly in the imagination as ruins do. What does a tattered remain say that a living functioning space can’t?
In an 80s era zone with peach and beige houses capped by blue and red metal roofs, I expected to see moms walking down the vacant sidewalks with big shoulder pads permed curls, and purple teal and magenta coats (like the one I was wearing pulled from the bowels of Silver Lining’s storage – an 80s era ski parka that’s still keeping me warm). That officer housing section looked like a master plan lifted right out of an orange county architect’s office and plopped in the tundra. It almost appeared to be under construction with its lack of landscaping and its exposed plywood siding (where metal siding had been torn off by the wind). But broken windows, and rusty metal doors, cracked plastic wind screens and fire damaged units told a more recent tale. Perhaps a tale of rat infestations and electrical fires, or bored youth with too much time and space and rocks at hand, or fisherman with too much shore liberty and inhibitions drowned in alcohol.
One local took me on a tour of an old recreation center, to give me a flavor of what they’re up against from a cleanup standpoint. The old basketball court was piled high with mounds of deteriorating furniture. Walking around the edges, there were rolls of raffle tickets, piles of baseball helmets, table saws, rusty industrial washers, any and all manner of equipment you’d imagine in a facility like that, all piled into the one big space. With no one to fix the hinges on the doors, replace siding that was blown off, or add plywood to windows to save them from vandalism, everything in the room was suffering from water and rodent damage. Maybe when the items were moved there, everything had been categorized and organized, but all that remained was a toppling pile of junk deteriorating into trash. Parts of a kiln lay scattered, but who knew if all the parts were there, no one had the manual to put it back together. Locals looking for a new piece of furniture have picked through the piles over the years, toppling any past organization that existed, in an attempt to maintain or beautify their own little corner of this place. Even if any of the items had any value left, finding them and their pieces, putting them back together and paying to ship off island would have been an enormous task with little or no return. And this was one of many similar facilities.
My guide told of a recent electrical fire in one of the warehouse building filled with cars, it was especially difficult to deal with since no one knew how to run the fire truck. When he asked for advice, someone told him to read the labels on the truck. Last thing you want during a fire is to have to read the manual first. The reality is 80 people just can’t put to use and maintain all the stuff that 6000 people could (with a healthy military backing budget). What probably seemed like a giant Christmas present at first must be feeling like a colossal burden now. Still, there is one bar, one restaurant, and a grocery store. The newest of the school structures now houses the post office, city council office, community room, and a school for 20 or so kids. Most of the inhabited buildings are more or less clustered together, but what a mammoth task to try to keep power, water, sewer, and trash services for the few functioning buildings in the mass. The military is still here doing cleanup, but their cleanup focus is not on the structures – it’s a superfund site, so they have even bigger cleanup issues to address (and a funding source to address them with). Meanwhile since WWII there are also still, scattered throughout these islands, live ammunitions and Rommel stakes (a.k.a. “anti personnel devices,” sharp stakes in the ground that could pierce through your boots if you stepped on them in the spongy tundra). So we’ll definitely be stepping lightly on our future hikes, and avoiding touching anything rusty.
There are attempts to attract tourists, and hunters and outdoor adventurers are eager to visit, but the airfare from Anchorage alone is a whopping $1200 RT, and don’t forget to add the cost of shipping your caribou home with you. The military housing is comfortable and available for $150/night and up, but it’s not a 4 star resort. The residents we spoke with love it here, I can see the attraction, raw beauty, living in the extremes, and a special sense of freedom that living close to civilization just can’t equal. If you’re interested, apparently a fourplex can be purchased for an affordable $20k, but if it needs a fresh coat of paint, you can expect to pay a premium to fly a few cans here.
Frank says it’s getting depressing to him. I still have a desire to explore the ruins, maybe go find the pieces of the kiln, rebuild the pottery studio, learn to throw a pot, create an artists retreat, inventory cleanup and redesign the town, volunteer in the school, hunt some caribou and make coats and boots from their hides, carve their horns into pendants…so much potential, so much work to be done! But the captain says it’s early to bed early to rise, off to the fuel dock with the sunrise.
xoxomo
*Our rent-a-car was an old rusty Bronco with the Adak Fire Department logo and working flashing lights! A few pics of the truck and the town are up on picasaweb.google.com/margoreveil but I did not get back to the internet to post the rest of my pictures of the houses and buildings. It’ll be a few weeks now before we get to Dutch Harbor.