Alaskans Find New Road Paved With Uncertainty

When people dream of getting away from it all, only a few hardy souls have in mind a place like Whittier--where almost everybody lives in a single high-rise building, huddling through storms so malevolent the boats sink in the harbor and grown dogs blow down the street.

The ferry doesn’t even run from early fall to late spring. For the most part, the 280 locals take a train that bores through a 2 1/2-mile-long tunnel of rock and ice. When avalanches bury the tracks, no one goes anywhere. Even those who love it admit that a recent book wasn’t far off when it called Whittier “the strangest town in Alaska.”

So imagine what will happen today, when the state opens a road through the tunnel, connecting this scenic outlet on Prince William Sound to the main highway and Anchorage, 57 miles away.

“ ‘Devastating’ is a good word for what’s going to happen to this town with this tunnel,” says acting Mayor Arlen Arneson.

Overnight, half the population of Alaska--about 300,000 people--will be within a two-hour drive; state officials estimate Whittier will get 1.5 million tourists a year by 2006--most of them using Whittier as a gateway to the fishing and recreational boating opportunities of Prince William Sound.

Environmentalists, fearful that the new road will bring destructive waves of visitors to one of Alaska’s most pristine wilderness areas, are poised to chain themselves to the tunnel opening, blocking the first cars as they attempt to pass.

Whittier residents have different worries, like what happens when hundreds of cars a day stream down the new road into a town that has exactly two public restrooms and several Porta Pottis?

“They’re going to have mass confusion,” predicts former City Manager Carrie Williams. “How do you take a small town . . . and expect them to have the sophistication to meet these kinds of challenges?”

A Town Rooted in Isolation

There are plenty of places more remote in Alaska but few where insulation is such a state of mind. Part of that is the peculiar geography of Whittier, which exists as a mere square mile of glacial silt at the toe of two mountain ranges.

The town was born in the early days of World War II, when the military needed to supply the Alaska Command with a perpetually fog-shrouded port that couldn’t be bombed by Japanese planes. Because there was really nowhere to build but up, the military located its entire headquarters in two high-rise buildings: the 14-story Begich Tower, now home to two-thirds of Whittier, and the abandoned Buckner Building.

Although there is another small apartment building, a few restaurants, a fish processing factory and some harbor buildings splayed out below, Begich Tower is Whittier’s urban core: a hulking rectangle squatting over the harbor. In it, in addition to rows and rows of apartments, are the town’s post office, church, video store, laundry, notary public, grocery store, city hall and tanning salon.

Most stories about Whittier begin in one of the Begich Tower hallways or were witnessed from one of its postage-stamp windows.

There’s the one about Robert Wardlow, better known as Cowboy, who held the record for not having left Whittier for eight years. “He sat in that chair right there,” says Gary Carr, a clerk at the Country Store on the tower’s first floor. “He’d sit there till his beard was down to there and his hair was all matted. And then he’d shave so you wouldn’t recognize him. He’d sit there with Kay Shepard, a cantankerous, hard-headed woman. They used to sit and argue with each other all day long. . . . He died of cancer of the esophagus.”

Finally got out of Whittier, huh?

“Nah,” says Carr, reaching for a can on the shelf behind the cash register. “He’s right up there.”

“It’s like a college dormitory, you know, with everybody walking around in their bathrobe and slippers,” says June Miller, who runs the bed-and-breakfast on the top two floors. “My neighbor will bring me over biscuits and gravy. We get together in the laundry room if we have a problem.”

And if someone’s been drinking too much and gets thrown out of their apartment? They simply walk down the hall and knock on another door, which quietly closes behind them.

Residents decorate their apartment doors along the long hallways with wreaths, welcome signs and fake brickwork. There is the perpetual smell of fried pork chops in the air. Even the flu is shared each winter, a variety known as the “Whittier crud” that most residents believe is due to the inadequate fresh air in the Begich--not that anyone is willing to pay to do anything about it.

Beverly Sue Walts, a bartender at the Anchor Inn, lives just down the hall from her ex-boyfriend. Occasionally, she succumbs to the temptation to drop in again, in part for lack of more interesting dating prospects. “It’s the old saying about Alaska: The odds are good, but the goods are odd,” she sighed.

Weathering the Winter

Stories abound of the weather that drives people into the Begich and keeps them there much of the winter: howling winds that blow blinding snow and anything else that isn’t chained down. Residents tell of the man from Anchorage who ventured on a night dive this past New Year’s Eve, walked halfway out of the water and was simply never seen again. Or the time Babs Reynolds and her Pekingese blew off the loading dock and ended up under a car.

Then there are the tales of the tunnel--like how Paul Heimbuch got out of his car to relieve his bladder while riding on the flatbed and fell off the train.

“The train comes in and there was a car on it with nobody in it,” recalls Walts. “They had to go back in and get him. He had started a little fire, I guess, to keep warm.”

The train tunnel was completed in 1942 in a stunning feat of engineering: 13,090 feet of rock blasted in two directions, with manual surveying so precise that when the two blasting crews met in the middle, one side was only half an inch lower than the other, 1 1/2 inches off to the side.

Now engineers have turned it into the longest road tunnel in North America. The rails have been smoothed out and underlain with concrete panels, allowing drivers to safely motor atop the tracks in a single lane, like streetcar tracks running down a road. Traffic will be allowed through from the Whittier end of the tunnel for half an hour, followed by the Portage end for half an hour, with freight trains lumbering through in between.

For the first time, the tunnel has lights. It’s been equipped with a state-of-the-art safety system of video monitors, radar detectors and fans to assure that, even if somebody hauls out of the Anchor Inn dead drunk and slams into the back of a fueled-up motor home in the middle of the tunnel, nobody fries.

Firetrucks and water will be stationed at each end. Safe houses along the route have room for 55 people behind doors that will hold back a fire for four hours.

Jeff Brown, project engineer for the state, has put the cost of the upgrades at $74.2 million. And in his 25 years of building roads, Brown says, no job has been harder than Whittier--where half the people are all for it, and half hate it.

“I honestly believe it’s going to be a breath of fresh air for this little town, and it needs some fresh air, believe me,” Brown says. He thinks it will take a week of living with the road before those opposed to it realize they now can drive to Anchorage for groceries and not have to buy a $72 round-trip train ticket.

But others aren’t so sure.

Town Braces for Invasion

“I haven’t found anybody that’s real happy with it,” says Arneson, wondering how boatloads of tourists could even fit in Whittier. “They couldn’t even stand here, let alone drive their cars, dogs, kids and picnic baskets,” he said. “What are we going to do about the toilet paper, the paper towels? Who’s going to clean the bathrooms?”

And the road through the narrow tunnel, Arneson says, rolling his eyes. “Can you imagine mom and pop, in their early 70s, driving a 40-foot motor home through there?”

Still, the town is doing its best to get ready.

Bulldozers are shoving dirt all over the outskirts of town, furiously grading a new parking lot and finishing the road between the tunnel and downtown.

Eighteen lots near the harbor have been leased for new restaurants, T-shirt shops, arts-and-crafts shops and boat supply businesses. And with land running out in a town butted up against towering mountains, the state has fielded dozens of inquiries from imaginative entrepreneurs proposing to move offshore with floating liquor stores, restaurants and hotels.

And city officials are considering selling bonds to finance new water and sewer lines near the harbor. That will allow the city to get state money to build a new parking lot and bathrooms there.

In the meantime, however, environmental groups have gone to Gov. Tony Knowles seeking a last-minute reprieve. They argue that opening up a rich ecosystem like Prince William Sound--already devastated by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill--is foolhardy.

But countering the environmental protests is the lobbying of the powerful cruise industry, which sees a road through Whittier as a valuable access to interior Alaska for millions of tourists. In fact, major cruise lines already have signaled their desire to unload up to 1,300 passengers at a time at Whittier’s harbor. For that reason, few people expect the governor to halt opening of the road.

Making Preparations

So people prepare for the inevitable. Reynolds, who operates the Buffalo Burger stand down on the harbor, figures she’s seen just about everything come through Whittier anyway since her arrival in 1977: 10 road plans, 23 evictions, nine harbor masters, 42 city studies, 12 city managers, 10 mayors and 11 inches of rain in 24 hours.

“I came here 23 years ago. . . . I had an ex-husband who was going to kill me, and this place offered me so much security,” Reynolds says. “This isn’t going to be our secure, safe little haven anymore.”

In the Whittier spirit, however, Reynolds had a golf cart brought in on the train to use once the tourists arrive. “Won’t have to worry about parking,” she explains.