Pacific NW

Expeditions

We awoke to pouring rain coming down in sheets. In the early afternoon I was completely surprised to hear a woman’s voice outside the boat calling “hello?” She and another were in kayaks, shuddering under several layers of sopping wet gore-tex. They wanted to know how long the rain was going to last, and looked into the boat longingly when I poked my head out, sweating and in a t-shirt. I cannot praise that woodstove enough. By 1700 hours the rain still hadn’t let up. We decided to make the run into Whittier as it was only a few hours away. The lady in the harbormaster’s office was a ditz and it took me three tries on the radio before she remembered to call back with a slip assignment. We were crammed into a slip so narrow that I didn’t even have room to put the fenders out! The harbor desperately needs to be expanded. I took matters into my own hands and moved to a slip with six more inches of width, and used a “Bayliner” power boat as my fender. The city of Whittier is the strangest and ugliest town we’ve ever seen. It is tucked in amongst some of the most stunning tracts of wilderness, glaciers and mountains. The “city” used to be occupied by 30,000 troops during WWII. They all lived in three huge buildings. Today, about 300 people live in Whittier, all in the same one building! The other two have been abandoned and lie in crumbling ruin. There are no residential houses, just the one building. Inside it are the post office, general store, movie store, city council, restaurants etc. It feels like a huge college dorm from the twilight zone. The rest of the “downtown” is a series of abandoned fire stations and concrete slabs and a grocery store that sells the customary dusty boxes of pasta and cereal from the mid 80’s at 2012 prices. Neptune and I explored the big building and talked with its citizens. Apparently there are only three people that live elsewhere. They are trappers living in a schoolbus up the mountain behind the building that throw the occasional barbecue. The whole scene reminded us of a bureau of reclamation project gone wrong. As we walked through the cinderblock, linoleum and asbestos tile, and fluorescent-lit corridors of the tower, we wondered at the people who lived there.