Adak isn't the sort of place many people just go. If you are neither hunter nor birder nor fisher, and you still want to go there, it's best if you have a collector's mind. It's the sort of place you'd really get if you've always been a beachcomber, a person who likes to walk a tide line, who can't resist pocketing the hollow bird bone or the hunter's sun-bleached shotgun shell.
It helps, too, if you like history. History, like beachcombing, is essentially a way to exercise the imagination. Adak has exotic natural beauty, sure, but the place is also a unique study in the life cycle of human debris. It's junk, really, but if you're the right sort of person, it fills your mind with stories.
To get to Adak, you fly 1,200 miles west of Anchorage to the far end of the Aleutian Islands. Alaska Airlines currently offers jet service to the island on Thursdays and Sundays. It takes about three hours to get to Adak, depending on the wind. The plane is often mostly empty.
You descend out of the clouds and there it it is: snow-capped peaks rising out of the sea like the island home of a villain in a James Bond movie, the Pacific on one side and the Bering Sea on the other. Once you land, you're in another time zone, one hour earlier than mainland Alaska.
One-time strategic military installation
The United States sent 4,500 troops to Adak to build a base in 1942, just after the Japanese attacked Dutch Harbor and occupied the far western Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska. The military constructed a harbor, scores of buildings and the beginnings of what is now a massive airstrip. In 1943, on the eve of a planned U.S. invasion of Kiska, there were 90,000 troops stationed on the island. (When they finally landed on Kiska, they discovered the Japanese had left.)
The base remained through the Cold War. Before it closed in the mid-1990s, roughly 6,000 people made their homes on the remote, windy island. When my plane touched down in mid-April, there were fewer than 100 residents left, living among the curious bones of the old Navy town.
Making connections
Nathaniel Wilder, a childhood friend and photographer, met me at the airport, looking tan from a week outdoors. This was his sixth spring hunting caribou on the island. Caribou hunting is one of the big reasons people who aren't fishermen or government employees come to Adak.
As is the case on a number of Aleutian islands with herds of grazing animals, caribou were introduced as a way to guarantee there would always be food. Without any natural predators, the herd has grown to about 3,000. Nathaniel and four friends took five animals, hiking out with the meat over miles of grassy muskeg and mountain passes. The friends were all getting on the plane.
The airport turns into a community gathering when a flight comes in. Everybody seems to be around. Nathaniel introduced me to Jack Stewart, a white-bearded military retiree in his 70s whose empty rental unit we would be staying in. Nathaniel and I also met Elaine Smiloff. Elaine, who is in her 50s, holds half a dozen titles, including city council member and weather observer. She agreed to give us a tour the next day if we paid her gas money. (She also told us to get land use permits from the Aleut Corporation. They are available at the airport for a small fee.)
We piled into Jack's red pickup and lumbered through an industrial area, past a stack of crab pots, a closed Mexican restaurant and an open liquor store, past the high school, which is also a post office and city hall, past Ann Stevens Elementary, which was boarded up, past a chicken yard where hens pecked around an old office chair, turning into a subdivision marked with a faded sign that read, "Sandy Cove."
Stepping back in time
It doesn't take long before you fall into Adak's time warp. All the decor is about 25 years old or older. It's like being on a massive movie set. And, to complete the retro picture, there is basically no Internet connectivity, except for Wi-Fi that is either crazy expensive and/or too slow to load email. Smartphones are useless. There is no Google to help inform your experience. There are no status updates to pull you out of the moment. Truths aren't quite as verifiable there, and word of mouth holds more weight. You also have way more time to think.
Elaine arrived the next day exactly on time in a dented passenger van, a big black lab named Max, Jr. running ahead of her with a stick in his mouth (He looks back at the intersections to see which way she's turning).
We cruised in the van over rolling grassy hills, breezing through open gates punched in layers of rusting wire fence that once must have seemed intimidating. The weather-beaten, institutional buildings of the base had been transferred to the Aleut Corporation, Elaine said. Many of them were totally open to the weather, windows broken by vandals, rat droppings and beer cans on the floors, birds nesting in the beams.
One of our journeys began in an empty cinder block mess hall. We descended a flight of stairs and edged through a partly-open metal gate, arriving in an underground tunnel. It was dark except for our cellphone flashlights. (Pro-tip: Bring a working headlamp to Adak.) A wind rushed through from broken windows somewhere on the other side. Through the tunnel, Nathaniel and I soon came upon an empty underground swimming pool. Vandals had been entertaining themselves by throwing office furniture into the deep end.
Elaine and her friend Mik (an off-season Denali tour bus driver house-sitting a place on the island) were down the corridor hunting for treasures. Elaine, like many of the locals, is a master repurposer. (With permission, of course.) She was on the hunt for some old shelves for her store. Trees don't grow on Adak, and most people heat with oil, but Elaine heats with wood, relying partially on scrap. She told me she once burned through all the wood in a water-damaged underground bowling alley.
"Ten pins a night," she said.
A souvenir
The last day, we drove a rutted road out to Finger Bay with Mik and Elaine. Max Jr. and two little dogs that live at the Blue Bird ran along beside the van, nosing through the grass for rats. I asked Elaine how often she checks her email. Maybe once a week, she told me. When somebody calls and tells her to.
When the bay came into view, Nathaniel spotted a seal. We watched it slide into the water.
We parked and walked along the bank. A giant net used to stretch across the opening of the bay, meant to snare submarines like sockeyes. Now it was piled up near the shore, getting grown over.
There was all sorts of other evidence of the elaborate military project that had once been. Mossy foundations. Holes. Pipes. It was the sort of thing you might want to look up online, but of course that was impossible, so you had to imagine it. About then, a small white shape in the water caught my eye. I bent down and picked it up. It was an obsolete spark plug. I turned it over in my palm, feeling the weight of it, and then I slipped it into my pocket.
This story appeared in the May 2015 issue of 61º North Magazine. Contact 61º editor Jamie Gonzales at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.