Whittier, the town that lives under one roof

Through Maynard Mountain there is one road, and it is only one lane. Cars wait at the gate of the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel while the light runs through its sequence, and from time to time the gate holds while a train comes through instead, headlight swelling out of the dark, the mountain humming with the weight. When the signal finally changes, the line of cars takes its turn under the rock, past the rings of fluorescent light, and comes out the far side into the wet green light of Prince William Sound.

The town on the far side is called Whittier. The rain arrives with the car and follows it down the valley where Passage Canal opens into the Sound. Mountains stand straight out of the water, gray rock streaked with waterfalls, and on the flat lip of land between the mountain and the sea stands one tower of concrete. It is not a beautiful building. It is built to hold things, a harbor for people, the way the mountain is a harbor for weather.

The building is Begich Towers, and most of the town lives in it.

The building

Begich Towers was raised as an army barracks in the years after the Second World War, when the port below it moved supplies through these mountains. Soldiers filled the floors. Then the army left, and the building did not empty. The barracks rooms became apartments. The post office set up in the lobby. A market opened off the main corridor. The police keep a small office by the mailboxes. If a person needed food, mail, and law, that person could live out a long life without once putting on boots.

Inside, the tower has the acoustics of any place where many lives are stacked close. Footsteps travel. Someone's piano comes down the stairwell after supper. The elevator opens and closes all day, and each time it lets out a person the whole town could recognize by silhouette. Fourteen floors of windows face the water; at four o'clock in the winter dark, the lights come on in all of them, stacked like the rungs of a small ladder against the mountain.

Whittier gets more rain than almost any town in Alaska. It does not drizzle. It arrives in gray curtains and stays, day after day, until the moss hangs off every branch, until new waterfalls appear on rock where no stream was remembered, until the ground gives under a boot like soaked bread. On days like that — which is most days — the tower makes its own sense. The rain can have the outside. Everything a person needs is under one roof.

The other big building in town is empty. The Buckner Building, larger than the tower, was built to house far more soldiers than ever arrived, a whole concrete city with a theater and a bakery and a bowling alley. Now its windows are dark, and it stands ankle-deep in grass across the wet ground, looking at the tower like an older brother who never moved out. Kids dare each other to go near it. Nobody goes in.

The water

The harbor is at the foot of the land, a short cold walk from the tower's door. The fishing boats dock there, halibut longliners with their gear stacked on the decks, and the fish plant rumbles through the night, its lights flattening across the black water. In summer the cruise ships come, so huge the town looks like a toy at their side. Passengers pour down the gangways in rain jackets, ride the train that threads the tunnel, photograph the same waterfall, buy the same coffee, and board again before the wind turns. Whittier lets them pass the way it lets the tide pass.

Wildlife does not wait for visitors. Black bears cross the road because it is the easiest way along the shore. Eagles sit on the light poles over the docks. Sea otters roll in the harbor among the buoys, cracking clams on their chests. On the far side of the canal, snow stays in the mountain gullies through July.

Everything that comes in by land waits on the tunnel's clock. The gate opens, the cars cross, the trains cross, the gate closes, and the night belongs to the rain and the water. By sea, the state ferry ties up at the dock in all weather, and the short road from the tunnel passes the tower, the harbor, and the dark bulk of the Buckner, and ends at the water.

The one roof

Almost nobody chooses Whittier forever. Most come for a season — a job at the plant, a boat to crew, a year of steady work and cheap rent — and the season stretches. The town is a few hundred people, and most of them live in the tower. On the cold dark days there is nowhere else to be, so there is no reserve about it. News travels by elevator. A birth, a death, a boat that went out and came back late — the whole building knows by evening.

And that is the strange gentleness of the place. It would be fair to call the tower ugly, and fair to call the weather miserable, and yet the two of them together make a kind of hospitality. A life that would be lonely in a spread-out town gets crowded instead. Weather that would keep a person trapped in a house keeps a person visible instead. The rain is not the enemy of the town. It is what pushed everyone under the same roof, and under that roof people look out for one another.

On the clear nights that come once in a while, the sky goes dark and the stars come down close, and the whole Sound glows under them. Then the rain returns, and one by one the windows go dark up the fourteen floors, and the tower stands thick and warm in the wet, holding everybody, while the mountain holds the water, and the water holds the town.