Randy on Adak Island, AK July 2002

Adak's Bait and Tackle restaurant

We ate at the local restaurant, the Bait and Tackle for breakfast Wednesday morning. The architecture and signage looked familiar, as it was formerly the McDonalds when this was still a Naval base. The breakfast special (Three eggs, hash browns, toast, coffee and juice) was $10.30, which was about as bad as I was expecting. We were the morning rush as Kirk, the helicopter pilot & mechanic and myself were the only ones in there for the hour we lingered. We ate there for lunch too and it was much busier. For dinner at 5:15 pm, she was sweeping up and obviously looking toward closing at 6. Our order of grilled cheese sandwiches was interrupted at the midway point as the power went out for the whole island but that's a bigger story covered below.

The Temsco Bell 212 (Huey) helicopter before our safety briefings on one of our 2 short trips

Work wise it was pretty disappointing. Due to the low cloud/fog, we really weren't able to start anything until latter in the day. We had our helicopter safety briefing at 9:30 at the airport. Both Kirk and I got a good feeling about the pilot and his attitude. He's no hot dog and doesn't feel the need to prove himself yet confident, knowledgeable and experienced. The intro to our Bell 212 "Huey" went leisurely, as there was plenty of fog and cloud cover a few hundred feet up from leaving earlier. At about 1100 we decided to take her up and see if we could find a path through the fog to our islands of interest. We got as far as the other side of the Adak before giving up (about 5 miles). Total time in the air, about 12 minutes. We hoped that it would look better after lunch but it didn't. We hoped it would look better after a walk, exploring the area but it didn't. Fog rules this island.

Typical airport cloud cover with the generally grounded helicopter

Fortunately while walking around Kirk and I were offered a fifty cent tour of the place by one of the UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] cleanup guys we met earlier in the day and befriended. He was a retired Navy EOD (20 years) and had worked the Adak UXO cleanup for three summers. He had been to Adak when it was a thriving Navy base so on the whole he was fairly knowledgeable. He took us to Finger Bay where there the salmon run up the creek and there was a submarine facility supported by dozens of magazines in the surrounding hillsides. The hillsides were beautiful but seeded with UXO that they have been working on cleaning up. He also showed us the former Navy Communications Facility (aka Radio City) on the northeast side of Mount Moffet where we got to see a couple of sea otters and a very mangy looking bald eagle. Our tour lasted about an hour but it helped us get the lay of our temporary home for the next week.

A rather mangy bald eagle at Andrew Lake

Thursday-Monday, July 18 to 22, 2002

We tried the helicopter again heading west toward Tanaga Island. At the aptly named Careful Point on the west side of Adak, the cloud cover and fog got fairly very soupy and next island to the west was not visible. We tried to the east and got to the next island over but again essentially didn't get far enough to accomplish anything of note.

The rest of Thursday was spent waiting for the weather to break, which it didn't it. Friday and Saturday were more of the same and the endless purgatory of idle monotony like in the movie "Ground Hog Day" began to permeate our psyche. Sunday and Monday morning were the same thing and we left on the Monday afternoon flight having achieved none of our goals work wise but we did get to see and experience a bit of the current Adak culture.

ADAK IS A STRANGE PLACE

In the 1980s, the population of the Naval community at Adak peaked at 6,100, making it the 6th largest community in Alaska. It's decidedly smaller than that now with the Navy gone (they closed up shop March 1997). It's difficult to get reliable numbers for a summer population but a small contingency stays all year (about 70-100). Of the people we met, there were maybe a dozen services people (restaurant/store and hotel workers) a few dozen fisherman (generally on the boat or at the one processing plant), transient contractors for UXO cleanup (Foster Wheeler) and Building Demolition/Debris Removal crew (Bristol), USFWS employees (4) or volunteers (more). There was also a crew from a NOAA deep ocean 2-person submarine survey vessel but that was a weekend port call.

Zeto Point looking South

Most people have more than one job and the same faces kept popping up again and again. There were several times I felt like Mr. Douglas (Eddie Albert) on Green Acres or a visitor to Petticoat Junction. The cook/hostess at the restaurant is also bartender at VFW and barber (by appointment only). The "hotel" manager also is a baggage handler at the airport. The post office worker also handles gas station duties (which is only open selected days for a couple of hours with her car being the "office").

Unlike the small town CBS TV shows of the late 1960s, there were no real old timers to speak of. The 3 year USFWS veteran seems to be among the most seasoned though a few ex-Navy folks have returned intermittently and cumulatively have more time on island but don't necessarily stay all year. Given the expense of the plane ticket (a subsidized $1,200-round trip), you would think that there wouldn't be much going back and forth to "town" (i.e. Anchorage, which is the default assumption for that term throughout Alaska I believe) but there is. Maybe it's a work ticket that one doesn't have to actually pay for like me but it's not clear.

With so few people, it doesn't take long before you start recognizing everyone's car and hence where they live, work and hang out. You can tell when their home, work or somewhere else. It wouldn't be easy to have a clandestine affair here at all. By the end of the week, we knew about a dozen locals by name, and they us.

Nothing happens quickly or efficiently on Adak. The term "Aleutian Time" came up more than once and a "Mannina" feel permeates the pace of life. All our meals and service seemed to take much longer than it would have in a typical place in the lower 48. A clearer example would be that Kirk and I switched our return flight to Anchorage to be on the first charter back that was suppose to get to Adak a couple of hours earlier than the normal Monday flight. It arrived basically on the normal flight schedule but didn't leave until nearly 50 minutes after the normal flight was scheduled to leave (which by the way had not arrived yet). There was no apparent reason for any of the delay, just a normal day. At least with the charter, we're not scheduled to stop in Cold Bay, which should cut an hour or so off the flight time.

Still the place was exceptionally charming and grew on me. It's surprising who used you get to things that would be a big deal elsewhere. There are bald eagles everyway and they're fairly tame. It's nothing to get within 15 yards of one or two together. They're generally majestic but the dumpster diving ones we saw at the fishing docks pushing the ravens away from the pick of the garbage wasn't presenting the Proud American icon image we've common to cherish (I would have snapped a picture but regrettably didn't have a camera). Along the same "no big deal" lines, was the 4.5 earthquake on Friday. It barely registered a comment among the locals, who would comment in reply about the two others that week that were smaller but still noticeable.

Finger Bay creek

Fishing and hunting are a big deal here and it's expected that it is one of your free time activities. I avoided using the "V" word (vegetarian) when ordering food, preferring to just say no meat, though I had to explain that chicken was meat the first time I ordered. At least I wasn't insulted like I've been in New Mexico and west Texas. Fortunately, I ate fish and given it's location there was frequently a fish option to the menu (though to be honest, the restaurant served one type of meal with anything else a "special" order).

We heard a couple of time that Adak boasts the largest caribou herd both in size of the animal and the numbers. We never saw any proof of this for ourselves except for the bones of a discarded carcass. I'm not sure of the veracity of this claim, as there was a fair amount of questionable hearsay and out and out BS. At the VFW hall, a young fisherman tried to convince me that Tanaga was the "old" or original Adak. He wasn't too keen on my enlightening them on the general history of Naval Tanaga but nothing came of it. Among the numerous rumors and imperfect knowledge, everybody liked to guess about the presence of nuclear weapons. Several persons who should have had a clue pointed to the several areas with double fences as speculated spots. As Adak had many super secret communication listening posts and monitoring station facilities with some very nice brass plaques explaining them, I wasn't buying the proffered locations. Before leaving the air terminal, I got to study the airport's very well done interpretative aid, which clearly labels a map denoting the location of the Cold War Activity Sites, including the Airborne Underwater Weapons Complex Weapons Storage and Maintenance. Doaah! Nobody pointed out that area, which made more sense for other reasons too.

One of the things that added to the quirkiness of the place, and probably keeping the population low, is that nobody can actually own any property yet. The southern half of the island is National Wildlife Refuge and the north end is all still owned by the Navy. However, until the Navy finishes enough of the cleanup to transfer complete title to the land it in limbo. The plan is for the Native American group the Aleut Enterprise Corporation (AEC) to take over and they have a presence there but the number of natives running things seemed to be very small. Anyway AEC hasn't taken over yet and I, nor anyone else it seems, could figure who was running the show most of the time between the Navy, AEC and the newly created City of Adak. Part of the political power disorder lead to an actual utility power disorder. As Adak is glad to point, there's been $2 billion dollars worth of infrastructure investment there, though how much of that remains is a question. Anyway, the city's electrical power plant was constructed for a much larger population base and is complexly oversized for the people there now. The end result is that its way too expensive to run and the city was behind on the fuel payments to keep it running. The big news on the island the day we arrived was questions about whether it would get shut off. When a black occurred the next day, the was a general sense of hopelessness as everything is run off electricity and most people's livelihood's require it. The outage only lasted a couple hours and was caused by an equipment failure not from lack of fuel. Evidently they temporarily solved that issue while we were there but I'm not sure how.

Zeto Point 155mm Panama Mount

Another oddity about Adak culture is the weekend getaway cabins. At the VFW hall several of the locals were talking about going up to their cabins to relax. The term "their" doesn't mean that they actually owned them but merely had claimed them and everyone understood that; bordering on liberal, hippiness but maybe not. Seabees and others built these over the years and they're generally simple cabins without plumbing and frequently electricity. They're scattered about the green hills around town but they're really not "away" form town in the sense you might normally think of, as many are visible from town and vice-versa given the lack of trees and shrubs on Adak. We heard a number of variations on the oft told old joke concerning the lack of trees and woman in the area, "There's a woman behind every tree in the Aleutians" and variations there of. I'm not sure I saw the point of the cabins but than I didn't visit one.

Given that we didn't get to do what we came for, it's possible that I'll return to Adak in next year or so to try again (probably with a boat this time). I think I would like that.

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