101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [25]
According to photographer Michael Keferl, this shot was taken shortly after the wave pool reopened (it had been closed for repair)—and no, it wasn’t Photoshopped. These revelers just take their wave pools seriously. They don’t have time for you and your silly concerns, like how a lifeguard would be able to rescue you from the crush, or what you should do if the guy next to you starts peeing. They just want to know the answer to one question: how can I squeeze my pink inner tube into that pool?
As one commenter put it, the resulting scene combines the “acoustics of a high school gymnasium with the ambiance of being bathed in lukewarm urine.” It also raises that age-old philosophical question: if a small child gets pulled underwater but everyone is having too much fun to notice, did she really drown?
Chapter 35
Mid-January in Whittier, Alaska
Cut off from the rest of Alaska by thirty-five-hundred-foot-tall mountains, covered for most of the year by heavy clouds, the town of Whittier, Alaska, might not exist if it weren’t for World War II. After the Japanese bombed the Aleutian Islands in 1942, the U.S. Army wanted to find a place in Alaska to build a secret military installation—ideally an isolated spot with an ice-free port and bad weather that would make it harder to see from the air. Tucked into the northeast corner of the Kenai Peninsula and cut off from the mainland by the Chugach Mountains, Whittier qualified on all counts.
After deciding on a location, the army’s first task was to build a tunnel. So it began blasting through the granite, and by 1943 had completed a 2.5-mile passageway to Whittier that, until recently, was open only to trains. Next, it built two huge apartment buildings to house the residents of the town.
At its peak in 1960, Whittier’s population was about twelve hundred, but that didn’t last long. When the army pulled out of Whittier, its population dropped to a mere eighty Whittiots, which meant that when the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake killed thirteen people, it wiped out a considerable percentage of the town’s population. As of 2007, Whittier was back up to a whopping 174 residents, but with more people migrating out than coming in, it’s unlikely to ever reach its former peak.
Part of the reason Whittier has never been heavily populated is that until the tunnel was opened to cars, the only way to get there was by sea or rail. Even today, the one-lane tunnel can only accommodate one direction of traffic at a time, and has to alternate between trains and cars. Add in daily maintenance periods and there are times when you can wait more than two hours for the chance to pay the $12 toll.
Of course, this only applies when the tunnel is open. It closes each evening around 11, so don’t linger too long if you intend to make it back to Anchorage for the night. What’s more, on April 11, 2009, a large rockslide tumbled onto the highway leading to the tunnel. It was shut down entirely for more than a month, stranding many of the town’s residents and giving new relevancy to the POW—PRISONER OF WHITTIER—T-shirts that were popular before the tunnel opened to cars.
Begich Towers, the town’s only apartment building—and home to most of Whittier’s residents
Courtesy of the author
Whittier does have a beautiful hiking trail and great wildlife, but be sure to time your visit well—it receives no direct sunlight from November to February and gets more than twenty feet of snow per year.
Chapter 36
Onondaga Lake
The 1400s were good to Onondaga Lake, a 4.6-square-mile lake that sits northwest of Syracuse, New York. Back then, it enjoyed a privileged status at the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy. Its halcyon days lasted until the nineteenth century, when it became a popular holiday destination, ringed with resorts and restaurants featuring locally caught fish. But once industrial development in Syracuse really kicked in, the lake got screwed.
First was the sewage: as the nearby city of Syracuse grew, its planners designed its water system to discharge the city’s domestic and industrial waste directly