Where the WIND Begins
EAGLE AND FISHING CABIN, FINGER BAY, JULY 2015. BY THE FOLLOWING MARCH, THE CABIN HAD BEEN LEVELED BY THE WINTER WINDS.
ALASKA ADAK ISLAND IS WAY OUT there, so far at the end of the Aleutian archipelago in the Bering Sea that it shares a time zone with Hawaii instead of its own state. This is not a place for the fainthearted. Besides being earthquake prone and still recovering from a military hangover of unexploded ordnance, it is home to some of the most raging-maniac weather on the planet.
6 WINTER 2017
Winds capable of sending dumpsters somersaulting down roadways like tumbleweeds can hit 120 miles per hour. Yet record strengths remain unknown since the winds once blasted the island’s anemometer off its tower. Historically home to the Unangan people, known more commonly as Aleuts, this 270-square-mile volcanic island halfway between Seattle and Tokyo was developed as a strategic Army base during World War II, after the Japanese bombing of Dutch Harbor and the occupation of Attu and Kiska islands to the west. The compound later became a Cold War naval air and submarine surveillance station, which in its heyday was one of Alaska’s largest cities. Some 6,000 military personnel and their families lived there in colorful, cookie-cutter duplexes lined up neatly as if for inspection, with schools, restaurants, a hospital, a ski lodge, a movie theater, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a roller rink, basketball, and squash and tennis courts. A McDonald’s, too.
—ALL IMAGES © BEN HUFF
The military abandoned it all in the late 1990s, turning roughly $3 billion in military assets over to the wind. Those who stayed hoped its deep-water port might attract cruise ships or that its barracks could be turned into a prison. Neither panned out. Although the 2010 census recorded a population of 326, only about 80 full-time residents remain, living among the ruins of a more prosperous time. The stunning landscape, decaying infrastructure, and resilient people who are still hanging on inspired award-winning Alaskan photographer Ben Huff to choose Adak as a long-term photography project. Supported in part by the Alaska Humanities Forum, the project will become Huff ’s second photography book. Nothing about the commitment he’s made to this far-flung place has been easy, from getting there to making peace with its landscape, hauntingly beautiful on one hand, postapocalyptic on the other, the contradictions often superimposed upon each other. Much of Adak’s infrastructure, now owned by the Aleut Corporation, is open, either unlocked or missing windows, walls, and roofs.