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and am trying to buy life insurance.
• Standing in a no-man’s-land at night in Lebanon as an unidentified militia points guns at us and asks me and my friend our identities. My friend says “Australia,” in a thick Australian accent. The gunman gets excited. He double checks: “You say, ‘Israel’?”
NICK KRISTOF is a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist.
Chapter 34 The Tokyo Summerland Wave Pool, August 14, 2007, 3 P.M.
T here are times when a picture really is worth a thousand words. Like this one—a photograph of the Tokyo Summerland Wave Pool taken during the Japanese festival of Obon. Technically Obon is a time to commemorate the dead, but apparently it can also be an invitation to grab your water wings and head to the pool.
Michael Keferl/CScoutJapan.com
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
C ut 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
• Standing in a no-man’s-land at night in Lebanon as an unidentified militia points guns at us and asks me and my friend our identities. My friend says “Australia,” in a thick Australian accent. The gunman gets excited. He double checks: “You say, ‘Israel’?”
NICK KRISTOF is a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist.
Chapter 34 The Tokyo Summerland Wave Pool, August 14, 2007, 3 P.M.
T here are times when a picture really is worth a thousand words. Like this one—a photograph of the Tokyo Summerland Wave Pool taken during the Japanese festival of Obon. Technically Obon is a time to commemorate the dead, but apparently it can also be an invitation to grab your water wings and head to the pool.
Michael Keferl/CScoutJapan.com
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
C ut 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
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