ADAK
Almost no one lives here anymore. The official headcount seems exaggerated. Once, during WWII, people flooded the island in a rush. Then, during the Cold War, more and more people, more permanent buildings, a pointedly deliberate growth.
The military need now gone, a parking lot is strewn with playground detritus. The McDonald’s is locked as if closed for a twenty-year-long holiday, a time capsule to a year of Jurassic Park Happy Meals. Almost every building is as simply abandoned. Salvageable resaleable junk has been harvested and barged away, the buildings’ shells left to be destroyed by wind and rain.
The energy with which we try to kill each other is fearsome.
The resources devoted to the project of death are considered to be infinite, and ultimately so little valued apart from that project that they can be swiftly and carelessly abandoned.
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Adak is a small island in the middle of the Aleutian Chain. Politically it is part of Alaska, which is politically part of the United States, through a dubious chain of title based on a fictional conquest.
Adak is almost treeless, with rolling hills covered in green brush, mountains seldom unshrouded, home to seals, imported caribou, and a plethora of migrating birds to pull at the heartstrings of anyone carrying a life list.
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Ambling around Adak off established trails is not recommended in light of vast amounts of unexploded ordnance and hidden Rommel spikes.
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Adak is known to the Unangan as “The Birthplace of Winds.” The name is apt. There is so much wind here – strong winds to rip a truck’s door off its hinges, to soak you with horizontal rain, to resonate old wire casings, to blow and swirl in a noisy polyphony all around you.
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What would we be, if instead of our devotion to causing death, we devoted the same energy, money, talent, resources, commitment, to celebrating such wondrous wind?
To singing the wind. To rhapsodizing the wind. To lithographing the wind. To rhyming the wind. To choreographing the wind. To becoming the wind through tempera, toes, tones, typing.
And all this just one project, one station, one mission among multitudes.
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These were my thoughts on visiting Adak, home to an abandoned military base, a place where one must amble cautiously because of unexploded ordnance and hidden Rommel spikes.