Begich Towers—or BTI, as we call it—is an old military building constructed in the fifties to house officers and their families and designed to withstand earthquakes, which it has had the opportunity to do on more than one occasion. Behind its rectangle of fourteen stories loom mountains with waterfalls that cascade down the sides. Wide windows span each apartment, many of which offer stunning views of the harbor with Billings Glacier in the distance. The thousands of people who drift through our town on their way to fishing adventures or cruise ship vacations think we’re crazy to live in a Cold War high-rise and in weather that often forces us to live indoors for much of the year. They see the decaying and dry-docked boats, stacked and rusted storage containers, and old buildings that haven’t been used in decades. I see glaciers and mountains and a community of people who make it possible for me to live here as I am.

My phone chirps and vibrates in my pocket. Across the screen is a reminder: Make a chicken Caesar salad for the dinner party. I nod—great idea. It’s a family recipe that Ruth showed me how to make when I was a teenager, one with a light dressing and homemade croutons. Not that I’m related to Ruth, who believes in conspiracies and cameras capturing our every move, but when the entire town lives in a place so remote we share a two-and-a-half-mile tunnel with a train, well, even Ruth is family.

I cross-check the reminder on my phone with the written To Do list and laugh softly when I see a note about the bear that Dad scared out of our building the summer before I turned eight years old. The bear had been causing trouble that summer, trying more than once to get into BTI, scaring cruise ship passengers who wandered around our small port town, and startling local teenagers who trespassed inside the abandoned Buckner Building, another relic of Whittier’s brief military occupation. And when he finally entered BTI’s lobby through a door left cracked open, he filled the entire first floor with the oily stink of dead fish.