So this is what the edge of the world feels like.

Adak is the most westerly town in the United States. It is 1,300 miles southwest of Anchorage and 350 miles west of Dutch Harbor, the final redoubt before the Aleutians devolve into a broken necklace of isolated volcanic pearls.

And it is empty. Or so, at least, it seems.

According to the State of Alaska, there are just 146 people living here, and even that seems generous. A little over ten years ago, Adak was bustling, home to at least 6,000 US Navy personnel and civilian contractors, and boasting an infrastructure that would have been the envy of any small town, let alone one nestled in a harbor overlooked by mountains covered in lush maritime tundra and surrounded by the hostile Bering Sea.

There was a movie theater, a roller skating rink, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a ski lodge, a bowling alley. There were racquetball and tennis courts. There was a skeet range. And, of course, there was a McDonald’s.

All of this was a consequence of World War II and the Japanese invasion of Attu and Kiska, the most westerly of the Aleutians. Adak, like Amchitka to its west, became a military stronghold from which the campaign to recover the two islands could be launched; unlike on Amchitka, when the war ended, the military personnel stayed, and Adak became a Cold War submarine surveillance center that marked the American military’s western outlier.

But on March 31, 1997, the base closed. When it was open, Adak must have been an incongruous site, a slice of Americana in the Aleutians; now it is closed, it feels, frankly, unsettling.

In a way, it is because the incongruity remains. The housing that was built was entirely in the style of any suburban subdivision: identical cookie-cutter houses, painted in bright, cheery shades of (as best as my colorblind eyes can tell) blues and yellows and, oh I don’t know, let’s say reds, each with its own driveway, garage, and patch of front lawn.

Now they are empty, street upon street of them, as if the island’s entire human population had just packed up, locked the doors, and left in the space of five minutes. The houses look in pretty good shape for having been left empty for a decade; here and there, a garage window is cracked or smashed or a door buckled, but by and large the houses look almost ready for new residents. But the yards are overgrown, the foliage overwhelming the swing sets, the basketball hoops rusting and fading, mosses taking over the sidewalks.

And so it is with much of the rest of the town. The shopping mall: abandoned. The McDonald’s: abandoned. The skating rink, the swimming pool, the movie theater: all empty, awaiting customers that are no longer around.

But then you turn a corner and, suddenly, one particular cul-de-sac of houses, otherwise identical to the others, boasts pickup trucks in the driveways and recently-mown front yards dotted here and there with daisies. A young child waves hello and his father looks up from washing his car and nods in greeting as if it were the most normal thing in the world to see a stranger walking through his otherwise seemingly deserted town.

For Adak, initial appearances notwithstanding, is not deserted. Indeed, there is a serious effort underway to maintain and rebuild the community. There is expected to be at least a temporary influx of people—perhaps, according to rumors, as many as 400—and an associated boost to the economy with the arrival of a cleanup crew next year, equipped with a mandate to do address the ordnance and other remnants of the military’s rapid departure. (There are signs across the island, for example, prohibiting the digging of holes more than two feet deep; and the high school displays cheery cartoon posters warning children not to touch unexploded bombs). There is fishing here, too, with Pacific cod particularly important, and a processing plant on shore. Times here are tough, but in the western Aleutians, so far at least, the situation is far less grim than in some of the communities farther east. Even so, there is an acute awareness of the importance of protecting the marine ecosystem, and there was an attentive and involved gathering at a community meeting in which George explained the concept of Cultural Marine Heritage Zones.

It also doesn’t hurt the local economy when the occasional Greenpeace ship comes into port, either. For a lot of the folks on board, it’s been a long expedition that is nearing its end, and while your faithful correspondent remained on board, there was no shortage of crew making friends and letting their hair down at the local bar. During the stagger home, suddenly Adak didn’t seem like such a bad place to be.

But now we have left and are heading west. The sea is flat calm, and the Esperanza just steamed slowly through the narrow and stunningly beautiful Kagalaska Strait. We put the African Queen, one of our rigid-hulled inflatables, in the water to film our passage through the verdant green volcanic hills, and as we made our way, a minke whale appeared off the bow, swam lazily past us, and then surfaced just feet away from the inflatable, diving slowly beneath and turning sideways to watch the strange visitors as it disappeared beneath the waves.