Attu — Where the Frontier Withdrew
A straight line north from New Zealand leads to Attu Island—the westernmost point of the United States, located in the Eastern Hemisphere. A place where geography contradicts mythology, and where the frontier quietly turned back.
From Opua, at the top of New Zealand’s North Island, the shortest route to Alaska runs almost straight north — a clean transit up the Pacific. It is, as projects go, geographically coherent. We go north because that is where the ice is. Granted, we could also go south to find ice much closer to Opua. But southern ice belongs to a different story, and a different scale, that I am not ready to face yet.
It took me some time to make peace with the geography. I did not initially think of simply drawing a line north from Opua. I imagined reaching the Aleutian Islands from Hawaii, from the Northern Hemisphere, from somewhere else in the United States. Eventually, I looked at the coordinates. Opua: 174.11°. Attu: 173.26°. That was when I realized that the westernmost territory of the United States lay almost directly north of where I will depart.
Except it is not west. Not really.
Attu sits at 173°E longitude. In absolute planetary terms, Attu lies farther east than Tokyo, farther east than Beijing, farther east than virtually all of Asia. It is called the westernmost point of the United States because Americans followed the Aleutian chain curling southwest until they ran out of island, and called the end of that chain the western frontier. But the earth’s coordinate system is indifferent to national mythology. Follow the numbers and Attu is in the Eastern Hemisphere. The frontier that pushed west has looped so far around the globe that it has come back into the east.
The date line sits just a few miles away, almost like a courtesy extended to the United States. Medny Island, 200 miles to the west, is part of Russia and is also, technically, tomorrow. Attu is the place where East and West touch, where a coastline faces the future, where the geometry of American expansion quietly breaks.
And yet the pattern was familiar. The Unangan people lived on Attu for thousands of years before anyone else decided it mattered. When the Japanese invaded in June 1942 — the only occupation of American soil during the Second World War — the Unangan were taken as prisoners to Japan. After the war, the United States government did not allow them to return. The land was needed for strategic purposes. The people could go elsewhere.
The Battle of Attu, fought in May 1943 to retake the island, was among the strangest of the Pacific war. The terrain was tundra and volcanic rock. The weather was fog, cold, and mud. More American casualties came from exposure and confusion than from Japanese combat. When the Japanese finally ran out of supplies, they launched a massive banzai charge rather than surrender. Within days, the island was silent. Roughly 2,900 Japanese and 550 Americans were dead on an island most Americans had never heard of and would quickly forget.
The Cold War gave Attu a second life as a surveillance post. A Coast Guard LORAN station operated for decades, a small permanent crew watching a stretch of ocean that faced the Soviet Union. For fifty years after the battle, Americans maintained a presence on the island. They heated buildings. They flew supplies. They kept watch. They were doing their jobs.
In 2010, the Coast Guard closed the station and left. Attu became uninhabited — the largest uninhabited island in the United States. It is now a wildlife refuge.
After the displacement, the battle, the long Cold War vigil, the answer turned out to be simple: it wasn’t worth holding. What I will be sailing toward is the place where the American story of expansion ran out of land — and out of conviction.
And yet Google Maps still identifies eleven named beaches on the island. Big Mike Beach has a 4.8-star rating and 130 reviews.
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Jean Peccoud