The Badger surfed 300 yards backward across the spit, then slammed violently stern-first into the ocean as the wave broke. The lazarette and fish hold probably filled immediately, because the troller never resurfaced, only floating with its wheelhouse and bow in the air and then sinking slowly as it was struck again and again by trees swept along in the rush of the tsunami. A log smashed through the wheelhouse door and struck Swanson in the chest, breaking some of his ribs, then washed out again. Working frantically, he still managed to fight his way out onto the deck, untie the Badger’s eight-foot dinghy, and launch it over the side. The oars had been washed away, and he was forced to pry a thwart loose to use as a paddle. The crippled troller sank out from under him and his wife just as they leaped into the wildly tossing dinghy, landing in frigid water up to their waists.
A mile to the east, the Ulrichs hung on for dear life as the Edrie shot to the top of the wave, rising so fast that the thick anchor chain snapped and whipped back around the pilothouse, smashing a window. Then the wave swept the little troller up onto what until moments before had been the heavily timbered shoreline but was now a boiling uproar of muddy water.
“I was sure that the end of the world had come for Sonny and me and our boat,” said Ulrich. “I wanted my wife back in Pelican to know where and how her husband and first-born son had been lost, so I grabbed the handset of my radiotelephone and yelled into it: ‘Mayday! Mayday! This is the Edrie in Lituya Bay. All hell has broken loose in here.’ ” Then he faltered a bit before adding, “I think we’ve had it. Goodbye.”
The wave surged up the base of a hill behind Ulrich’s anchorage, then poured back into the bay, carrying the Edrie along with it as it changed directions and began sweeping toward the western shore. Icebergs, trees, and debris clogged the surface; even with the engine at full power it was all Ulrich could do to bring the boat around and avoid being washed into an even thicker mess he could see in the fading twilight along the western shore. It was almost impossible to tell the water from the land; in a matter of minutes the wave had torn four square miles of timber from the shores of Lituya Bay and pounded it into a jumbled mass that continued to slide back and forth across the bay as the wave rebounded from side to side. For what seemed an eternity, the normally placid waters of the bay leaped and boiled with twenty-foot seas coming from every direction, each one bristling with icebergs and hull-crushing logs.
After a few minutes the chaos seemed to be subsiding, and Ulrich, thinking they had perhaps weathered the worst of it, reached again for the radio. “I wasn’t sure, of course, that either of my [earlier] transmissions had been picked up,” he said, but as soon as he spoke into the microphone, the airways burst to life. All up and down the coast frantic boat operators began shooting questions at Ulrich and each other, asking who was okay and who was missing. Did anybody know where so-and-so had last been seen? Was anyone else in Lituya Bay?
While the stunned trolling fleet began its dreadful inventory, Ulrich realized he had to make a decision. The debris was closing in around the Edrie, and in a few minutes it would be completely dark. There were strange currents and eddies full of grinding wreckage moving around the bay. In the gloom, he said, the whole scene had a “nightmarish quality,” and he knew that any one of the massive chunks of ice or pitching logs could make kindling of the Edrie in an instant.
He decided he had to get out of Lituya Bay at once.
The risk was incalculable. By now the tide was at full ebb, and there was no way of knowing if the channel had been moved or perhaps even closed completely by the scouring of the massive wave. In any case, the outflow would be full of logs and ice charging seaward at twelve knots into the standing combers that sealed off the entrance during the peak of every ebb.
“I knew we were going to take a pounding as we went out,” said Ulrich, “and hoped the trunk cabin and pilothouse would stand it. We might be swept clean and pounded under by the seas at the entrance, but it was a chance I had to take.”
He tucked pillows and blankets around Sonny to cushion him from the shocks he knew were coming and told him to hang on for dear life. As he eased toward the entrance, he saw the light of another boat moving outside the bay and grabbed the radio. “For god’s sake, don’t come in here!” he yelled. “All hell’s broken loose! Stay out!”
The voice that came back was that of Ulrich’s friend George Brockman, skipper of the Theron, who calmly asked Ulrich what he planned to do. In a brief exchange Brockman described for Ulrich what he could see of the entrance, then, in an act of remarkable courage, offered to station himself in line with the channel, in the path of the hurtling logs and ice-filled outflow, so that Ulrich could use the Theron’s masthead light as a beacon to steer by.
As soon as Brockman was in place, said Ulrich, “I braced myself and headed out.” Steering madly to stay lined up on the Theron’s light, the Edrie swept headlong into the race, surrounded on all sides by tumbling debris. At the first comber the troller slammed into a wall of water that broke completely over the wheelhouse. A second comber did the same. The third and final wave broke so hard that the Edrie was completely submerged.
“But the stout little Edrie was equal to it,” Ulrich later bragged with deserved pride. “She never faltered, and soon we had reached the comparative safety of the open sea.”
“Comparative” safety was accurate: Boats coming to the rescue from up and down the coast began to encounter rafts of logs and debris while still miles away. In the middle of the heaving mess, in their tiny, half-swamped punt, the Swansons were feeling anything but safe. They did not know that the fleet’s radio census had deduced that both the Badger and the Sunmore had been in Lituya Bay, or that the troller Lumen, with its owner, Julian Graham, and his seventeen-year-old son Kenneth on board, was already pushing slowly through the mass of logs outside of Lituya Bay looking for survivors. Upon learning that two other boats had been in the bay, Ulrich, too, decided to stay and join in the search, even though, as he later admitted, he was “badly shaken.”
While the Edrie motored slowly to and fro and Ulrich peered into the darkness, the Lumen maneuvered into the mass of logs, sweeping a searchlight back and forth. For an hour and a half Graham and his son alternated searching with shutting down the engine and drifting, listening in the dark for cries for help. Hearing something like the mewling of a seagull, Graham turned the spotlight in the direction of the cry and instantly heard something that sounded more human. It did not take long for them to make out the Badger’s punt with the Swansons huddled in the bottom. Vivian was unconscious and Bill was in shock, but the Grahams managed to get them on board and head for a cove near Cape Spencer where a seaplane with a doctor on board could pick them up at first light and deliver them to the hospital in Juneau. At five thirty A.M., after the sun had been up long enough for the rescuers to be sure there were no more survivors, Ulrich gave up the search and began the long run home to Pelican.
The Sunmore, with Orville and Mickey Wagner on board, was never seen again. A search plane spotted an oil slick just outside Lituya Bay that marked the spot where they had gone down.
Chapter 10
The 1958 Earthquake generated the largest mega-tsunami ever recorded on the planet. Before it was over, the Pacific Plate side of the Fairweather Fault ground at least twenty-one and a half feet northwestward against its North American counterpart and rose three and a half feet. The quake measured 8.3 on the moment magnitude scale,* four times as strong as the 1906 “Great” San Francisco earthquake, which is usually considered the benchmark of earthquake history in America. It also lasted over four minutes, compared to that infamously destructive California shaker’s ninety seconds. Vivian Swanson’s hair turned white before she was released from the hospital, and the only sign ever found of the three berry pickers left behind on Khantaak Island was a few paper plates drifting on the water. For days afterward the sea in Cross Sound and the Gulf of Alaska was littered with the carcasses of halibut, octopuses, and other bottom dwellers
killed by the subsurface shocks. In Lituya Bay itself, all the vegetation was stripped away for a quarter of a mile or more inland; everything growing along both shores and on the spit was gone, leaving only knobs of bald bedrock veined with thin rivulets of silt. The spur above Gilbert Inlet was naked up to 1,720 feet. On the western side of the bay near the spit, where the Sunmore and the Badger took their final rides, the devastation reached nearly a mile inland. All in all, studies later showed, more than five square miles of land on both sides of Lituya Bay were inundated under water an average of 110 feet deep.
Beyond the lives of those spared, the single gift of the wave was the cottonwoods and their scent. As I slipped the kayak back into the water and climbed in, I thought of how over the five decades since the tsunami had occurred, life had once again proved to be indomitable, slowly reforesting the land in a process as dependable as the spinning of a finely geared machine. Whether in the wake of a tsunami or a receding glacier, the reforestation of newly scoured land is always the same. First come a few grasses and lichens, simple life-forms that can take hold and squeeze a living from the poor sediments left behind. As these grow, seed, die, rot, and grow again, they slowly manufacture a soil that is poor but sufficient for alders and willows to take root in. Alders thrive in a symbiotic relationship with tiny, soil-dwelling life-forms called actinobacteria, whose job is to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrate nourishing to the trees. The deciduous alders’ fallen leaves gradually build up and decompose into a nitrogen-rich compost that provides a suitable environment for cottonwoods.
Within twenty years or so after the Lituya Bay wave, these cottonwoods had already begun to grow tall enough to start shading out the alders and were adding their own bits of phosphorus and potassium to the recipe, which would in turn prepare the land for spruce trees to move in. By the time I arrived, fifty years after the wave, the scalped bedrock it had left behind was already covered in cottonwoods forty feet high, with a few spruce saplings scattered among them to show where a squirrel or bird had buried a cone or passed a seed through its digestive tract after feeding in the coniferous forest a quarter mile inland. In another fifty years the forest will be an even mix of spruce and cottonwood; give the process a century or two and the spruce needles building up around the base of the cottonwoods will eventually raise the acidity of the soil to a level beyond what the cottonwoods are comfortable with but ideal for hemlock and cedar. Within three or four hundred years—which is light-speed, geologically speaking—the cottonwoods will have completely disappeared, leaving the forest fully coniferous again. The sweet balm of Gilead that swirled around me as I paddled away will be a thing of the past—or it will be, I reminded myself, if Kah-Lituya allows it.
He probably won’t. The geological and historical record shows that there have been four, or possibly five, great waves in Lituya Bay in the past three hundred years, and there are slabs of rock hanging on the walls at the back of the fjord that may be more tenuously attached than the one that created the 1958 wave. It is not possible to predict when Kah-Lituya will reawaken, but geologists agree that sooner or later the Fairweather Fault will inevitably lurch and release a slide, and the whole process will start over.
Paddling slowly, I stared up at the abrupt interface between cottonwoods and conifers that marked the apogee of the wave on the spur above Gilbert Inlet, nearly a third of a mile above sea level. I tried to play an actuarial game in my head, inputting the number of days I thought I might be in Lituya Bay into a calculation I had come across in one of Don Miller’s geological studies that gave the odds of another great wave occurring on any given day at 9,000 to 1. But the mathematics of risk broke down when I remembered that Miller had made the prediction in 1960. Nearly 18,000 days had already passed. Lituya Bay was long overdue for another wave.
Thinking about it made me feel like someone was standing behind me with a cocked and loaded gun. The mountains sprang into sharp focus, with every knob, rock, vein, and granite scale in clear relief against the deep blue sky, and my hearing became acute; the fjord was so completely still that the silence became not just a lack of noise but a palpable thing, so that a faint hissing in my ears might have been the sound of deep currents humming through the skin of the kayak or the rush of my own blood. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it may concentrate the mind wonderfully for a man to know he is about to be hanged, but the juxtaposition of such sharp, clear beauty and the knowledge that Kah-Lituya might at any moment decide to devour me, my boat, the forests, and perhaps even a large chunk of the mountains was unnerving. I had planned to continue up the fjord into Gilbert Inlet to see the scar left by the massive ’58 slide and perhaps even climb a short distance onto Lituya Glacier, but the kayak suddenly felt too small and delicately balanced for the landscape. I came about and paddled for the boat instead, telling myself that paddling was already irritating the pinched nerve in my neck and traveling another half-dozen miles might inflame it.
Back on the Swift, I ate some lunch and watched a raptor soar along the face of a timber-covered ridge sloping away from the mountain bordering Gilbert Inlet. For reasons I could not fathom, the chart gave the name of the ridge as Solomon’s Railroad. The distance rendered the raptor little more than a speck that appeared and disappeared against the green of the forest, but I could tell by the flap-and-glide pattern of its drifting spirals that it was a northern goshawk. While I ate, the swallows put in another appearance, made a fluttering inspection of the scupper, then fled.
I wiped my plate and stowed it in a locker, then dug my pack and most of the gear I would need for the trek up the coast out of the hold. I was in no hurry to get started, but the sun was pleasant, and there were still a few preparations to be made. I checked the stove—a new high-tech lightweight ensemble designed to boil a quart of water in less than two minutes—again by lighting and relighting it several times using the unit’s self-contained piezoelectric igniter. It worked flawlessly, but I double-checked anyway to make sure I had a bundle of wooden matches dipped in candle wax tucked into a waterproof film can; if dry tinder can be found, matches and wax will start a fire under almost any conditions, and I couldn’t bring myself to completely trust a push-button gizmo.
Jon had lent me a small, ultralight one-person tent for the trip—my own weighed six pounds and was designed for expedition-level mountaineering—and I was wrapping silver tape* around the poles when the swallows showed up again. This time the male (I presumed) carried a thread of grass in his beak.
I stopped to watch his antics. The female was being coy, darting off a few yards, then returning to hover at the scupper, as if unsure of what she thought of the place. The male followed and lured her back; then she left again and he followed. I waited, but they did not return. An ache like a bruise had been lurking behind my sternum since the hummingbird had reminded me of Luisa that morning, and now there was something in the behavior of the swallows that unsettled me.
I stowed the tent in its bag, wrapped a few turns of silver tape around my hiking poles, and tried to sort more gear, but I could not concentrate. I kept misplacing things—the extra batteries for my headlamp disappeared, a Ziplock of tea bags wasn’t where I’d left it, and finally the checklist itself was gone. I checked my pants pockets, the pack, under and around all the gear strewn about the deck. I even dumped the tent back out of its stuff sack to be sure it wasn’t lost in the folds, but the carefully assembled list of items, divided into categories of “indispensable,” “might come in handy,” and “luxuries” through a process of marking out and relisting so protracted it had left the paper soft and creased along the folds, was gone.
I swept the gear off the deck and slammed the hold, then noticed my heart was pounding.
I took a deep breath. This had been happening too often over the past year.
“Overwork,” I said to myself. Misplacing things, forgetting things—my hands doing one thing while my mind was somewhere else had become commonplace.
When I broke ground for
the house two years ago in early April, I had been boiling with energy, and life couldn’t have been better. The sun had shone for weeks at a time, and my wife—then my fiancée—had come by the site regularly, sometimes with coffee or a treat she had baked. I would shut down whatever piece of equipment I was operating and take a break, resting my arm around her waist while she rubbed my neck and we talked about the landscaping she wanted to do or the layout of the kitchen.
Progress was rapid. I hired two helpers from a local construction company who knew the value of straight and level and wore leather tool bags that had grown shiny from years of hard use. Rod was a powerhouse, red-faced, lean, and strong; he worked at a dead run, throwing sheets of plywood around and driving iron stakes while I pounded holes in the bedrock with a hammer drill. Jason was younger, built low to the ground like a second-string fullback, and a casual observer might have thought he was moving slowly, but he could think in compound angles and was usually two steps ahead of me.
By the end of May, when the cement trucks came grumbling up the steep grade to the site and began pumping the footing molds full of concrete, the weather had turned warm, almost hot, so that as we worked to trowel the mixture smooth and get the plate bolts in place before the concrete hardened up, we were forced to strip down to T-shirts.
The terrain I was building on was tricky, with ribs of greenstone, deep hollows, and rock shelves that rose and dropped eight feet from the front of the house to the back. Rob went on to another job while Jason and I continued framing knee walls of rot-proof two-by-eights atop the stepped concrete footing with the help of two fishermen left short of money by a poor spring fishing season. By the middle of June, after a long period spent working ten hours a day, six days a week, the foundation was ready for the floor joists to be set in place. One corner of Jason’s mouth flicked up into a brief smile after a careful check with a laser showed that our work had been true to within one sixteenth of an inch across forty-two feet, measured corner to corner along the diagonal of the growing house. He stepped back while I checked a second time, tapping the laser with a finger to test the bubble in its base, and got the same result. Then we nodded at each other and agreed it was “good enough.”
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 9