As the scientists approached Portage, a small town at the head of the arm where the road to Whittier splits off to the east, they saw groves of trees along the shore that were now standing in seawater partway up their trunks. Before the quake they had to have been high and dry. That could mean one of two things: one, that the tides since the earthquake were now abnormally high, or two, that the land was now permanently lower, that it had sunk during the quake. The latter explanation seemed more likely; it also meant that Portage’s homes and businesses were going to be permanently inundated as well. The town was doomed.
Soon they were out over Prince William Sound itself, with its spectacularly rugged scenery of glaciers, fjords, islands, bays and channels. The famous naturalist John Muir had described the sound, on a visit in 1899, as “one of the richest, most glorious mountain landscapes I ever beheld—peak over peak dipping deep in the sky, a thousand of them, icy and shining, rising higher, higher, beyond and yet beyond one another, burning bright in the afternoon light, purple cloud-bars above them, purple shadows in the hollows, and great breadths of sun-spangled, ice-dotted waters in front.”
But now there were obvious signs that Muir’s glorious landscape had been scarred by the earthquake. From the plane, Plafker and Grantz spotted trees and other debris in some of the sound’s many bays and inlets, and evidence that parts of the coast had been hit by large waves or high water. There were areas along the shoreline, sometimes high up, where incoming water had washed the snow away. This “snow line” proved to be a convenient telltale for how high and far inland the water had come. At least the snow was good for something, Plafker thought. But high up along one inlet, Blackstone Bay, the hillside appeared to have been scoured; all the trees and other vegetation had been removed, leaving bare ground behind.
In his many flights into the backcountry over the years, Plafker had occasionally seen signs of a recent rockslide or snow avalanche. But now, for as far as he could see around the sound, the landscape was full of them. The earthquake must have caused thousands of slides—some little, some big, some that left piles of rock debris or snow and ice at the base of a slope, some that created huge swaths of destruction as the debris traveled quickly over a wide area. And perhaps some of the slides weren’t really slides at all. The shaking had been so great that in a few cases it almost seemed that huge blocks of snow and ice had been flung off mountaintops, landing in the valleys below.
The region’s many lakes, which had all been frozen over, showed the impact of the earthquake as well. On some, the frozen surface now looked like a jigsaw puzzle, the ice sheet fractured into hundreds of small pieces. But the ice on other lakes had remained in one piece, with raised ridges at the shoreline, suggesting that the ice sheet as a whole had moved back and forth during the quake.
Plafker knew he was witnessing destruction on a scale seldom seen anywhere. Clearly it was only because of the fact that Alaska was largely unsettled and empty that the toll in lives and property appeared to be relatively low; if a similar quake had happened in a heavily populated region the scale of the human disaster would have been overwhelming.
He couldn’t help but be in awe of the energy that had been unleashed in just a few minutes two days before. But it was exhilarating to see this altered landscape up close. Over the droning of the engine, he and Grantz kept shouting at the pilot—to make another pass to get a better look at something, or to circle around while Plafker changed film. They didn’t want to miss a thing.
They flew on, at times barely above the treetops, eventually turning toward the southwest and the Kenai Peninsula. From there they headed back toward Anchorage, where they landed about four hours after they’d taken off, exhausted but amazed at what they’d seen.
That first flight was followed over the next few days by others. Plafker usually sat in the copilot’s seat so he could take photographs. Grantz juggled the maps from a seat just behind. For their part, the military pilots liked the work—all the low-level flying and detours to look at specific signs of quake damage were a welcome change from their usual tasks of ferrying equipment or military brass around.
Although he was not an earthquake expert, Plafker understood enough about quakes to know that what causes them is slippage along a fracture, or fault, in the rocks. Geologists see signs of faulting in rocks all the time, and Plafker had seen countless old small faults over the years in his fieldwork. This quake was so enormous and the effects were so widespread—they’d already flown across thousands of square miles of devastation—that the fault that had caused this one must be huge: so huge, in fact, that even if much of the rupture had happened out of sight (early guesses were that the slippage had occurred more than ten miles underground) there almost certainly had to be evidence of it at the surface. There had to be some disruption of the landscape along a more or less straight line, perhaps for dozens of miles, showing how the earth had moved this way and that. Yet as they flew around southern Alaska they saw nothing of the sort.
Plafker was intrigued—they had seen so much destruction wrought by the quake but no indication of what might have caused it. It began to gnaw at him a little. There was something different about this earthquake, he realized.
He couldn’t have known it at the time—he was just a field geologist, after all—but he’d be thinking about what made this earthquake different for the next few years. And for the rest of his career he’d be thinking about other quakes that were like it. The study of earthquakes, it would turn out, would become his life.
But first he and the others had to record what they’d learned about the Alaska quake from their two weeks in the state. Plafker, Grantz and Kachadoorian returned to Menlo Park to write up their findings, with Grantz taking charge of putting together a report, a “circular” in the parlance of the Geological Survey. And they made plans to return to Alaska with many more scientists in a few months, to further explore places like Chenega and Valdez and get a better understanding of why Alaska had been shaken to its core.
Kristine Madsen looked up with trepidation at the white building with the red roof that would be her home for the next year. She’d wanted to teach in a one-room schoolhouse, and there it was, perched by itself at the top of a small hill. Things had moved quickly. One day she’d been in Anchorage, talking to an administrator with the state education department, and a few days later she’d arrived at Chenega, a village of about seventy-five native Alaskans, mostly Alutiiq, on a small island of the same name in Prince William Sound. It was late summer 1963, and now, after the floatplane that had brought her and her puppy, Tlo, from Cordova had dropped her off and taxied out on the water for takeoff, she wasn’t quite sure what she had gotten herself into.
The island was isolated. Other than the occasional fish camp or cannery, the nearest place of any size was Whittier, more than fifty miles to the northwest by water, following a zigzag course through some of the sound’s many inlets and passages. Cordova was nearly twice that distance, to the east, a more direct journey over the open water of the sound. Anchorage was inland to the northwest, on the other side of the Chugach Mountains. It might as well have been a continent away.
But Chenega’s was a beautiful isolation. Steep hills, rising as high as two thousand feet above the water, were the dominant feature of its twenty square miles. They were studded with spruce and hemlock, the trees’ heavy boughs shading a soft understory of ferns, mosses and berry bushes. The interior of the island was a mix of woodlands and the boggy peatland known as muskeg, with a few ponds scattered here and there. Small streams connected the wetlands and rushed down the hills to the sound. On clear days the views from Chenega were extraordinary, with the snowy peaks of other islands and the Kenai Peninsula visible in the distance to the southwest. But the cloudy, foggy days—common weather for Prince William Sound—served up their own kind of beauty, turning a cluster of small islands offshore into dark smudges, like daubs of dark gray in a wet-on-wet watercolor.
The land offered salmonberries, blue
berries, currants and other wild delicacies for the taking, and dozens of kinds of animals roamed the hillsides, among them bear, deer, wild goat, mink, fox, porcupine, marmot and muskrat. In the nearby channels, whales and porpoises sometimes cruised by; seals, sea otters and sea lions swam or basked on rocks exposed by the tide. Gulls, sandpipers and other shorebirds skidded along the water’s edge, while on land Steller’s jays of brilliant blue cackled in the trees and bald eagles kept a lookout for prey from high above. There were clams, mussels and other shellfish in the intertidal zone, and fish of all kinds—halibut, cod, red snapper, hooligan and herring, and, above all, five species of salmon that arrived throughout the season. Herring roe, which stuck to blades of kelp like candy, was a delicacy all its own.
Like so much of the land around Prince William Sound, the steep hills of Chenega Island ran almost straight to the water, often with little more than a small strip of wild grass, or perhaps a few alders, as a buffer. From the air at first it seemed that the island must be uninhabited—where would someone live in a rugged spot like this?—but as Madsen’s plane flew down Knight Island Passage and approached the island’s south coast, a village came into view.
Chenega sat on a small cove, with quiet water that sometimes collected floating chunks of ice that calved from glaciers into nearby Icy Bay. A crescent beach several hundred yards long ran beneath a protective bulkhead, about eight feet high and made of stacked timbers. From the top of the bulkhead a long wooden dock led out into the cove. The dock was just a flat open deck, wide enough so that people could get by even if there was a pile of supplies on it. Toward the seaward end of the dock stood its only distinguishing feature, an outhouse.
Steps led from the beach to the top of the bulkhead, beyond which there was just enough flat land for a cluster of about half a dozen small wooden houses, with roughly the same number spread out along the top of the bulkhead to the southeast. The houses were steep-roofed and made of logs and planks, and most were simple, two-room affairs. Some had other attached structures: a smokehouse for preserving salmon and seal meat, and a bathhouse for the steam baths that were a ritual of village life. A small stream, cascading down from a dammed-up pond far up on a nearby hill, provided water for the baths and everything else.
Wooden boardwalks snaked around the houses and to the building that was, literally and figuratively, the center of Chenega. This was St. Mary’s, a Russian Orthodox church. It was a modest wooden structure, long and narrow, with a dome-shaped cupola topped by the traditional Orthodox cross with three horizontal crossbeams. Inside there were no pews, but in the Russian Orthodox tradition the walls were covered with icons, and, for holidays, crepe-paper flowers made by the village women.
Near the foot of the dock was a building that was divided in two. On one side was a small cooperative store—it had lost half its sign in a storm and for years said only RATIVE STORE—that also functioned as a post office. The other was a boathouse, where in the past villagers had repaired their kayaks; now they used it to repair their skiffs. Nearby was another structure, a shed known to everyone as the Smokehouse, which had a pool table where the men of Chenega would spend time. The charge was ten cents a game, with the proceeds going to the church.
The store, post office and Smokehouse sat at the foot of a small hill, on top of which sat the schoolhouse. At an elevation of seventy feet, it was the highest building in Chenega, and the only one not near the water.
The building, built several decades before by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, indeed had one classroom, to the right of a small entryway, plus a narrow storeroom for books, supplies and government surplus food. To the left of the entry were living quarters, cozy and comfortable, with a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. Behind the school, next to a small field that was used for recess, was a concrete-block structure that housed an oil-fired generator for the school. (A small hydroelectric plant built about two decades before by the Civilian Conservation Corps and meant to bring electricity to the whole village had been a failure, with the generator burning out after only a few years’ service.)
Supplies, food, fuel oil—everything that was needed at the schoolhouse—were winched up on a wheeled dolly on a set of rails that ran up the hill from near the store. Students and others, however, reached the schoolhouse by way of a series of wooden steps. There were precisely ninety of them. Madsen would come to know the number well, because she counted them every time she went up.
—
Kris Madsen had grown up in Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, where her father worked at the naval shipyard near San Pedro. A tall, skinny girl with blue eyes and unbelievably red hair, she developed an independent streak from an early age. Perhaps it was because of her family situation: her birth mother had died when she was two, and her father, overwhelmed by the prospect of raising a toddler on his own, had sent her to live with his sister near Sacramento. When Kris was older her father got married again, to a schoolteacher named Bernice, and Kris came back to live with them.
Whatever the reason for her independent ways, by the time of her high school graduation, in 1958, Madsen was ready to get out and see the world. Her first stop was the University of California at Santa Barbara, just 120 miles up the coast. But for her it was the start of a new life.
At Santa Barbara, she gravitated toward anthropology and education. While she enjoyed studying the former, she soon realized that when it came to satisfying her wanderlust, education was probably a better choice. With a teaching degree, she could go just about anywhere. Everybody needed teachers.
When Madsen graduated after four years, she had no desire to begin her career in the local schools back home. She didn’t even want to remain in California, but she didn’t really have a clue where she might want to go. She’d only been as far as Vancouver, British Columbia, with her family. With no experience to go by, using the alphabet seemed as good a way as any to choose a place to work and live. She’d start at the beginning: Australia or Alaska.
The career office at the university didn’t know much about jobs Down Under, but the Last Frontier was a different story. It so happened, a counselor told Madsen, that Alaskan officials were currently in California interviewing for teaching jobs. A state for just three years, Alaska was growing and in desperate need of teachers, especially those willing to work in native villages. Before, finding teachers for the native population had been the federal government’s responsibility, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but now it was Alaska’s problem. As an inducement, the state was offering excellent pay. Madsen could make about $5,000 a year.
She went to an interview and was hired on the spot. There was an opening in a three-teacher school in Old Harbor, an Alutiiq village on the big island of Kodiak in the Gulf of Alaska. Late in the summer of 1962, accompanied by her stepmother, Madsen made the long trip north—flying from Los Angeles to Seattle to Anchorage. She and Bernice did some shopping, picking up, among other things, a rabbitskin coat for the cold weather. Bernice said her goodbyes and left for California, while Madsen boarded a small plane for the 250-mile flight to the city of Kodiak on the island. She then took a floatplane the final forty miles to Old Harbor, on the island’s southern coast, to begin her Alaskan teaching adventure.
As native villages go, Old Harbor was big, with a population of more than two hundred. Madsen taught the first and second grades and had more than a dozen students. Her first day at the school—her first day as a professional teacher—began with an incident that showed just how different life in Alaska could be. As her pupils filed into the classroom, a first grader named Rocky Christiansen came up to her desk. He was carrying a freshly caught salmon that was just about as big as he was, holding it up the way a professional fisherman would, with his fingers in its gills. Madsen had spent the morning neatly organizing her desk—she had wanted to make a good impression on any parents who might be bringing their children to school on the first day. With a flick of his forearm little Rocky quickly put an end to those plans, flo
pping the salmon onto the desk. “For you, teacher!” he exclaimed.
The school year ended in May, and for Madsen it was a good experience. She liked the other teachers, a husband-and-wife team, and befriended a Baptist missionary, a woman with whom she often shared meals. But her living quarters were beyond rustic—she slept on a bed behind some shelves in her classroom, which itself was little more than a glorified storage closet. Back home in Long Beach in the summer of 1963, working as a cook on a tuna boat, she decided she wanted to go back to Alaska for at least another year. But she thought she might want a different challenge.
So upon returning to Anchorage in late August she met with the state education official. She was willing to go back to Old Harbor, she told him, but she was also interested in the idea of teaching all elementary grades in one classroom. No sooner had the words come out of her mouth than the telephone rang. The official chatted with someone on the other end for a few minutes and then hung up. He turned to Madsen. We’ve just had an opening for a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse, he told her. Are you interested? It’s in a small village in Prince William Sound.
—
When Europeans reached Prince William Sound in the nineteenth century, the natives hardly greeted them with open arms. Vitus Bering, a Danish captain who was commanding a Russian naval expedition and whose name now graces the strait that separates Russia and the United States, discovered Alaska in 1741 but missed the sound; the closest he came was Kayak Island, fifty miles to the southeast. It was thirty-seven more years before an explorer sailed into the sound. But what an explorer he was: the British Royal Navy captain James Cook, who did more than any other navigator to fill in the many blanks in the map of the Pacific Ocean. In May 1778 Cook was on his third and final voyage, an ultimately fruitless quest to find the Northwest Passage across North America, when he arrived off Hinchinbrook Island, at the southeastern edge of the sound. One of his two ships, the Resolution, was in need of repairs, so Cook looked for a quiet bay in which to anchor. He proceeded into the sound, finally stopping at a place on the eastern edge of it, an inlet that he called Snug Corner Cove.
The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet Page 2