Since the Glassmans had three young children of their own, and a fourth several years later, conditions in their household were cramped. So in 1937, Nathan sent George and Lloyd to the Hebrew National Orphan Home in Yonkers, just north of the city in Westchester County. George was eight. He managed to maintain his composure until his father left; but afterward he cried, off and on, for several days.
The orphanage, known to everyone who lived there as the H, had been established in 1912 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to provide an Orthodox Jewish upbringing for one hundred needy boys aged six to eighteen. They were housed in two tenements, back to back with a courtyard between, off Second Avenue. In 1920, the home was relocated to a twenty-acre site in Yonkers. Its mammoth four-story main building had dormitories on three floors housing three hundred boys, a dining hall, a synagogue, classrooms and two gymnasiums. The grounds, which backed up against the aqueduct that supplied New York City’s water, were bucolic, more rural than urban. In addition to a playground and ball fields, there were fields for growing vegetables, an apple orchard, a chicken coop and a stable with a broken-down racehorse named Tiny Tim. Across the street was a public golf course, where the older boys could work as caddies.
The orphanage functioned with a certain military-like efficiency: rise-and-shine at 6 a.m., outside for the flag-raising, back inside for prayers at the synagogue, followed by breakfast, marching all the way. Then it was off to Public School 404—the classrooms on the fourth floor, which were under the jurisdiction of the New York City school system. An hour for play or music practice in the afternoon, followed by mandatory Hebrew school, more prayers, then supper, showers, studying and lights-out. There was a certain level of discipline as well, often enforced through what was called detention—being forced to stand or squat motionless for long periods.
Despite the strict regimen and discipline, by most accounts, the H was not an unhappy place. For most boys, there was so much to do—sports, music and clubs, in addition to regular studies and Hebrew—that they didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the circumstances of why they were there. George and Lloyd were more fortunate than most: their father visited them just about every weekend, making the long trek by subway from Brooklyn.
Like everyone else at the H, Plafker studied Hebrew, although it never stuck with him all that well. He chafed at having to attend synagogue. And he didn’t much care for some of the orphanage’s stricter rules. If his bed wasn’t made perfectly, a supervisor would flip the mattress onto the floor. And detention was doled out on the slightest of whims. But Plafker also played a lot of sports, learned how to use a printing press and caddied at the golf course for pocket money. And years before he came to know backcountry Alaska, he explored the wilds of Yonkers, where he and his fellow Boy Scouts set out traplines to catch squirrels and rabbits and went on campouts to the far end of the property.
At age seventeen, Lloyd left to join the navy. George, by then a gangly fifteen-year-old, wanted to get his high school diploma as quickly as possible and go to college for his degree. That, he knew, was his ticket out of New York.
He had been encouraged by his teachers to attend summer school for two years so that he could finish high school early. The summer school, recognizing that George had no money, waived the tuition. And so in 1945, at the age of sixteen, Plafker graduated from Roosevelt High School, moved in with his father in Brooklyn and enrolled at Brooklyn College.
Years later, Plafker would credit the eight years he spent at the H in no small way with shaping his character. Lacking the love and assistance most children receive from their families, boys at the home learned to get along with others, to share, to treat others fairly and to rely on one another for advice and help. Above all, Plafker felt that the home, with its rules, strict discipline and lack of parental authority, instilled in him a kind of inner toughness, a doggedness in dealing with a problem or a task. It was a quality that would serve him well in the years ahead.
—
Alfred Cary Hawkins, a gentlemanly New Jerseyan, believed that you couldn’t learn geology just by reading books or listening to lectures. You had to get out in the field, see rocks in their natural settings, describe and map them and chip pieces off for close-up study and inspection. His conviction that fieldwork was invaluable had informed Hawkins’s entire career. Both his master’s and doctoral work had involved extensive field studies. (His dissertation, for which he received a PhD from Brown in 1916, was titled simply “The Geology of a Portion of Rhode Island.”) After a stint in the army during World War I, Hawkins had taken a desk job analyzing minerals for the DuPont chemical company. But the lure of fieldwork was too strong, so he left DuPont after a few years for a succession of jobs with museums and universities, both teaching and collecting mineral specimens. By the summer of 1947 he was working part time as a consultant and part time as a teacher and hunting for minerals every chance he got, to sell to collectors.
At his first class at Brooklyn College that summer, Hawkins made his students an offer: in addition to the regular course work, they could spend Saturdays with him out in the field, studying rocks up close. Plafker and three other students, intrigued and eager to get out of Brooklyn as much as possible that summer, signed up.
Some of the trips weren’t so far afield. Hawkins and his students spent a Saturday in Manhattan, studying the exposed schist of Central Park, bedrock that had been formed 450 million years ago and had been twisted and folded since then. They ventured to the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge to look at the later sedimentary rock that overlies the older formations.
But most Saturdays, Plafker and his fellow students took the ferry across the Hudson to the waterside city of Hoboken. Hawkins would drive over from his home in Newark, ten miles away, and off they’d go in his car. One day they explored the Delaware Water Gap, on the Pennsylvania border, where the Delaware River cuts through the Appalachians, exposing gray quartzite. Another trip took them to Franklin Furnace, an old mine in northern New Jersey famous for minerals that glow brilliant colors under ultraviolet light. They went to so many mines and quarries, in fact, that Plafker began to think Hawkins knew every one in the state. He’d probably collected and sold specimens from all of them.
For Plafker, cruising around the wilds of New Jersey was a welcome respite from the drudgery of summer classes in the stifling heat and humidity of New York City. Seeing ancient rocks and formations brought his dry geology textbook to life. But best of all, at the end of each adventure Hawkins would drive Plafker and the other students back to Hoboken, where they’d go to the Clam Broth House, the landmark restaurant on Newark Avenue. Frequented by dockworkers and other blue-collar types, the Clam Broth House was famous for its two large signs in the shape of hands that pointed toward the entrance, and for its free lunch counter. As long as you bought a beer, you could sit at the counter filling up on beans and bread or other simple fare and drinking all the clam broth you could ever want. To the hungry, impoverished students this was a deal too good to pass up. Hawkins would join them, and while they ate and drank he would hold court, telling stories—whether true or not, Plafker couldn’t always tell—of much more exotic field trips he’d been on, to mines in Mexico and other far-off places.
To Plafker, desperate to get away from New York, it was eye-opening. He began to seriously consider switching to a degree in geology. That would mean he could continue going to Brooklyn College. The idea of spending the next couple of years at the City University campus up in Hamilton Heights, in northern Manhattan, had always held little appeal, as it would be a nasty commute.
By the end of the summer, Plafker’s mind was made up. I’m going to become a geologist, he thought. It seemed like a good life, drinking beer and telling tall tales.
—
Over the next two years, Plafker immersed himself in his new discipline. The prerequisite courses for a geology degree were the same as those for civil engineering, so now he was taking all geology courses, all the ti
me.
He continued to live at home with his father, but that soon became problematic. Nathan Plafker had gotten a divorce and soon was remarried, to a woman who had two daughters of her own, both younger than George. They moved into the apartment. George couldn’t tolerate all the talk and noise that came along with them.
But at that point he’d developed an extracurricular activity that took up a lot of his nonacademic hours: a girlfriend named Ruth Bersin. Ruth had dark curly hair, blue eyes and a seemingly boundless enthusiasm for doing whatever Plafker wanted to do.
At the H, there had never been much opportunity to interact with members of the opposite sex. Ruth was the first woman he had gotten to know to any degree. Their getting together had at first been something of a diversionary tactic, a favor for a friend, who was going out with Ruth’s older sister Lydia.
George and Ruth had hit it off, and George had hit it off with Ruth’s father as well. Chris Bersin was the live-in superintendent of a six-story apartment building in Manhattan Beach. Knowing that Plafker was not getting along with his father’s new wife, he offered him a room in the basement of his building. The place had much in its favor: it was free, it was far from his father’s new wife and daughters, and it gave him unfettered access to Ruth.
When Plafker graduated from Brooklyn College in 1949, he was twenty years old. He consulted a listing of civil service jobs and applied for one out West, working for the Army Corps of Engineers in Sacramento, California. The corps, desperate for help, quickly hired him. Although he and Ruth were dating seriously, he went to California on his own in the summer of 1949. He was ready for the kinds of adventures A. C. Hawkins had talked about. The adventure of marriage was a subject for another day.
During World War II, the corps had been kept busy contributing to the war effort, building everything from bridges, roads and military camps in Europe to enormous uranium-processing plants and other facilities that were critical parts of the American effort to make the atomic bomb. With the war over, the corps was turning its attention back to another part of its mandate, building the dams and other structures that would tame some of America’s wildest rivers to protect against flooding, allow navigation, generate electricity and provide recreation areas for the country’s growing middle class. Plafker was assigned to work on a couple of these projects, including Folsom Dam, a crucial part of what eventually became California’s Central Valley Project. His job was to help determine whether the dam site, on the American River some twenty-five miles from Sacramento, was geologically sound. Folsom, of course, was also home to a notorious state prison, and to get to work Plafker had to pass through the prison grounds, always with a police escort. He would later tell friends that he had done time at Folsom Prison.
Later that year he came back East to ask Ruth to marry him. They were married on New Year’s Eve in New Mexico on the way back to California.
After another six months with the corps, Plafker began to realize that despite having an undergraduate degree in the subject he really knew very little about geology. And if he wanted a better job than what amounted to looking at rock cores all day, he needed to further his education. So he quit to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley and get a master’s degree.
He lasted only one semester before Ruth became pregnant. Once again he needed a job, to feed his growing family. While he’d enjoyed his time with the corps, it wasn’t the kind of fieldwork he wanted to do. But another federal agency offered plenty of the kind of work he was interested in—the US Geological Survey.
The USGS was established in 1879, charged by Congress with “examining the geological structure, mineral resources and products” of public lands. But it had its origins in surveys undertaken more than fifty years before, as the United States was expanding westward following the War of 1812. These early surveys were geared to evaluating the agricultural prospects of new lands. But as the nation eventually grew to be more industrialized, and as the field of geology developed, later surveys focused more on mineral resources.
By the end of the Civil War, American industry had developed to such an extent, and its need for mineral and other resources was so great, that several major surveys of the West were undertaken, including one along the fortieth parallel, the route of the transcontinental railroad. More than any other efforts, these surveys laid the groundwork for the creation of the USGS; its first director was Clarence King, who had led the fortieth-parallel survey.
Since then, the Geological Survey had greatly expanded the scope of its work to include basic functions like topographic mapping (much of the United States was unmapped) and cataloging of water and coal and oil resources. During the world wars it aided the military by concentrating on minerals that were crucial to the war efforts; after World War II it lent its expertise to the vast growth of roads and other parts of the nation’s infrastructure as the American economy took off.
Plafker applied to work at the Survey in 1950 and again was quickly hired. But if he was thinking of a life hacking through brush in the backcountry, that dream was soon dashed. He was assigned to the military geology branch, in Washington. It meant not only moving back East but taking a desk job, itemizing geological features around the world that might be of use to the military as locations for emergency airfields or river crossings. It was as if he were still working for the Army Corps of Engineers. Even worse, he was relying on the fieldwork of other people.
He was desperate to land a field job. He knew the Survey had an Alaska branch, based in San Francisco at the old US Mint building. Its geologists went north in the summer to do fieldwork and came back to California for the rest of the year, writing up their findings and doing other research. Not a bad prospect, he thought. And he knew that the branch was in need of personnel. There was a lot of terrain to be surveyed in Alaska. Plafker applied for a transfer, and after a year sharpening pencils in Washington he headed back West with his family.
The first thing one can see about Alaska from a map of the state is this: it’s big. From Ketchikan, in the southeastern Panhandle, it stretches more than 1,300 miles north to Point Barrow, on the Arctic Ocean, and nearly 2,200 miles to the westernmost point of the Aleutian Islands, just a stone’s throw from Russia. In all, it includes more than 650,000 square miles of territory, more than twice as much as Texas, the second-largest state. When Alaska entered the Union in 1959, the area of the United States grew by more than 20 percent overnight.
If a map gives at least a suggestion of the state’s topography, the second thing that stands out is how mountainous Alaska is. There’s the Brooks Range to the north, which entered the nation’s consciousness when oil companies started drilling on its north slope in the 1960s. Most of the mountains, though, are farther south, and there are a lot of them—hundreds of high rugged peaks, including some that are among the highest and most rugged in the world. Geologists divide Alaska’s mountains into ranges, and while there might be arguments over precisely where one range starts and another begins, or whether one is more accurately a subrange of another, here’s one way to sort them:
Coast Mountains
St. Elias Mountains
Wrangell Mountains
Alaska Range
Kuskokwim Mountains
Chugach Mountains
Talkeetna Mountains
Kenai Mountains
Aleutian Range
The big picture, however, is more important, and it’s a distinctive one. These mountains scribe a long arc that follows the coastline, starting with the Coast Mountains in the southeast, trending northwest through the St. Elias chain and the Wrangells, making a tight turn in the Chugach and the Alaska Range and trending southwest in the Kuskokwims, the Kenais and finally the Aleutian Range, which ends at the first of the islands at the western tip of the Alaska Peninsula.
The map doesn’t show it, but many of Alaska’s mountains are volcanoes, active or extinct—peaks like Edgecumbe in the southeast, Churchill and Drum in the Wrangells and dozens in the Al
eutian Range and farther west among the Aleutian Islands themselves. The Geological Survey, which has offices in Alaska to monitor and study the volcanoes, says that more than 130 have erupted in the past few million years. About 50 of these have been active in the two and a half centuries since Alaska was first discovered by outsiders. Captain Cook himself observed Mount Redoubt, in the Aleutian Range, spewing white smoke back in 1778. It has had full eruptions four times since 1900, including one in 2009. In 1912, Alaska was home to the most powerful eruption of the twentieth century, at a previously unknown volcanic vent called Novarupta on the Alaska Peninsula. Ash flowing from the eruption covered a nearby valley up to seven hundred feet deep, and for the next fifteen years steam vented from countless openings in the ash layer. Robert Griggs, leader of a National Geographic Society expedition to explore the devastation, named the eerie landscape the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.
But Alaska is just one part of what is, in effect, a rim of mountains and volcanoes around the Pacific Ocean, what is known today as the Ring of Fire. They run south through the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with Washington’s Mount Rainier being the best-known volcano, and on to California, Mexico (including Popocatépetl, outside Mexico City) and Central America. From there they continue into South America, where the Pacific coast is characterized by long chains of peaks from Ecuador all the way to Chile. Across the Southern Ocean, the mountains continue in Antarctica and then north along the western edge of the Pacific, from New Zealand to Indonesia—home to the famous Krakatoa eruption of 1883—and the Philippines (Mount Pinatubo, 1991) and on to Japan and the Siberian coast of Russia.
There are mountains and volcanoes elsewhere in the world, of course, but these stand out because they are so neatly arrayed around the Pacific. Clearly, for all these mountains to have formed, something—some process involving the outer layers of the earth—must have happened at the margins where the oceans and continents meet. And the volcanoes, just as clearly, suggest that that something is still going on.
The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet Page 6