The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet

by Henry Fountain

  All went well for the first day or two. A bush pilot who was to fly over each day to check on them saw them working in the canyon on August 5. But the next day the weather turned bad, and when the pilot flew over the river late in the day he saw the bodies of the two men on a bar, below the mouth of the canyon. Whether Miller had miscalculated the potential flooding danger or there had been some kind of accident, it was impossible to tell.

  It was sad news for Plafker, who took several moments to let the information sink in. But then he read on. Eberlein had a question for him: We’ve just lost one of our best field geologists, a man who knew southern Alaska like the back of his hand. You worked with him and know the area just about as well as he knew it. How would you like to come back to the Survey, and to Alaska?

  If a single quotation best reflects the Alaska of the mid-1960s, it might be one that actually was spoken years later, by Walter J. Hickel, a towering figure in the modern history of what natives called Alyeska, the Great Land. Hickel was one of the men who made Alaska, but Alaska also made him. Raised in Kansas, he’d come north in the early 1940s and gotten into the construction business. That led to real estate development, and before too long Wally Hickel, as he was universally known, was a major force in Anchorage’s growth, building shopping centers, housing and hotels. In the 1950s he also became enmeshed in Republican politics, and he was one of the leaders who helped ease the way to statehood in 1959. Hickel was the state’s second governor (defeating Valdez’s own Bill Egan, who was seeking a second term) and its eighth as well, having been elected again in 1990 after taking time out to serve as Richard Nixon’s interior secretary, among other things.

  The words in question were spoken by Hickel during his second gubernatorial term, in 1992. At the time, state fish and game officials had approved a program to bring Alaska’s gray wolf population under control. The animal was for many Alaskans a noble, if unofficial, symbol of the state. But the gray wolf was also a major predator of other wildlife. So the state had decided to allow some to be shot—by fish and game agents from airplanes in some areas and by private hunters in others. Their rationale was that thinning the ranks of the predators would increase the numbers of caribou, moose, bears and other game, creating an Eden for hunters and, for tourists, a spectacle that state officials rather extravagantly claimed would rival that of the Serengeti in East Africa. The plan had been approved despite objections from environmentalists and some wildlife biologists, who argued that the wolf was part of a complex ecosystem and that the state shouldn’t play God with it. Altering the predator–prey balance, they pointed out, could paradoxically lead to fewer big game animals, as populations might first increase so much that competition for food would become fierce, and starvation could ensue.

  Hickel had been a supporter of the plan to cull the wolf population—he was a booster of almost everything that would encourage tourism and other business activity in the state—and, when he was asked about it by a reporter, had responded with a memorable line.

  “We can’t just let nature run wild,” he said.

  Modern Alaska, it could be argued, lived by that concept. The state had been, and still was, defined by nature. Most of its territory was wilderness, tens of millions of acres of land that far outmatched, in breadth and often in ruggedness and grandeur, anything in the Lower 48. But Alaska had grown, and would continue to grow, because Alaskans had brought nature under control when and where they could.

  By 1964, the state’s population was about 250,000, including 40,000 natives. Far from being a land of hard-drinking sourdoughs and grizzled mountain men living in cabins made from rough-hewn logs—though those stereotypical characters existed—Alaska was well on its way to becoming much like the rest of America, urbanized and suburbanized. Fully half of the population lived in or around Anchorage and Fairbanks, the state’s biggest cities.

  Of the two, Anchorage was bigger and had come the furthest. Like Valdez, Anchorage was first a tent city, although a more organized one, having been deliberately established in 1914 at the head of Cook Inlet, where Knik Arm branches to the northeast and Turnagain Arm to the southeast. Several thousand workers who had been enlisted to lay the railroad from Seward to Fairbanks made their home at an encampment along Ship Creek, just north of, and down the hill from, what was to become downtown. As in Valdez, the tents had soon been replaced by buildings, and Anchorage became a hub for the new rail line, which after wartime delays was completed in the 1920s.

  Since then Anchorage had expanded, venturing forth into the wild, as it were, and taming it. The rail line and an ever-growing military presence—Anchorage became the headquarters of the Alaska Defense Command at the start of World War II—helped feed the city’s growth. By 1964, thanks to the efforts of Hickel and others, Anchorage was booming. Its downtown was bustling with shops, restaurants and commercial buildings. A new five-story J. C. Penney department store, a gleaming, nearly one-hundred-thousand-square-foot retail showcase, had opened on Fifth Avenue, just off the popular Fourth Avenue entertainment district with its bars, arcades and movie house. Anchorage was awash in government offices as well. Although the capital was in far-off Juneau in the Panhandle, as the center of Alaska’s population Anchorage by necessity handled much state and federal business.

  In Anchorage’s earlier days, planes had landed on a strip of parkland just a few blocks south of downtown. In 1951 a real airport was built southwest of downtown, and it was now buzzing with jetliners coming from Seattle and other American cities and with European flights stopping to refuel on their way to Asia. Anchorage was also starting to become a hub for a new way to ship cargo across the Pacific, by air.

  Hemmed in by water to the west and the slopes of the Chugach to the east, the city had spilled out any way it could: to the south around the airport and along the Seward Highway, and to the north, past the air force and army bases and up the eastern shores of Knik Arm toward the broad valley of the Matanuska River.

  The valley had seen its own development, beginning in the nineteenth century with the discovery of abundant coal deposits north of what soon became the settlement of Palmer, about forty miles from Anchorage. The area had always attracted homesteaders interested in farming, lured by the rich valley soil, but in 1935, as part of a New Deal program to help hard-hit farmers in the Midwest, a horde of newcomers arrived. The federal government moved more than two hundred families from Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota—states that were chosen in part because their climate was much like Alaska’s—to the valley, where they drew lots for forty-acre plots. The Matanuska Colony, as it was called, wasn’t a complete success, as the short growing season hampered agriculture, and over half of the original colonists eventually left. But the influx of people and money—the project is estimated to have cost $5 million—did spur the development of Palmer. Far from being an outpost in the wilderness, Anchorage was the center of what was practically becoming a sprawling metropolitan area.

  The state’s growth wasn’t limited to that region, however. Fairbanks had also vastly expanded beyond its origins as a dusty trading post established at the turn of the twentieth century to support gold prospectors working claims to the north. Early on, Fairbanks had briefly become a boomtown—one four-block stretch had no fewer than thirty-three saloons—but gold fever had petered out around the time of World War I. The road from Valdez, and the railroad from Anchorage and points south, enabled Fairbanks to continue thriving as the commercial capital of interior Alaska. Like Anchorage, it benefited from the presence of the military during World War II and especially when the Cold War thrust Alaska into prominence as a first line of defense against Soviet attack. The Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars on airfields and other more exotic installations built for programs like White Alice, a sprawling communications network of microwave links and large antennas that seemed to rise up out of nowhere on the landscape, and the Distant Early Warning, or DEW, Line, an array of coastal radar stations built to detect a Soviet nuclear first
strike.

  Civilization was thriving elsewhere as well. South of Anchorage, Seward and Whittier benefited from being on the rail line. In the Panhandle, Juneau thrived as the state capital, and on the Copper River delta, at the eastern edge of Prince William Sound, Cordova became a center of the salmon fishery.

  Since World War II, a statehood movement had been growing among Alaskans who chafed at being ruled largely by politicians and bureaucrats thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C. Alaska was such a different place from the rest of the United States, they argued, that it especially needed to be governed by Alaskans. Despite (or perhaps because of) strong opposition in Washington, the movement grew in the mid-1950s, reaching a milestone with the writing of a constitution that was ratified in 1956. Two years later, Congress finally approved statehood, and Alaska entered the union as the forty-ninth state, on January 3, 1959.

  Within a few years, much of the bloom had come off the rose of statehood, in large part because of the fiscal shocks it generated. (Indeed, concerns about how Alaska could afford to govern itself had been behind much of the opposition in Washington.) The state was suddenly on the hook for services that the federal government had previously paid for, like highway construction and maintenance, and also had to build the infrastructure of state government. Statehood had also done little to settle the land claims of Alaska’s natives, an issue that lingered until 1971.

  But statehood had given Alaskans more freedom to pursue their economic goals. The state’s fisheries, buoyed by new regulations, began to take off. Gold and other mineral resources still supplied a steady stream of revenue. The long battle to become a state had raised Alaska’s profile in the rest of the United States; a tourism industry grew as vacationers started coming north to see what the fuss was about. The military was still a strong economic engine. And Alaska was beginning to get a glimpse of a future that would be drenched in petroleum: it received its first oil revenues, of some $3 million, in 1959, from oil and gas fields discovered on the Kenai Peninsula. In 1968, the first oil reserves were found at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope.

  So five years along, Alaskans could feel confident about the direction of their state. They’d made the sometimes-rough transition to statehood and survived the financial squeeze it created. There were still limitless amounts of wilderness—one of the provisions of statehood was that Alaska got to choose more than one hundred million acres of federal land for its own—but Alaskans were making inroads with their own special brand of civilization. As Ernest Gruening, one of Alaska’s first senators, put it in a long encomium to the state published in National Geographic in 1959, Alaska’s people were “enterprising, vigorous, warmhearted, modern. In the larger communities they shop in supermarkets and neon-lighted drugstores, read everything from comics to classics, and watch television.”

  Alaskans were living, and enjoying, a distinctly far-northern version of the American Dream. It was one that relied on not letting nature run wild.

  Nature, though, was about to strike back.

  —

  With little more than a month left in the school year, Kris Madsen was growing restless. The isolation of Chenega, plus the usual cabin fever after a long winter—the island was not as bitingly cold or snowy as some parts of Alaska, but it could be dark and dreary—had proved to be a bit much. Perhaps sensing that she needed a diversion, however brief, a bush pilot who often stopped at the island had taken her up in his floatplane one day for a sightseeing flight. He was just having pity on me, Madsen thought, but she appreciated the chance to see places that her students had talked about, like the cannery at Port Nellie Juan and the awe-inspiring mountains and glaciers that framed Prince William Sound.

  The teaching had been going well enough, despite a lack of proper books. She’d discovered, much to her dismay, that there were no primers, or beginning reading books, for her youngest students and that most of the books for older students were hopelessly out of date. But Madsen had made do, and also had learned how to handle a room full of students of differing ages. She genuinely liked most of her charges, though they would sometimes bring disputes and other problems from home to the classroom. And she’d done more than teach. Although she had no training and very little in the way of supplies, she had been the village’s de facto nurse, dealing with the cuts and scrapes of everyday life. She’d cared so well for eleven-year-old Timmy Selanoff when he sliced his thumb open down at the beach one day that the real nurse, who visited Chenega irregularly for inoculations and other routine medical care, had been impressed. Madsen also had dealt with unexpected events, especially the news that came over the radio on a Friday in late November that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in far-off Texas. Chenegans revered the president; many had his portrait on the walls of their homes. Madsen had sent her students home early and established an informal period of mourning, lowering the flag to half-staff and canceling classes that she had scheduled for the next day.

  But she knew that a year in Chenega, after a year in Old Harbor, would be enough. She was thinking about what she would do next. Perhaps she’d get a job in Anchorage or even Fairbanks, farther north. But the state educational bureaucracy was stifling. She had endless reports to fill out and send off via the mail boat, and endless testing that the state wanted her to inflict on her students. One request was particularly galling: an IQ test with questions that she felt were laughably inappropriate for young native people whose world was a small isolated community like Chenega. One question featured a photograph of a filling station, something many of her students had never seen. Madsen had put big X’s across the answer sheets and sent them back to the bureaucrats in Anchorage. So perhaps, she sometimes thought, when the school year was over she’d end her Alaska adventure and return to sunny and warm California for a while before heading somewhere else.

  She would figure it all out eventually. On this day—overcast but not too cold, with temperatures in the thirties—she had teaching to do. Before her students came up the steps that morning, she raised the flag on the pole outside and readied her classroom for the day, arranging the desks and chairs and making sure that whatever books and supplies she would need were set out. She checked the surplus food in the storeroom for her students who had not brought anything for lunch or who, later in the day, might need a little something to tide them over. Then she did what she always did: she took up a piece of chalk and, in her plain teacherly hand, wrote the date on the blackboard.

  Today is Friday

  March 27, 1964

  It was Good Friday by the American church calendar. But Russian Orthodox Easter was not until May 3, more than a month away. So while school might have been out in Anchorage and other places, it was business as usual at the schoolhouse on the hill. Madsen needed to teach every day she could—that’s why she taught some Saturdays—because the state required 180 days of classes. No one knew precisely when in the spring the salmon would start running, but it would be sometime in May, and once they did her students and their families would be on their way to Port Nellie Juan and the school year would come crashing to an end.

  She’d learned that one of the tricks to teaching different grade levels at the same time was to assign an in-class project that everyone could work on at his or her own pace and that older students could help the younger ones with. Then she could work with each age group on academic subjects as needed throughout the day. That day, the children worked on paper Easter eggs to hang on the wall. She’d let the youngest go shortly after lunch, and the older students had left at about three. She’d spent the rest of the afternoon tidying up the classroom for the big event that evening. For this Friday night was movie night in Chenega.

  This was another of Madsen’s responsibilities that no one had told her about. Chenegans’ only contact with the world was through the radio. Most villagers had one, powered by batteries, and there was a two-way radio at the school. Movie night was a way to bring the outside world to Chenega—filtered through the lens of Holly
wood, of course. It was also one of the few nonreligious social activities that involved practically the whole village. Movies were shown on Friday nights, although not every week. The schoolhouse became the movie house, with a 16mm projector that Madsen had learned to operate.

  That evening’s feature was House on Haunted Hill, a grade B horror flick that Madsen had ordered through the mail, as usual, and that had arrived on the mail boat. The film, released to little acclaim in 1959, starred that master of horror, Vincent Price, as an eccentric millionaire who invites five people to be locked up in a Gothic mansion overlooking Los Angeles, with a promise of $10,000 to whoever can make it through the night. Needless to say, murder and mayhem ensue, aided and abetted by the millionaire’s fourth wife, played by Carol Ohmart, who a few years before, like countless young starlets, had been billed as “the next Marilyn Monroe.”

  Madsen, with the help of her friend Norman Selanoff, had moved the desks in the classroom off to one side and set up chairs and a screen. She had threaded the first reel of the film. There was no set showtime—the movie would start whenever it seemed that most of the villagers made it up the steps after dinner, perhaps around 6:30. With some time to kill before making dinner herself, Madsen and her friend decided to fetch some water from the pond above the school. Normally the water flowed down a pipe from a small dam on the pond. But there’d been a week of abnormally cold weather recently, and the pipe was frozen, restricting the flow to a trickle. So they would have to fetch the water in buckets.

  Down in the village, the day had been an ordinary one, overcast but not too dark, and not too cold. Some of the men had spread fresh gravel around the outside of the church, a customary way of sprucing it up during Lent. Others had gone seal hunting: Mickey and Nick Eleshansky had taken their boat, the Shamrock, over to Prince of Wales Passage, about a dozen miles from the village, and George Borodkin and Mark Selanoff were in their boat, the Marpet, near Icy Bay, about half that distance away. Nick Kompkoff had just painted his eighteen-foot skiff the day before and was thinking about taking it on a quick hunting trip, but the paint was not quite dry, so he decided to stay home. Later in the afternoon he wandered over to the Smokehouse to shoot some pool.