The Wave

by Susan Casey

  Leaving the launch, I walked slowly to my truck. I heard seagulls, still screaming in the dark, and the steady insistent wind like white noise, and the whine of winches lifting Jet Skis onto land. There were no stars to be seen, only the oily glare of the dock lights. It was hard to imagine that an all-night journey into Mexico lay ahead, but I knew I would go. “This storm will still be packing a punch,” Collins had said in his voice mail. “Todos is gonna be absolutely humongously huge tomorrow morning.” I felt my phone vibrate, and looked down to see a text message from Prickett: “United 787 to San Diego. 10:15,” he had written. “See you there.”

  THE GIANT WAVES WILL OCCUR IN LITUYA BAY IN THE FUTURE; THIS POTENTIAL DANGER SHOULD BE KNOWN TO THOSE WHO ENTER THE BAY.

  Don Miller, United States Geological Survey

  GLACIER BAY NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA

  If a person wanted to visit Lituya Bay, a remote fjord slashed into Alaska’s west coast just north of Sitka, he would first fly to Juneau. From there he’d take a short flight to the small town of Gustavus, the jumping-off point for Glacier Bay National Park. Next, he’d hire a seaplane. And if he got lucky with conditions, and the usual blanketing fog and drippy weather wasn’t parked over the bay, and the winds were resting from their hoedown, and if the pilot wasn’t too freaked out to consider the trip to begin with, he would eventually drop down over the majestic snow-capped Fairweather range with its sentinel glaciers, descending over dense wet forests of spruce and alder and cedar and hemlock—the steep hillsides a tangle of living trees, brush, and downed, rotting timber—and then he would see a seven-mile-long, two-mile-wide T-shaped inlet with a small teardrop-shaped island in its center. At first glance, Lituya Bay might possibly (and deceptively) look peaceful. But upon closer examination, as the plane glided down below the treetops, he would notice something startling. A half mile above the water the forest abruptly stops, as though someone had come along with a razor and given it a savage haircut.

  During the first half of the twentieth century, geologists puzzled over the strange denuded areas, the visible scars and wounds that pocked the land surrounding Lituya Bay, searching for an explanation. For years they found themselves unable to come to a conclusion. Cataclysmic things had happened in here, everyone agreed, but what kind, exactly—and when? Had a glacial lake burst through an ice dam, spilling into the bay and washing away all the vegetation? Or maybe an avalanche had scoured the land clean. Had there, perhaps, been an epic flood? In Alaska there were many potential sources for the trauma. The region was dotted with active volcanoes, riven by earthquakes, host to landslides and rockslides and radical conditions of all kinds. For years Lituya Bay was a confounding mystery. But as the story of its past came into focus and Nature gave some forthright demonstrations of what it was up to, the culprit became clear: giant waves, the largest ever witnessed on earth.

  The bay’s history was a quilt of stories about wave-induced fear and death passed down by the Tlingit Indians (pronounced KLIN-kit) who’d lived on these shores. According to their lore, entire villages had been wiped out when immense waves roared from the Gilbert and Crillon inlets at the head of the bay (think: the arms on the top of the T). Freakish waves had also occurred at the bay’s mouth, a narrow, 300-yard-wide passage where a fifteen-knot current collides with the unruly Gulf of Alaska over a shallow bar. The Indians told the story of how eighty men had gone out in ten war canoes and never come back, and of another loss of sixty men in four canoes. They recounted the eerie tale of a native woman picking berries who had returned to her home and found it washed away, her entire clan killed and their bodies draped from trees.

  A Russian expedition led by Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov investigated the bay in 1741; their scouting boat of eleven sailors rowed from the gulf into Lituya Bay and was never seen again. Bering dispatched another party of four to find out what happened, and it too vanished. At first the Russians assumed that the Tlingits had killed them, but eventually they came to believe that the fifteen men had drowned in the waves. On their heels, in 1786, the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, arrived, calling Lituya Bay “perhaps the most extraordinary place in the world.” Three weeks later he ran for the exit, minus twenty-one men and two boats that had been lost to its waters. Before he left, La Pérouse erected a plaque on the lone island in the center of Lituya Bay, naming it Cenotaph Island in memory of the perished seamen. “The fury of the waves in that place left no hope of their return,” the explorer wrote. “Nothing remained for us but to quit with speed a country that had proved so fatal.”

  Throughout the nineteenth century, a stream of boats went down at the entrance, swamped by rogue seas, countless victims lost in the freezing waters—and waves continued to shave the bay’s hillsides with regularity. In 1854 a 395-foot wave roared through Lituya with such fierceness that it not only swept away the trees but also stripped them of their bark. History didn’t record the wave’s human toll, but at that time American and Russian whale and seal hunters often holed up in Lituya Bay (ironically) for shelter, and the Tlingit population that lived on its shores likely numbered in the thousands. Twenty years later, in 1874, an eighty-foot wave rampaged through the bay wreaking more havoc, and then in 1899 a series of huge quakes created a set of two-hundred-footers that cost many of the area’s gold prospectors their lives. “We ran from our tents leaving everything behind,” one man’s account read, describing the panic when the waves surged toward them. Over the decades and centuries there were many wave events, and they all had the same plotline. “Lituya Bay is a paradise always poised just on the edge of violence,” one historian wrote. “And when that violence comes, it is overwhelming.”

  What caused these waves? The Tlingits believed the source was a sea monster named Kah Lituya (Man of Lituya) that lurked in the bay’s waters, his lair located deep beneath its pinched mouth. Whenever Kah Lituya was disturbed by interlopers or in any way pissed off, he showed his displeasure by reaching up from below, grasping both sides of the bay, and shaking them—hard. Those who died in the giant waves he created then became his slaves, fated to prowl the surrounding mountainsides as grizzly bears, on the lookout for other humans that Kah Lituya could ensnare in his trap.

  As one might expect, the geologists who arrived in the mid-1900s had another take.

  Lituya Bay, they concluded, was unique in the world, so perfectly equipped to pump out towering waves that nature might have designed it specifically for that purpose. On its three enclosing sides, steep unstable slopes and sprawling glaciers sheared straight up from sea level to seven thousand feet, loaded with rock and ice payloads that—with minimal encouragement—would go crashing down into the water, creating dramatic, localized tsunamis. (Imagine paving stones being dropped into a bathtub by someone standing on a ladder.)

  Nothing in Lituya Bay, however, was minimal or moderate. Instead of gently sloughing avalanches, its surrounding mountainsides convulsed in great wracking seizures brought on by earthquakes along the Fairweather Fault, a jumpy rift that traced the bay’s eastern edge (the top of the T). When it came to making megawaves, there was plenty of raw material here: the fault was ideally situated to dislodge large masses of glacier and rock, the mountains had near-vertical faces, and the bay itself was more than seven hundred feet deep. Ravaging earthquakes occurred with startling regularity: between 1899 and 1965 Alaska experienced nine that measured higher than 8 on the Richter scale and at least sixty that measured stronger than 7. In 1899 one big quake punched a section of the Fairweather range forty-seven feet skyward.

  During the twentieth century no one was more exposed to Lituya Bay’s perils than Jim Huscroft, an Ohio expat who’d come to Juneau in 1913 to work in a gold mine. When the mine closed down in 1917, Huscroft built a cabin on the west side of Cenotaph Island and took up permanent residence there. It was a solitary life but never a lonely one. Huscroft, a friendly man and a spectacular cook, was visited by a steady trickle of mountaineers attempting to climb Mount Fai
rweather, fishing boats that had anchored in the bay, and the odd enterprising grizzly bear that swam out to the island in search of food. Huscroft raised foxes and brewed beer, fished and grew vegetables and picked berries and baked bread. He built a small landing area for boats. He weathered Lituya’s frequent gales, constant fog, and driving rain. He looked at the doleful inscription on La Pérouse’s monument—“Reader, whoever thou art, mingle your tears with ours”—and he listened to the sound of ice and rock plunging down at the head of the bay and exploding the waters, knowing as any seasoned Alaskan would that these noises might eventually add up to a more personal kind of danger, that Lituya Bay, his landlord, might one day exact the heaviest payment imaginable for his tenancy. The rent came due on October 27, 1936.

  Just before dawn that day Huscroft, then sixty-four, stood at the stove in his long underwear making pancakes, his kitchen light visible to two fishermen, Fritz Frederickson and Nick Larsen, friends of Huscroft’s who were anchored just offshore on their forty-foot trawler, the Mine. At six-twenty a.m., as Huscroft worked his griddle and the fishermen brewed their morning coffee, a terrible noise began, an overwhelming but toneless din that Huscroft later described as the sound of “a hundred airplanes flying at low altitude.” The noise lasted for twenty minutes. Something was going on at the head of the bay, but Huscroft couldn’t figure out what; there had been no earthquake to shake anything loose. Aware of the bay’s history, he ran outside. Aboard the Mine, the two fishermen stood on deck looking anxiously into the distance. There was a sudden quiet as the noise stopped, a sinister, pregnant silence. Then the wave appeared.

  Huscroft stared for a moment at the dancing white line swinging toward him like a four-hundred-foot-high sledgehammer—it was maybe four miles away, spanning the entire width of the bay—and then he tore off for higher ground. Larsen and Frederickson lunged to hoist their anchor. Realizing they couldn’t escape the wave, they gunned straight toward it, trying to clear the crest. It was more like a wall than a wave, Larsen observed, clutching the wheel as his boat clawed its way up the face. He then realized, to his horror, that the wave’s backside was nothing but a sheer vertical drop; the water had drained out of the bay so dramatically that its surface had been sucked below sea level.

  Falling into the trough, the two men saw another giant wave hurtling toward them, larger than the first. Then a third, larger than the second. The Mine careened on a berserk roller-coaster ride but it survived, as did Larsen and Frederickson. In the aftermath the waves continued, smaller but still forceful, and they banged at the boat from all directions as the bay tried to regain its equilibrium. Huscroft too survived the waves, though not much else on Cenotaph Island did. The trees and vegetation were gone, as were the foxes, topsoil, garden, storage shed, root cellar full of food, dock, most of his supplies, and La Pérouse’s memorial. Part of Huscroft’s cabin had been washed away, and what remained was severely flooded.

  Later, geologists examining shoreline damage and carbon-dating tree rings estimated the waves’ height at the head of the bay: 490 feet. (By the time they’d hit Cenotaph Island they hovered around one hundred feet.) In the absence of an earthquake, they guessed that the mechanism for the waves had occurred underwater, an enormous submarine landslide provoked by … something. (This theory was never conclusively proved.) For his part, Huscroft never quite recovered from the hit. It was as though the wave had washed his spirit off the island too, and though he continued to live there he never replanted his garden or fully rebuilt his settlement. He died less than three years later.

  Life in Lituya Bay went on, the infinite cycle of winds, rains, and storms, the swirling play of the aurora borealis over the peaks, the weightless arcs of gulls and cormorants and auklets, the glaciers silently standing guard. When seas were rambunctious in the Gulf of Alaska, fishermen still dared to take refuge in the bay, nervously crossing the bar at slack tide, darting through the mouth when the waves were quiet. And for a while the waves were quiet.

  Then in 1958, Kah Lituya went postal.

  “Do you know this Mavericks place up by Half Moon Bay? Have you ever run into Grant Washburn? He’s a really studious guy. Really knows a lot about waves. And Jeff Clark—whoa! Did it all by himself out there, with sharks and … heh, heh, heh.” George Plafker, familiar with the local big-wave lore, laughed admiringly at Clark’s exploits. He leaned against his desk and crossed his arms. Still strapping at seventy-eight, Plafker, an emeritus geologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), was a veteran of the world’s most rugged places and one of the foremost experts on nature’s worst tantrums. Subduction-zone earthquakes, deformations in the earth’s crust, high-speed avalanches, submarine landslides—and the giant waves that resulted from everything on this list—these were all in a day’s work. Plafker was especially knowledgeable about Alaska and in particular the area around Lituya Bay. He wore a faded plaid flannel shirt, a fleece vest, jeans, and sturdy boots. Rimless glasses perched on his nose.

  I had come to his office in Menlo Park, California, to talk about Lituya Bay’s grandest spectacle to date, a 1,740-foot wave that ripped through there on July 9, 1958. Though Plafker himself had been in Guatemala at the time (“Much nicer down there”), his colleague Don Miller, another USGS geologist, had been working close by and was able to survey the bay within twenty-four hours of the event. Together Plafker and Miller had studied Lituya Bay extensively in the 1950s, examining the landscape for clues that would enable them to chart its volatile past. “We speculated a lot about what caused those waves,” Plafker recalled. “We knew it was something big, and we had all kinds of mechanisms, all of which proved to be wrong.” He chuckled and reached for a thick, dusty pile of folders on a shelf. “It is a unique spot,” he said. “Knowing what I know now, I get nervous at the thought of being there. Its history is just: Bang! Bang! Bang!” He handed me an armful of folders.

  Among the acres of files, books, and maps in his office, Plafker had stored Miller’s original papers and photographs. Miller, who drowned in 1961 while surveying the Kiagna River, north of the Chugach Mountains, had been sent to Alaska to scout for oil reserves. In the course of his work he’d become fascinated by the giant waves in Lituya Bay, generating a trove of research that remained unarchived due to lack of funds. In the heap of material I held was the inside story of a wave the size of ten Niagara Falls. “It should be fairly clear, I think,” Plafker said. “We did annotate a lot of this.” He leaned over the table and peered at a large black and white photograph, edges curled, that was secured to one folder’s cover by an elastic band. “The boats shelter in right behind the bar,” he said, pointing at an area south of Cenotaph Island. “When the wave hit, that’s where Howard Ulrich was.”

  In the beginning, July 9, 1958, was a stunning day, noteworthy for its clear skies and crystalline beauty. Just outside Lituya Bay’s mouth, several fishing boats had been jolted by an earthquake foreshock, but that wasn’t unusual and no one thought much of it. Things were tranquil as evening settled over the bay, though the immediate weather forecast seemed likely to change that. At seven p.m., still daylight in these latitudes, an amphibious plane circled and then touched down on the glassy water. From their beach camp on the bay’s northern shore, ten mountain climbers from the Alpine Club of Canada watched its descent. This was their pilot. He hadn’t been due until the next morning, but fearing meaner weather he had arrived early to retrieve them after their successful ascent of Mount Fairweather. The climbers began to pack their gear, stashing some of it in what remained of Huscroft’s cabin. While they were busy with this, three fishing boats—also worried about a change in conditions—arrived in the bay to anchor for the night.

  The boats were of a similar size and vintage, trawlers in the forty-foot range, sturdy as bulldogs and built to withstand the Alaskan seas. The Badger was skippered by Bill Swanson and his wife, Vivian; the Sunmore was manned by another couple, Orville and Mickey Wagner. The third vessel was Howard Ulrich’s boat, the Edrie. Ulri
ch, who lived just up the coast, knew these waters as well as anyone. With him was his seven-year-old son, Howard Jr. All three boats were part of a close-knit group of salmon fishers working a stretch of ocean known as the Fairweather Grounds. In the Gulf of Alaska dangers arise frequently, and the boats kept in constant touch via two-way radio.

  By nine p.m. the three boats were at their anchorages, and the climbers were ready to depart. As their plane lifted off in the rich northern twilight, a curious thing happened. Noisy clouds of birds began to depart the bay too, kittiwakes, gulls, and terns, wheeling frantically as though chased by a squadron of hawks. In their panic to leave, some of the birds smacked into trees and other obstacles, dropping dead to the ground. And at that moment, if you had stood very still and watched the flowers and grasses along the bay’s lower elevations, you would have seen that they were trembling.

  Standing on deck after dinner, Ulrich noticed groups of Dall’s porpoises traveling from the bay out to sea. He saw their dark backs, the flash of their white bellies, moving through the water. The surrounding mountains were hulking, white-capped silhouettes. Anchored in the southern lee of Cenotaph Island Ulrich couldn’t see the other boats, though he’d heard their engines. Just before ten, he and his son called it a night.