Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  The statement gave Hank his first chill of fright. He thought through the first lines of an “Our Father” with little concentration.

  They heard a thundering, crashing roar, like a train on the way. People on the cannery pier ran toward shore, and the man on the little boat disappeared into his cabin. Down the narrows came a wall of water three or four times the height of the boat as it lay. A forewave lifted the boat from the bottom and started it upward, but a second later the main water roared against it. Hank’s last glimpse as Steve shoved him into the cabin was of flying boards as the boat disappeared and the wall of water crashed onward.

  The Rondelay rose as if on a racer dip, pointing upward so that they tumbled against each other while water poured through cracks in the boat that heavy seas had never reached before. Plates flew crashing from the cupboard. At one point they were nearly vertical, and then the boat spun in a circle. Objects bumped and smashed against the hull. A diesel odor permeated everything. Jones engaged the engine and leaned his full weight into the wheel, but it tore from his grip. Hank fell on deck among broken crockery. He could hear the water beating beneath the boards an inch from his head. As he scrambled to his feet away from it, ripples of water were just flowing clear of the windshield. Outside in the twilight, other boats and objects were spinning.

  “She brought us through,” said Jones calmly. “Good little boat. Hank, don’t just stand there, pick up some of that broken shit on the deck. You’re supposed to be the cook.”

  When they went out on deck, they saw that the Rondelay was swirling helplessly with other boats, back in the harbor. The water was high on the harbormaster’s pier again, and those parts of the floats that remained were broken and disoriented. Jones gunned and gunned the engine, pointing the boat to sea away from the narrows. “Washed us right back over the breakwater! Better than slamming us into it, but this time while it’s submerged we’ve got to make it over and stay.” All around the deck, pieces of gear had disappeared. “Can’t batter this boat forever.”

  Suddenly the water took control in a new way. They gained momentum in a straight line, with everything else in their vicinity traveling in the same direction as the water hissed around them. “I’m not entirely in control here,” muttered Jones as he jammed the throttle and turned the wheel desperately. “Were headed for the narrows, right over the top of the breakwater.” The water of the narrows rushed out with the roaring whiteness of a waterfall. Hank remembered the tree log at Whale Pass, sucked under. Nothing affected their course. Jones tossed life jackets from the chest by the wheel. “Hank! Put mine on the kid there. Listen. If the rocks are still there she might tear us apart. Grab something that floats and kick toward shore.”

  But nothing happened. The breakwater must have washed apart. The current drew them toward the chaotic water moving out of the narrows, as if by cables. They grabbed poles to fend off large bumping debris. The boat was turned backwards, and Jones had no control. They moved stem-first around the apron of land where the narrows began. They might have been a stick in a rapids. Faster and faster it took them. They shot past the now-smashed cannery pier as the wind of their motion whistled through the rigging. Jones struggled to bring their bow around, but the water sucking in their wake held it fast. The stem, pointed in the direction of the current, kicked and bounced from side to side. Other boats and broken objects traveled with them, including a black buoy whose light continued to flash.

  “At this rate, well be out the other end in a couple minutes,” said Jones. “Mebbe well make open sea after all.”

  The forward-moving stern hit an object, bounced, veered, settled back on course. “If the son bitch don’t break apart before we get there,” said Steve. A calm had settled over them all. “Were not calling the shots,” said Jones, “so we might as well relax.”

  They had zoomed past the airways hangar when Ivan pointed with a cry. Several hundred feet ahead, a boat was tumbling end over end. “It’s moving toward us!” While everything around them moved inexorably northward, the objects ahead approached head-on in the opposite direction. A terrible spuming no man’s land began to explode where the waters collided.

  “Holy Virgin Mother, we’re trapped,” cried Ivan.

  Their forward motion stopped with a jolt and the boat spun a full turn. A moment later they were being transported back toward the boat harbor where they had started, in company with the flashing buoy and everything else. Ivan, watching the water with wide eyes and open mouth, knelt and crossed himself, while Jones and Steve laughed crazily. “I’ll collect two bucks fare apiece for that ride,” Jones declared. But before they were free, the current reversed itself again. It carried them back with less speed but still firmly as far as the airways hangar, then finally returned them to the jumble of boats in the harbor. The boat that had tumbled end over end now floated on its side. As Jones and Steve discussed whether they could save it, Hank recognized the Olaf, Chip’s and Tolly’s boat that they had corked and battled with the summer before.

  “Mebbe somebody trapped,” said Jones.

  “Go alongside, I’ll hop aboard,” said Steve.

  Too dangerous for you,” said Ivan. “I’m going. Chip Hansen and me, we’re Aleuts together.”

  Before they could take any action, the roiling waters had separated them again, and the Olaf went its way dipping under.

  Daylight had left quickly. Kodiak was dark except for headlights everywhere, crisscrossing, forming lines on the road that led to the top of Pillar Mountain behind town. Jones got on the radio to see whom he could reach. Conversations sputtered and died, but it was obvious from the bits they heard that the town was evacuating, with more waves expected. The town had received no communication except through Hawaii, but somebody had heard that Anchorage, Seward, and Valdez had been destroyed. The Rondelay was trapped in the harbor, with logs, boats, and other debris blocking their passage to open water. Some time after dark, the light of a full moon took over, casting objects into black silhouettes, outlining the roofs ashore. Time advanced, with events as jumbled as the debris around them. Sometimes they drew close enough to other boats to shout exchanges, but the general din of water in motion and objects colliding drowned out their own voices.

  A dark, shouting figure in an open dory bobbed by, and they grabbed him aboard. It was Tolly of the Olaf, haggard, laughing now with relief, his gold earring still in place. He had been alone on the Olaf. She scraped a rock and the water came in faster than the pump could carry it out, until the engine flooded. He had grabbed a dory floating by, and last saw the Olaf racing out the narrows.

  “If I could get back to the narrows,” Jones said, “mebbe I’d get through this time.”

  “No!” said Ivan. “That place is haunted now, from that poor fellow whose boat tore apart around him.”

  “Everyplace here’s haunted by now, I expect.”

  The water drained out and stranded them on the harbor bottom again, the moon glistening on the temporary mudflats. This time they were inside the breakwater. Flashlights and bonfires flickered all the way up the mountain behind town, and the beams of massed car lights cut into the sky from the top. It was growing chilly. The water on their rigging turned to frost. The crew shared coats with Tolly and the boy, because nobody cared to weather it below.

  The third wave roared in over the breakwater, picked them up, and carried them partway into town. They threw a line around a power pole to keep from banging into buildings. Close by their flashlights made out Krafts Drygoods, and Jones declared they were at the foot of Benson Avenue, but then the big building floated away and they realized they might be anywhere. When the water receded, they found themselves on dry land. Tolly and the boy thanked them and took off uphill at a trot.

  It was a ghost town of skewed buildings and piles of wreckage, with clusters of lights from other grounded boats. They climbed down and walked around the Rondelay, examining it with their flashlights. She was marred and scuffed, but still whole except for a loose rudder which J
ones hurriedly started to fix. As Hank held the light, Jones said, ‘This ain’t the end, and no telling what’s coming. Better get yourself up the hill.”

  “No chance.”

  “Then stick close, be ready to jump back aboard.”

  Not far away, a big power scow the size and shape of the Billy II was also stranded. With deck lights ablaze, it was the brightest object anywhere. They called back and forth to the crew, and learned that she had three thousand king crabs aboard which she had just come in to deliver.

  From a dark boat’s shape farther into the harbor a woman’s voice called, “Everybody over there all right?”

  Steve walked down to the water’s edge. “Sure am. How are you?”

  “Can’t complain, but it’s a little scary. My husband’s away in Seattle to get parts, but I’ve run things pretty good.”

  Steve shone his light in her direction. She had graying hair and wore yellow rain gear. Her boat was listing badly.

  “We’ll get you off.”

  “No, no, I can’t abandon the boat. I’ll be all right.”

  Steve raced back to the Rondelay for a coil of line. “Best pull her off,” said Jones.

  “She can’t lose that boat. I know them people, they’ve had hard times. I’m going to ride it out with her.”

  “No. Boat’s half sunk, and another wave might do it.”

  “Bullshit,” said Steve easily. By the water’s edge he called, “Now, missus, grab this line and secure it. I’m coming aboard.”

  “Oh!” Her voice brightened. “That’s good of you, but I’m fine.” Steve paid no attention except to call “Catch!” The siren started somewhere on the hill. The woman caught the line with alacrity, and they felt it tighten. Jones kept objecting, but he joined with Ivan and Hank to pull as Steve waded out. The boat was still thirty feet away.

  There came a terrible roar of crashing and splitting. The moonlight caught a rim of foam on top a black-glinting wave, higher than houses, advancing across the breakwater. Steve lunged into the water, hand over hand toward the woman’s boat. Ivan and Jones grabbed him with a lock around each shoulder and raced to the Rondelay, with Hank trailing after. Steve cried out, then scrambled aboard with the others. They tumbled into the cabin just as the water hit.

  It crashed through their windshield and engulfed them all in glass and foaming water even as it lifted them high and swept them wildly bumping into buildings. Steve cursed and wept as the woman’s scream sailed past them and was lost in the general roar. Poles split around them—one barely missed the boat. Timbers broke to a sound like gunshots.

  With the window broken they could watch as soon as the Rondelay righted itself. The boat swirled in circles, moving up into the business street, past the Mecca Restaurant which strangely remained, then down the street past the supermarket and Tony’s Bar. They were headed straight into a wall of Tony’s when the big building rose from its foundation and pivoted ahead of them sluggishly. Other boats also dipped around buildings, their lights blinking. It was wild, Hank thought, like he’ll in the Bible. He could have laughed had it not been for the woman. The big power scow with the crabs aboard sailed grandly past them with lights ablaze. Then the water pulled them back into the harbor, bouncing them against objects like a puck in a pinball machine.

  Other boats swirled with them, often close enough to touch, but each boat and its men rode alone.

  For more than an hour the hand of the water pushed them in one direction, then returned them. Moonlight gleamed on white-painted boards and parts of structures, while above the dead town refugee lights flickered along the mountainside. “I’m sure Adele’s up there safe,” said Jones. “Wonder if I’ve still got a house?” The objects around them sometimes traveled alongside, sometimes moved in colliding directions or disappeared. In the middle of the harbor they rode for several minutes with the Standard Oil Building, its square roof slanting and dipping, and then the waters pulled it out to sea as Jones tried unsuccessfully to follow, while they were whirlpooled back into the center of flotsam. The general roaring and cracking continued, and the smells were everywhere of diesel oil and churned bottom mud.

  At length the narrows sucked them in, transported them through white water like a log in a flume past bare shoreline that had recently held the canneries and airways, and spewed them into open water. Their engine grabbed hold and at last pulled them from the grip of the currents. For the first time in hours they rode again in a boat at least partially controlled by themselves.

  CHAPTER 13

  Mud

  The Alaska Good Friday earthquake of 27 March 1964 originated fifty miles east of Anchorage, about 200 miles northeast of Kodiak. With a Richter reading of 8.6, it was the heaviest quake ever recorded in North America. In Anchorage, parts of Fourth Avenue dropped thirty feet in seconds. The seismic shock followed from land into the seafloor like a crack through china, and the sudden upheaval generated a chaos of water that roared out in giant sea swells called tsunamis. The swells traveled as terrible walls of water down Prince William Sound and through the Gulf of Alaska to Kodiak Island and beyond. They roared up inlets to destroy the Seward waterfront, and most of Valdez. The water obliterated one village on the mainland (Chenega) and one on Kodiak Island (Kaguyak), while wrecking others to the point where they were eventually abandoned.

  The town of Kodiak has several small islands near its harbor (one of which parallels the eastward shore of town to form the narrows), and these diverted the oncoming swells into tricky patterns coming from different directions. It saved Kodiak from a single, total onslaught while subjecting the harbor to a variety of other destructive forces. Throughout the Alaska earthquake area, the total loss of fishing boats and canneries was figured at $13.6 million in 1964 dollars, of which Kodiak suffered the lion’s share of $10 million. This included in Kodiak, according to one official set of statistics, 46 crab boats and 35 salmon boats lost and 86 others damaged. There were 17 “known dead in the Kodiak town area plus four others in the villages. In the five blocks of downtown Kodiak, 65 structures were destroyed and 23 others damaged, with the inventories of 71 businesses wiped out. This represented 75 percent of all commercial facilities. Beyond the business area, 158 private homes were destroyed and many others severely damaged. Three-quarters of the food supply was also gone in this town of 3000 dependent on imports. The earthquake itself left a permanent mark on Kodiak: it sank the town and the harbor floor five feet.

  When the current finally freed them, Jones, like an animal let from its cage, sped the Rondelay full power in a straight line. Only the thumps of debris stopped him. The moonlight illuminated an oily swath of ripples and eddies between the black mountain shore of Kodiak and the low line of Woody Island a mile opposite. As they moved, silhouettes of boats, invisible without their lights, appeared in the moonpath. They spent the rest of the night, as did other boats under power which had escaped the current, boarding the pilotless boats, pumping them if necessary, then dropping anchors with maximum chain. Hank kept a list, to tell the owners. Further tsunami waves rolled under them at regular intervals, each lesser than the one before. In open water the waves were graduated rather than crested, so that the Rondelay merely rode their tops.

  There were boats, or pieces of them, for which nothing could be done. One sank as they watched; others were flooded beyond any ability to pump. On one the hydraulic anchor winch was broken, and Hank followed Steve into oil-thick water up to his thighs to search out the controls and fix them.

  They found the Linda J riding fully lighted, with coffee water boiling on the stove, a foot of water sloshing in the bilge, deserted. Hank went into a deep malaise, although he continued working. Two hours later, a boat bumped alongside and there was Joe Eberhardt yelling and stomping on the frosty deck of the Hesperis as he asked if anybody had seen the Linda J. It seems the Linda had beached during one of the outsurges, and as Joe, alone in the boat, scrambled underneath to caulk a split seam the next wave roared in. It washed him against a rocky clif
f and he clutched and climbed, the water sucking around his waist as he struggled. “I don t ever need to kiss death any closer until the real time comes,” he said easily as he gulped coffee aboard the Rondelay, but his hands trembled. He was covered with cuts and bruises. “Well, sir, I clung by my balls for one-two hours, because that water never went down again, until finally somebody’s skiff floated by, and then later Jack on the Hesperis found me. Whoo! You don’t know how good it feels to have a deck between you and the water until you’ve tried it bareass.”

  They found Joe’s boat and Hank transferred over to help clean up and bring her in. Joe continued talking in a hyper state until past four in the morning and then, at Hank’s promise to call at any hint of danger, crawled into his bunk, and with a groan fell asleep.

  Hank watched the moonlight fade as the sky lightened. With daylight he could see beyond pockets of debris to the vastness of wreckage that sluggishly moved with the water. There were peaks of whole buildings, upturned boats, single splintered boards that eddied in clusters, and an upturned boat. It was like the Hindu creation, when everything first had to be destroyed to start again. Was there a town left? He wondered about the dead, heard the woman’s scream again in his mind, shuddered at the never-forgotten touch of Pete’s rigid hand beneath cold water, hoped no bodies would float by. It was a time for large and serious thoughts. Nothing had touched him; it seemed nothing could touch him as he flexed the firm muscles beneath his shoulders, yet in his mind he knew he was as vulnerable as anybody else, as fragile to fire and water as a piece of paper.

  Joe Eberhardt woke with a cry of fright, then gave a deep, selfconscious laugh when he saw Hank’s concerned face. They returned up the swirling currents of the narrows, now benign enough to allow passage under normal power. The twin onion domes of the little Russian church on the hill were intact. Then the sights of destruction began. The complex along the narrows had been swept away: cannery, cold storage, plane hangar, fuel dock, boatyard, stores, chandlery—everything. Only the big fuel tanks on higher ground remained, and a few shards of piling.