Dan Seavey took note of that small fact the way most observant people take note of slight incongruities: pushed away to the back of his mind—a small memory which would shortly take on great significance.
As the switch engine six blocks away started moving again, Dan Seavey swung the door closed behind him and accepted a chair at the kitchen table, the panorama of Seward in late afternoon playing just outside the picture window to his right.
To the Alaska Railroad engineer, not even the noise and vibration of the 125-ton diesel-electric switch engine could completely mask the special feel of the Seward waterfront. The tracks here were, well, mushy. Well built and solid, to be sure. Thousands of tons rolled over them daily, and the ties and 125-pound steel rails all were in good shape.
But the ground beneath the tracks and ties seemed to echo the vibrations of the locomotive’s passage. There was a secondary vibration—almost as if the rails had been placed on an enormous layer of hard rubber. To those familiar with it, that was just Seward.
On the south end of the town one of the three giant gantry cranes on the Alaska Railroad docks resumed its movements alongside berth one, rumbling slowly back and forth on steel legs and wheels, looming over the south shoreline of Seward, which was the south portion of the Seward alluvial fan formed by the glacially eroded gravel and silt pulverized from the nearby mountain slopes. The Alaska Railroad docks were a long series of concrete and steel platforms which formed the southern terminus of the Alaska Railroad—and the longshoremen who populated them in ’round-the-clock shifts were the underpinning of the town’s economy. The owner of the docks was the Alaska Railroad, which in turn was owned by the U.S. government, which meant that employment was fairly steady.
The Alaska Steamship Company’s venerable old Liberty ship, the Chena, had vacated the dock in the early hours of the morning, sailing on its regular run for Valdez (pronounced Val-deez’), more than 150 sea miles to the northeast. The Seward men who had loaded the Chena the night before knew the ship would be approaching the Valdez narrows by now, casting a familiar profile against the fir-covered mountain slopes as she churned northward. They also knew that the days were numbered for such World War II-vintage, loose-cargo vessels. The reality that containerships eventually would replace freighters like the Chena—and thus replace many a longshoreman’s job—was not lost on the Seward dock-workers. But they expected the transition to take a decade, and there would be time to adjust. Meanwhile, it was a good life in Seward, even if the work was physical, occasionally backbreaking, and dangerous.
And there would always be jobs at the head of Resurrection Bay as long as Anchorage stayed healthy, and Seward remained its deepwater port. The cost of digging a channel deep enough to bring oceangoing vessels into Anchorage year-round would be horrendous, and though there was some talk in government circles about doing just that, with the financial momentum of the tremendous investment in Seward’s dock facilities and the Alaska Railroad, Seward would probably be safe from sudden change.
The previous sixty years of human presence had altered drastically the appearance and the function of this relatively small teardrop of land at the head of Resurrection Bay. Where the cold waters had lapped at an empty and silty shoreline and gulls had once landed unmolested at the edge of a thin forest of spruce, hemlock, and cottonwood trees, industrial rolling stock and cargo now covered the terrain. It was the spot from which dog sled trails were first blazed to the rich gold fields of Nome—the beginnings of a trail later known as the Iditarod.
The gantry crane was back in motion now, lifting another sling of crates from one spot to another—rearranging the outbound loads for the next ship. Two blocks away up Fourth Avenue to the north, the whining of the electric motors on the crane blended with the rumbling sounds of the switch engine in the marshaling yard to the east and vibrated gently through the interior of a false-fronted two-story building labeled “Brown and Hawkins.”
In a small apartment over the expansive Brown and Hawkins sales floor of clothing racks and dry goods, the diminutive figure of an elderly woman moved quietly through a small kitchen and entered her bedroom. Slowly, carefully she lay down on the bed, taking note of the fading daylight through her window and listening to the slow, steady ticking of her clock, knowing without looking that it was around five-thirty in the afternoon. Emma Justice Hawkins, the widow of the man who founded this store and commissioned the building in 1903, had remained right here in Seward since those distant days. A merchant’s wife, a mother, one of the founding families—now eighty-eight years of age, down to ninety pounds, and in tenuous health—she was one of a remaining few of the original pioneers. Her husband, T. W. “Bill” Hawkins, had died sixteen years before. Her daughter and son-in-law both were one story below now, finishing the business day.
Emma had come to the outpost of Seward three years after a small group of engineers arrived on the alluvial delta, determined to make it the southern terminus of a railroad for Alaska. By 1905 the railroad company had gone bankrupt, but the outpost—named Seward in honor of Lincoln’s secretary of state who bought the territory—remained.
The muffled sounds of people moving around in the store below intruded on her thoughts for a moment. The building was too well built to allow much noise through the walls, so they were only distant murmurings, accompanied by the occasional squeak of a hardwood board in the sturdy old building. They were sounds she knew so very well.
She had always been proud of this building and its quality. It was far more than just a backwater frame structure; it was a frontier craftsman’s masterpiece. Part of the decor were such contemporary features as a skylight and spotlight fixtures, rather than old-time drop lamps. The beautiful handworked wooden ceiling beams in the living room of what was now her daughter’s apartment were a model of fine workmanship. And the old building was sturdy, standing unaffected through good times and hard times, earth tremors and high winds, and even torrential rains and nearby floods from Lowell Creek (which ran periodically through the middle of town before the city built a concrete diversion tunnel around the south end).
Earthquakes were frequent in Alaska, and her experience with them was lengthy. She and her daughter, Virginia, had survived the 1933 quake in the Los Angeles area—the infamous Long Beach quake which collapsed many schools at a moment that Providence had dictated classes not be in session. Literally thousands of schoolchildren would have been killed and injured if it had happened at any other time, she knew. California had required higher standards after that, but she knew the Californians needed those higher standards because they didn’t favor wooden structures; their buildings were too often brick and mortar and other brittle materials. Wooden frame structures like Brown and Hawkins could bend and sway, rattle, shake, and tilt with a quake and seldom do more than pop a nail or two. Masonry buildings, like those in Long Beach, would shatter and fall, crushing those inside.
Many small earthquakes had rattled Seward over the years, but their building had always come through. She had no reason to assume it would ever be otherwise. After all, weren’t great quakes reserved for California alone?
The engineer moved the throttle of the big diesel engine forward a bit, listening for the expected sequential report of eighty cars taking up the slack in their couplings one by one, a series of heavy-metal clunks that would blend into a deep-throated metallic shudder. When the sound reached him, he would add more power, increasing the speed of the northbound freight to that of a man’s walking pace, lumbering slowly toward the Texaco tank farm on the northeast corner of the shoreline. The last forty cars of the freight were tank cars, filled with highly inflammable aviation gasoline. The caboose was south of the Standard Oil tanks on the southeast corner of the shoreline, the engine nearly a mile north, a few yards from the southernmost Texaco tank.
Slowly the experienced Alaska Railroad veteran inched the throttle lever forward—a rolling high-explosives depot between two dangerous tank farms. It was a rather tenuous means of transpo
rting such materials, he realized. The safety of such a train was always dependent on the stability of the roadbed, which in turn was always subject to landslides, floods, earthquakes, and erosion. His train would proceed safely to Anchorage only so long as nature gave its permission.
And, of course, that permission would always be subject to change without notice.
Valdez, Alaska
Basil “Red” Ferrier and his son Delbert stood at the wheel of their 34-foot fishing boat, the Falcon, and watched the 441-foot freighter heading toward them as it steamed out of the Valdez narrows just ahead, on a course to the northeast, moving abeam the unmanned lighthouse which marked the northern entrance to the channel. The rumble of the Falcon’s engine joined with the audible rush of the seven knots of wind flowing past their ears, masking the sounds of the oncoming behemoth which was moving steadily against the backdrop of the snow-covered peaks of the Chugach Mountains. It would be several minutes before the low rumble of her powerful reciprocating steam engine would roll over the cold waters of the bay and mark her almost silent passage—a familiar and friendly throbbing bathing both sides of the narrows like a murmured reassurance that human machinery and human ingenuity dominated things even here in the Alaskan wilderness.
The image of the big ship was looming in their perspective as the two dissimilar craft prepared to pass a half mile apart. The steamship had already sailed past the Falcon’s destination, the snow-covered slopes of the western side of the narrows, less than three miles south of them now. There would be a beach there and large spruce trees, one of which they would cut down, buck up, and tow back home behind their boat. Red and Delbert Ferrier had their chain saw and a commission to deliver one large log to a friend with an idle sawmill.
“Well, Del, there goes ten hours of work.”
For the two commercial fishermen and part-time longshoremen, the S. S. Chena was a passing bird in the hand to the lumber they intended to cut in the bush. Father and son could have been standing among the longshoremen waiting for the ship on the Valdez dock. Instead of the better but uncertain pay they were to receive for delivering a log, they could be pulling at least ten hours of wages working the cargo into the night.
The Falcon was past the Chena now, rolling gently over the swells from the big ship’s wake. Behind them the Chena’s bow began swinging to the east, the ship running against the current from a mean low tide as she pushed toward the tiny community of Valdez and their waterfront house some ten miles distant at the east end of the bay. Marion Ferrier, Red’s wife, would be getting home from her job as a waitress at the Club Valdez Restaurant and from Good Friday service about the time the ship tied up at the dock. Dinner would have to proceed without the Ferrier men, however. Red and Delbert weren’t planning to be home until late evening.
On the bridge of the Chena veteran Captain Merrill Stewart pulled the binoculars from his eyes and took in the beauty of the fjord ahead of his ship. No matter how many times he had sailed into these waters on an Alaska Steamship Company vessel, it was still awe-inspiring. This little outpost tenaciously clinging to the eastern head of a bay formed by the steep sides of five-thousand-foot mountain walls was one of the important gateways to interior Alaska. It claimed prominence in the natural order of Alaskan life as the state’s northernmost year-round ice-free port, but its attributes were measured by more than commercial considerations. Valdez also sat amidst a cornucopia of natural grandeur, a portrait in earth tones and snow of wild and magnificent scenery in the teeth of a perpetual stiff and chilly breeze.
The ship’s pilot, whose job it was to guide the Chena into and out of the ports and bays and inlets, was giving orders to the helmsman now. Captain Stewart could relax for a few minutes. Docking was a half hour ahead, and the fifteen-hour trip from Seward was almost complete.
Six stories below the bridge the rhythmic clanging of impacted seawater vibrating the steel hull of the venerable old freighter echoed through the darkened cargo holds, the crew quarters, and the engine room, giving sound and substance to their speed of nine knots through the salt water, and rattling the dark shapes of assorted cargo—including the star consignment of this trip: a huge D-8 Caterpiller bulldozer chained down carefully in one corner. The oversize blade of the heavy Cat bounced slightly against the steel floor in sympathetic harmony with the constant clanging, adding its own tattoo to the cacophony within.
Within an hour there would be light once again in the hold as burly men worked with hands in heavy gloves, their minds focused on securing slings and barking orders to unseen companions above. There would then unfold a routine but risky ballet of delicate balance involving tons of barely suspended metal. Moving within the narrowest of margins on the strength of a specially rigged crane, they would haul the cargo, and the dozer, vertically up through the opening before swinging it over to the relative security of the dock—a man-made wooden platform suspended on wooden pilings set, basically, in mud. It was a ballet scheduled for performance within the hour at the Valdez dockside before an appreciative audience of townspeople even now gathering there, almost twelve miles east of the approaching ship.
Merrill Stewart had sailed in and out of this bay since the late twenties. He knew its history. In fact, he was part of nearly one-half of its chronological history—as much as a master mariner can be in the ports he frequents. Merrill Stewart had watched Valdez through the good times and the bad, and there had been an abundance of the latter from an ecomomic point of view.
He had known before he first saw it that Valdez had been conceived in haste, grown as an afterthought, and maintained as an accident of geography through the determination of human spirit. The first shaky tents pitched at water’s edge just below the Valdez Glacier, which in 1897 and 1898 provided a direct path to the gold-fields, somehow evolved into a soggy landscape of tar paper shacks and later to a crosshatch of dirt streets and wooden buildings. By the time reformed prospectors Charles Brown and Bill Hawkins had given up on their tiny Valdez toehold to establish themselves as the pioneer merchants of Seward, Valdez was rapidly becoming a ghost town—a process which never quite reached completion. The few intrepid souls who had come there and found life by the cold waters of the bay harsh but satisfying were not the type to be stampeded to greener pastures by such passing calamities as a collapsing economic base. If the gold mining was over, they would find another way to live.
Captain Stewart paused in mid-thought, long-refined habit patterns dictating a progress check of the ship’s heading and speed, the rpm’s of the huge single propeller, and the depth showing on the fathometer, which was now at 720 feet and coming up slowly. Ahead of him, three miles to the east, was the town itself, a community established at the foot of the glacier sitting tenuously on an outwash delta of gravel and loosely packed rock debris—a community with a waterlogged foundation devoid of bedrock or security.
But then the town was hardly the product of well-thought-out land use planning. No one had thought to consider which was the best townsite from a geologic point of view because frontier communities did not have the luxury of such esoteric hairsplitting. Economics, survival, and convenience, not geologic niceties, were the arbiters. If the water table was inconveniently high in Valdez, the town would simply forgo basements. If the floor of the waterfront seemed a bit unstable, the builders would simply sink more pilings. The first tents had been pitched exactly where they were needed, on little more than a mudbank which sloped gently into the water before dropping off at a steep angle to the floor of the bay. That was where the town had begun, and that was where the Valdez which the SS Chena was now approaching would stay.
As the years progressed and Valdez painfully, slowly carved out a reason for existence as a port, it never occurred to anyone to drill down through the alluvial mud and silt beneath the town to see if anything worrisome was there, and no one regarded the shallow water table as threatening. Valdez was there because it sat in the path of the shortest distance between two points: the end of the dock and the
road to Fairbanks. With seniority as a town approaching sixty-six years, the community of Valdez was quite sure it was in the right place, if not always at the right time.
The Chena was now the dominant feature to the west of the Valdez dock, her bulk a semisilhouette in head-on profile cupped by the mountains and the water, an occasional fleck of white foam around the bow the only sign of motion. To the townspeople who enjoyed watching her approach for aesthetic as well as economic reasons, she was like a painting come to life, sailing out of the canvas of blue skies, white mountains, and choppy green water. The venerable old Liberty ship slowed her pace, her engine telegraph moving to “one quarter ahead,” the harbor pilot and the captain mentally computing the closing rates and the currents with the benefit of experience measured in decades.
John Kelsey, one of the owners of the Valdez Dock Company and the Chena’s agent in Valdez, stood on the end of the pier, the ship and the bay filling his field of vision. He had watched this process countless times. After ten minutes of careful slowing and strategic steering, the twenty-thousand-ton (forty-million-pound) vessel would end up a few feet from the dock dead in the water, ready to be hauled in the last remaining inches by six to eight stout lines made of hemp and thrown from the deck by the contingent of merchant mariners now taking their positions along the port side. Mistakes in such procedures could be very costly. Even at a few knots of closing speed, the impact of a ship the size and weight of the Chena could do incredible damage to Kelsey’s dock.
John Kelsey’s appreciation of such artistry in nautical maneuvering ran deep. He had been a Navy man, a deck officer in the Pacific theater in World War II—navigator of the attack transport USS Olmstead, and later the skipper of a submarine tender (the PC1079). Just as professional pilots never tire of watching airplanes land, professional mariners never tire of watching their ships come in, and Kelsey was no exception.
On Shaky Ground Page 3