Cascadia

by H W Buzz Bernard

  Rob had never quite reconciled the fact that despite Oregon’s plethora of natural wonders—Crater Lake, Mount Hood, Multnomah Falls, the Oregon Dunes—the cheese factory drew more visitors per year than any other attraction. That’s not to say he and his family hadn’t themselves been significant contributors. Virtually every jaunt to the coast had eventually brought them to the place where such delicacies as Tillamook Mudslide ice cream—the name suddenly seemed eerily prescient—Marionberry Pie fudge, or Tillamook Cheesesteak sandwiches beckoned. Now such innocent pleasures seemed suddenly and disastrously part of a distant past, a once-upon-a-time Camelot that might never be reclaimed.

  Rob continued southward toward the city of Tillamook. He noted that the 101 bridge over the Wilson River had been badly damaged and rendered unusable. A short distance on, two more bridges, over sloughs, had been washed out.

  Tillamook itself, except for the western end of town, had been largely spared by the tsunami. But, similar to the previous destruction he and Tim had witnessed, fires and devastated infrastructure gave mute testimony to the epic earthquake. Rob dropped to a lower altitude and buzzed the city.

  “Look at that,” he said to Tim, and pointed.

  Below them, an entire block of buildings burned with impunity. Black smoke billowed skyward, blending into the low, gray overcast that draped like a death shroud over the devastated landscape. Rob could see no emergency crews battling the flames. He guessed the streets had been rendered impassible, or perhaps shattered water lines had made firefighting impossible. How do you plan for contingencies such as that?

  Rob rolled the plane to the right, made a U-turn, gained some altitude, and headed back toward Manzanita, Cannon Beach, and Seaside.

  “Try Mom on the cell again,” he said to Tim.

  Tim removed his headset and punched in Deb’s number on his phone.

  Rob tried Seattle Center once more, but to no avail.

  Tim turned toward his dad and, cell phone to his ear, yelled, “It just rings busy.”

  Rob motioned for him to put the headset back on.

  “What’s going on?” Tim asked. “Why can’t I get through?”

  “You’re lucky to even get a connection. Most cell towers are down or have been knocked out of alignment. Fiber optic cables have been snapped. Even if you manage to establish a link, like you just did, the circuits are totally overwhelmed, and probably will be for weeks.”

  “This is really bad isn’t it, Dad?” Deepening concern registered in his voice.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid so.”

  As the plane purred northward, Rob tried to recall the statistics he’d seen relative to the number of people likely to be affected when Cascadia ruptured. They were mind numbing, and prepared in anticipation of a nine-point-zero quake, not a nine-point-three.

  The combined metro population of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland is close to eight million. Roughly another three million live in smaller towns and cities west of the Cascades. That’s a total of eleven million, give or take—the population of Ohio, someone had once pointed out—most of whom will be without electricity, gas, and communications for weeks. That’s assuming they still have homes. Thousands won’t.

  And what about emergency services, water, and food? How, for instance, do you get to grocery stores if the roads are wrecked? More to the point, how do you get supplies to the grocery stores themselves?

  Tim continued to study the sprawl of destruction below. He looked over at his dad. “So is this like Hurricane Sandy?”

  “No. Much worse. Just think about the area involved. Here, it’s the entire Pacific Coast from Vancouver Island to northern California. That’s six hundred miles. Sandy clobbered mainly Long Island and New Jersey, a stretch of what, maybe a hundred miles? And most of the damage there was confined to the immediate coasts. Here, quake damage will extend far inland. I’m sure the Willamette Valley and Puget Sound took a violent hit. We’ll check it out later.”

  Tim, clearly stunned by the enormity of the disaster, merely nodded.

  “Grab a notepad out of the map pocket,” Rob said. “We’ll make a record of what we see as we head back up the coast. Sooner or later we’ll be able to talk to someone.”

  Tim retrieved the notepad, then swiveled his head, searching the sky around the aircraft. “Funny we haven’t seen any other airplanes.”

  “Nobody along the coast is going to be taking off now. And earlier, it wasn’t the kind of bright, sunny morning that would have enticed a lot of private pilots.”

  “How about helicopters?”

  “I think the Coast Guard in Astoria has some Jayhawks, but I doubt their facility fared well.”

  “News choppers?”

  “The problem there is getting crews to the choppers. Sundays, especially holiday Sundays, can be pretty slow news days, so a lot of folks have the day off. And barring that, there’s the challenge of negotiating streets littered with debris, intersections without traffic signals, and pancaked overpasses.”

  “That TV chick in Manzanita probably got some great footage.”

  “Yeah, if it didn’t cost her her life.”

  They flew back over Nehalem Bay and Manzanita. The initial tsunami surge appeared to have taken out most of Manzanita except the northern residential area. The assembly areas seemed to have been spared, though the one on the golf course stood as an island, surrounded by water. The rush of the ocean had fallen short of 101, which ran along higher ground above the town, but at least one slide on Neahkahnie Mountain had severed the highway.

  Rob circled back over the village and dropped to a lower altitude. He passed above the KGW-TV satellite truck which obviously had survived, but appeared abandoned. He didn’t spot Amanda or her cameraman. Not a good sign. If they hadn’t heeded his warning, and had gone to the beach to record the tsunami’s arrival, they had been killed.

  Rob turned north again and climbed, following 101 around the western edge of Neahkahnie Mountain where the topography consisted of steep cliffs plunging to the ocean. A short distance north of Manzanita, in Oswald West State Park, the highway bridge over Necarney Creek sat crumpled in the stream below. A few minutes later, just south of the tiny village of Arch Cape, he discovered a quarter-mile-long highway tunnel had collapsed.

  “How are they ever gonna get help in here?” Tim asked.

  “Helicopters, but it’ll take several days to marshal an organized response. Heavier supplies will probably have to be airlifted in by planes like C-130s. They only need a couple of thousand feet to land and take off.”

  “C-130s?”

  “Four-engined turboprop planes. You remember when we saw the Blue Angels, they had a plane called ‘Fat Albert’ that carried all their stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was a C-130.”

  “Any around here?”

  “I don’t think so. I seem to recall the Air Guard has some in Idaho or California, but I don’t know exactly where. Anyhow, it’s going to take a while to get relief plans cranked up, so large-scale assistance isn’t going to be arriving here any time soon.”

  He lowered the Skylane’s nose and slowed the aircraft as they approached Cannon Beach.

  Manzanita

  “OUR DAUGHTER is beautiful,” Alex whispered. “Tall, smart, funny . . .” Her voice trailed off. Shock? Pain? A foot already in heaven?

  Shack clung to her hand with vise-grip tenacity, listening to her fading words, but hearing more the thunderous forte of their last moments on Earth. Don’t leave, don’t leave, don’t leave, he repeated over and over to himself. He cursed himself for his lack of bravery. As a fighter pilot on a strafing or bombing run, he’d never feared for his life, always knew he could fight back or find a way out.

  Now he had become a silent-movie damsel in distress, tied to the tracks as a locomotive hurtled do
wn the rails. He didn’t want to die. Didn’t want to run. Wanted to believe in miracles.

  A cascade of water smashed into the house, and he knew there were no miracles.

  The ocean, cold, numbing, powerful, rose with lightning swiftness to entomb him and Alex in a watery sarcophagus.

  In a final gesture of love, or more likely desperation, they pressed their lips together as though they might find a few more precious seconds of life in each other’s lungs. But the ocean’s onslaught forced them apart, and they released their souls.

  For Shack, the blackness and pain came swiftly, almost mercifully—a quick passage from one world to whatever lay beyond. Peace, it seemed, a strange incongruity. He found himself in a still meadow, golden in daffodils and sunlight, filled with the melodies of songbirds. He held hands with Alex and Skylar as they strolled through the field, lush with flowers and soft, green grass, an Arcadia of opportunities missed.

  The quiet laughter of the two women joined with the pianissimo twittering of the birds, filling the air with an intimacy and tranquility Shack had never known. Alex kissed him on the cheek. Skylar leaned her head against his shoulder and murmured, Daddy.

  Paradise found, but only for a gossamer moment. In a fleeting instant it vanished, crushed in darkness and drowned in a tsunami of his own tears. Shack knew what lay beyond. The eternal void of a life squandered.

  Cannon Beach

  JONATHAN FOUGHT through his emotional agony, righted himself, and frantically searched the swirling waters for Zurry. The glut of wreckage and dreck that spun and eddied on the surface of the surge made spotting the dog, his huge size notwithstanding, virtually impossible.

  Guilt, like a twelve-ton weight, descended upon Jonathan with crushing force. The loss of his long-time companion could be laid directly at his feet. He’d asked too much of Zurry, burdening him with a load he had no hope of bearing. He should have just let the damn treasure go, chalked it up to another defeat in life, and played out his time on Earth in the company of his great, furry friend. They wouldn’t have been rich in a monetary sense, but their cups would have overflowed with love.

  Jonathan blinked back tears. But then, in the water, he spotted something. He squinted, trying to get a clearer view. Yes, he was certain: Zurry’s great snout, snorkeling through the surge like a parti-colored seal. He seemed caught in a swift current about fifty yards away where the tsunami swarmed over the lower slopes of Haystack Hill.

  In a blur of motion, Jonathan stripped off his boots, jacket, and pants. He patted his hip to make sure his hunting knife remained in its sheath, then plunged into the flood. The icy water stunned him, but he forced himself to overcome the almost paralyzing shock by flailing his arms and kicking his legs fiercely, propelling himself toward Zurry.

  Driven by adrenaline, he closed the gap between himself and his friend. But a renewed rush of water caught Zurry and bore him away. Once more, his head disappeared beneath the turbulent surface.

  Jonathan, terrified the burst of adrenaline would wear off and leave him as nothing more than human driftwood, redoubled his efforts to overtake Zurry. He torpedoed deep into the frigid surge and, using dead reckoning, knifed through the debris-laden water in pursuit of his dog. He lost track of time underwater, but his lungs, on the verge of exploding, told him the moment to surface had come.

  He burst into the air like a breaching whale, his mouth wide, gasping for oxygen. The flotsam and jetsam of what had once been Cannon Beach swirled around him as if he were imprisoned in a filthy snow globe.

  “Zurry,” he screamed, before ingesting a mouthful of salt water. He spat it out, then spun in place, searching for any sign of the dog. Nothing. He plunged deep once more, determined to find his friend. Or die trying.

  Again he surfaced, no longer certain if he were even heading in the right direction. Had he moved closer to or farther away from where he’d last spotted Zurry?

  “Damn it to hell,” he sputtered in frustration.

  He made a quick 360-degree turn, thought he saw something about ten yards behind him, and stroked toward it.

  Zurry, his eyes wide with fear, turned to stare at his master. Just as Jonathan reached him, the dog snapped his mouth shut and sank out of sight.

  Jonathan yanked his knife from its sheath and dove after him. The visibility in the black water hovered near zero, but Jonathan caught just a glimpse of one of the canvas bags tied to Zurry and grabbed it. Between the weight of the treasure and Zurry, and his own bulk, they rocketed toward the bottom of the sea, wherever that might be now, like an iron anchor.

  Jonathan, using touch more than sight as a guide, swiped his knife at the ropes securing the canvas sacks to Zurry. But it would take more than blind swipes to unfetter his friend, he realized, and grasped the ropes with his free hand. As they continued their plunge through the depths, he sawed desperately at the bindings with his knife.

  At last the bags released. The treasure—his retirement, the object of a decade-long search, the stuff of legends—disappeared into the murky waters to become a legend once more. Jonathan gave Zurry a mighty upward shove and together they broke the surface.

  They found themselves only a short distance from the terminus of the tsunami’s run and paddled, both near exhaustion, toward a hillside thick with evergreens and huckleberries.

  Zurry beside him, Jonathan crawled on all fours away from the water’s edge. The tsunami likely had reached its maximum run-up and would retreat, but from what Jonathan understood, additional surges would follow.

  Finally, they sat, side by side, soaking wet, in a small clearing on the hill, and surveyed the forever-altered coast of northern Oregon, a once and future kingdom of natural beauty.

  Jonathan draped his arm over Zurry’s shoulders. “Just a boy and his dog,” he said softly. “Well, old man and his dog,” he corrected.

  Zurry licked Jonathan’s cheek, plopped onto his stomach, closed his eyes, and within a matter of seconds settled into a rhythmic snoring.

  Chapter Twenty

  Airborne

  Airborne Over Cannon Beach

  Sunday, July 5

  ROB DROPPED THE Skylane to a few hundred feet above the surface over Cannon Beach and skimmed over what used to be the seashore, now submerged. The town itself had largely ceased to exist. It appeared as if a second large wave had just thundered through the community.

  The Pacific Ocean had claimed most of the inhabited areas of the town and covered Highway 101 in several spots. Only Haystack Hill had escaped the flood and now sat like a forested Noah’s Ark as seawater sloshed around its base on three sides.

  Perhaps the term “Atlantis” could have been used to describe Cannon Beach, at least what was left of it, but that seemed far too benign a portrait. What sat beneath Rob could be better labeled a garbage slough. Building tops poking from the water stood as shattered sentinels in a churning sludge composed of every sort of detritus imaginable: vehicles, bodies, oil, gasoline, roofs, houses, bathtubs, lumber, trees, signs, boxes, furniture, small boats, beach umbrellas, surfboards, and even a horse, still saddled, swimming mightily through the viscous mire.

  Rob, feeling slightly ill, turned his head away and looked westward, over the ocean. The Pacific. The name means peaceful. He shook his head at the irony. Goaded by a geologic clash far below its surface, the “peaceful” ocean had attacked along a six-hundred-mile front. The assault would relegate Hurricane Katrina and its appalling New Orleans’s death toll to a footnote in the history of U. S. natural disasters. The death toll along the Oregon and Washington coasts would be fearsome.

  A holiday weekend. Jam-packed seaside communities. Thousands of tourists unfamiliar with evacuation procedures and gathering points. He wondered, callously he knew, if there were even enough body bags in the state to handle the dead. A rush of bile from his churning stomach surged into his throat, but he choked it
back, trying to swallow with it the rising tide of his emotions.

  He glanced at Tim who sat silently in the Skylane’s passenger seat, staring at his feet.

  “Better make some notes, son,” Rob said over the interphone.

  Tim looked up. Tears filled his eyes.

  “That’s okay,” Rob said. “Never mind. I think we’ll remember this.”

  Tim nodded and turned away.

  The tsunami inundation would eventually recede, of course. Dry land would re-emerge. The Pacific would, for the most part, become bucolic again. But the North Coast of Oregon would be forever altered, both its landscape and its people.

  Feeling as if a dagger had been driven deep into his soul, Rob continued to fly northward, toward Seaside and Astoria. He feared what he would find.

  Seaside

  A FEW MINUTES’ flying time brought the Skylane to Seaside and the conjoined town of Gearhart. Seaside, long a favorite destination of vacationing Oregonians, had been the site of saltworks for the Lewis and Clark Expedition over two centuries ago. Rob recalled visiting the city as a boy in the 1980s: a fun place for kids, its streets lined with arcades, t-shirt shops, and salt-water taffy vendors. Now there were no streets or buildings visible, only the ocean.

  The scenes here were no different from what Tim and he had seen in Cannon Beach—utter devastation. It seemed what the earthquake hadn’t claimed, the tsunami had. Even 101 sat underwater, though the ocean flood had begun to ebb.

  Rob climbed and circled the two towns. People at the assembly points, where the truncated coastal plain abutted the foothills of the Coast Range, waved as he flew over. Searing acid again surged into his esophagus as he realized there seemed to be almost as many bodies floating in the water as there were standing in the assembly areas.