Raven’s answer was to send another emissary from the feathered spirit world, a small ruby of light that zoomed past my head and dropped in to hover at a cluster of western columbines a few feet away. The flowers themselves seemed a small phenomenon; back in Juneau, where the snow was still two feet deep in places, the rufous hummingbird with the scarlet throat patch bobbing in and out of the delicate orange and yellow blossoms would have been hard-pressed to find a bloom. Shortly before I’d left for Lituya Bay, I had kicked through a mound of crusted snow and been amazed to find the tiny pink bells of blueberry flowers already fully formed beneath the snow; so rigid is nature’s timetable in certain matters, and so strong is the rush to life, that the flower, which is perhaps the single most critical factor in the hummingbird’s survival during Alaska’s brief spring, had somehow known to bloom while still trapped beneath a layer of solid ice. Why this small cluster of columbines had chosen to bloom so unseasonably early was a mystery too.
The hummingbird hung above the columbine, probing with its bill. As I watched, the ache of losing Luisa began to creep back into my chest. The lone hummingbird reminded me of the dozen tiny, bobbing birds that had appeared at the feeder Joel had hung outside the window beside her bed, darting and hovering until the feeder looked like a hive of scarlet bees. Some appeared not to feed at all, but only floated, wings blurring, in front of the window, looking in at Luisa as she lay curled on her side under a blanket.
In some Buddhist traditions it is believed that at the moment of death the departing soul enters the body of a nearby animal; shortly after Luisa stopped breathing, the hummingbirds flew away.
The raven on the beach behind me called once, then again, and its mate answered. I could tell by the sound of the calls that they were moving away. The hummingbird’s throat patch flashed, creating a fiery red burst among the orange and yellow flowers before the bird buzzed straight up into the canopy and disappeared, leaving in its place only the slowly nodding columbine and a hollow feeling in my chest that I tried to fill by taking a deep breath and letting it out as a sigh.
I was back out on the beach, untying the kayak and listening to the back-and-forth calls of the retreating ravens, when a half-remembered line from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” muddled through my head: The protagonist laments the death of a loved one, crying out, “Is there no Balm in Gilead?,” only to be answered by the raven’s famously dark “Nevermore.” Then I considered how the cottonwoods, with their acres of new green buds and balmy perfume, were not only an example of the miraculous transmutation of water and sunlight into the wonder of spring, but a signature of cataclysm as well; not one of the tall, straight cottonwoods was over fifty years old, yet if I walked a mere quarter of a mile inland, to the line of dark hemlocks, spruces, and cedars that provided such a sudden contrast to the green cottonwoods, I would find trees that had been alive for a thousand years. The suddenness of the transition would certainly be noticed by anyone encountering it, and of interest to any curious naturalist, but to anyone familiar with the history of Lituya Bay, it would be a clear—and frightening—reminder of one of the most staggering geological incidents of the twentieth century.
Chapter 9
Lituya Bay Is shaped like a T, with the tidal entrance at the bottom and Cenotaph Island halfway up the vertical stem. At the top of the T, to the right, is Crillon Inlet, which trends southeast for approximately a mile and a half. Gilbert Inlet runs to the left and terminates at the face of Lituya Glacier, which flows down the slopes of 12,700-foot Mount Crillon. Beyond Lituya Glacier lies Desolation Valley, which abuts Fairweather Glacier twelve miles farther north. Draw a line across Fairweather Glacier, down the middle of Desolation Valley, and along the Lituya T and you have mapped a small portion of the Fairweather Fault, where a great slab of the earth’s rocky skin known as the North American Plate (which underlies all of North America, Greenland, and parts of Siberia) grinds up against its eponymous counterpart, the Pacific Plate. The Fairweather Fault runs southeast for more than a hundred miles from up near Yakutat to Cape Spencer, where it links into a jagged system of cracks and fractures that reaches all the way through British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and into California. The surfaces of the fault are vertical and the motion of the tectonic plates is horizontal, which in turn means that the pressure that inevitably builds up between the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate as the two circle each other like a pair of grappling sumo wrestlers must sooner or later be released in the form of a jarring earthquake. When Howard Ulrich, a fisherman from the village of Pelican, seventy miles to the south, entered Lituya Bay on the evening of July 9, 1958, aboard his thirty-eight-foot wooden troller, the Edrie, he had no idea the Fairweather Fault was about to strike.
It was eight P.M. and the weather was clear. Ulrich had crossed the bar at the end of the flood with no problem. The sea outside was glassy, with a low swell rolling in from the west. There was no wind, and Ulrich’s eight-year-old son, Howard Jr.—or Sonny, as he preferred to be called—was ready to help anchor the Edrie. Sonny was the spitting image of his dad; in an old photograph both wear plaid work shirts, heavy boots, and denim pants. The father stands with one hand on his son’s shoulder, the boy smiling straight into the lens. Both are built square across the shoulders, like they were made to hold their ground.
All up and down the coast, mariners were making the most of the settled weather. A fleet of trollers was working the tide rips and rocks near Cape Spencer. A few had taken advantage of the calm seas to run fifty miles offshore to the Fairweather Grounds, where a series of seamounts were known to provide good fishing when good weather allowed. The crews of fish-buying scows in small shelters like Thistle Cove and Dixon Harbor, north of Cape Spencer, were sitting on deck in the sun, waiting for the salmon boats to come in for the evening, and a hundred miles north, up in Yakutat, the postmaster, John Williams, and his wife, Dora, had decided the best way to spend the beautiful evening was picking berries and having a picnic with friends on Khantaak Island, just offshore from the town.
After crossing the bar, Ulrich turned to starboard and made for a small bight about a mile inside the bay on the eastern shore. From where he dropped anchor, he could not see the entrance, so he was unaware, as he and Sonny cooked dinner and prepared to turn in for the night, that a second boat, the Sunmore, owned and operated by a young couple named Orville and Mickey Wagner, had come in and anchored on the opposite side of the entrance. At nine P.M. a third boat, the Badger, with Bill and Vivian Swanson on board, bucked the start of the ebb tide to get in.
The Swansons first thought to anchor near Cenotaph Island, and at the sound of their engine Sonny rolled out of his bunk and went up into the wheelhouse to see who it was. The trollers who work the offshore grounds and coastline near Lituya Bay are a close-knit community and keep tabs on each other’s comings and goings. After watching for a bit, Sonny went back below to tell his dozing father who their companions were.
After Sonny went below, the Swansons decided against anchoring near Cenotaph Island and turned around to go back and anchor near the Wagners, but not before noticing that the colony of black-legged kittiwakes that nest on the steep southern side of the island seemed unusually loud and nervous. People up in Yakutat also later reported that the gulls and terns were acting strange, constantly taking flight and circling, settling down, and lifting off again amid a cacophony of alarm calls.
By ten P.M., Lituya Bay was bathed in the lingering twilight of a summer sunset, and the crews of the Sunmore, the Badger, and the Edrie had settled in for the evening. Howard and Sonny Ulrich were already asleep. On the Badger, the Swansons were in their bunks. Up in Yakutat, Postmaster Williams and his wife decided it was time to head for home, so they launched their skiff and pulled away from Khantaak Island after saying goodbye to their friends.
At ten sixteen, an earthquake of almost unimaginable intensity struck. A deep rumbling welled up from underground, and the waters of the bay began churning and tossing so wildl
y that Bill Swanson tumbled out of his bunk. The Edrie rolled so hard that Howard Ulrich leaped out of bed and ran to the wheelhouse, thinking the anchor had come loose and the boat was being sucked across the bar by the ebb. Finding the boat still in the same place, but leaping and tugging at its anchor chain, he hurried Sonny up on deck, where they stood transfixed by what they saw. The peaks at the back of the fjord were, in Ulrich’s word, “heaving.”
“Have you ever seen a 15,000-foot mountain twist and shake and dance?” he later asked a writer for Alaska Sportsman magazine. The mountains looked as if they were suffering “unbearable internal tortures.”
It was an apt description. Avalanches of rock and snow were breaking loose all across the faces of the mountains, raising clouds of dust that made the peaks and faces appear to be smoking. A thousand miles away at the University of Washington in Seattle, the needle was knocked off the seismograph. For four long minutes the west side of the Fairweather Fault lurched, slid, and ground northwest, dragging the entire 115 miles of coastline between Cape Spencer and Yakutat along the ragged edge of the North American continent. The Fairweather Range responded with a series of violent leaps and jerks.
The noise was frightful. On the Badger, Bill Swanson scrambled up into the wheelhouse and looked toward the head of the bay, where the sound was coming from. “The mountains were shaking something awful,” he later said, “but what I noticed mostly was . . . Lituya Glacier.
“I know you can’t ordinarily see that glacier from where I was anchored, and people shake their heads when I tell them what I saw that night, but I can’t help it if they don’t believe me. I know the glacier is hidden by the point [of Gilbert Inlet], but I know what I saw that night, too.
“The glacier had risen in the air and moved forward so it was in sight. It must have risen several hundred feet. I don’t mean it was just hanging in the air. It seemed to be solid, but it was jumping and shaking like crazy. Big chunks of ice were falling off the face of it and down into the water. That was six miles away and they still looked like big chunks. They came off the glacier like a big load of rocks spilling out of a dump truck.”
Thirteen hundred feet of the glacier’s face sheared off. But as the earthquake continued, things got even worse. Between a minute and two and a half minutes into the earthquake, the entire flank of a 5,000-foot peak on the northeast side of Gilbert Inlet sheared off, releasing a crumbling slab of rock 300 feet thick, 2,300 feet wide, and 3,000 feet across. Approximately forty million cubic yards of stone, ice, and soil weighing an estimated ninety million tons fell more than half a mile down the vertical face of the peak into Gilbert Inlet.
“During all this,” said Howard Ulrich, “I was literally petrified, rooted to the deck. It was not fright, but a kind of stunned amazement. I do not think I thought of it as something that was going to affect me.”
The next thing he saw, as he described it a few years later, was “like an atomic explosion,” and “after this big flash came a huge wave. It looked like just a big wall of water.”
Swanson used the same words, saying that after the glacier dropped back out of sight, there was “a big wall of water coming over the point.”
“Big” hardly begins to describe it. The “point” he spoke of was the shoulder of an unnamed 3,400-foot mountain that forms the western side of Gilbert Inlet. The wave was over 1,700 feet high.
“To call the scene awe-inspiring is a puny attempt to describe what was happening,” Ulrich later remembered. “As far as I am concerned, suitable words do not exist.”
While the Swansons and the Ulrichs stood transfixed on the decks of their boats and watched the wave crash over the mountain, hell was breaking loose all the way from Yakutat down to Cape Spencer. Postmaster Williams and his wife, Dora, watched in horror as the end of Khantaak Island, where their friends were still picking berries, lurched twenty feet into the air, then dropped beneath the surface of the boiling water.
A huge water tank at the Yakutat cannery collapsed, destroying two wharves. South of Lituya Bay, near Cape Spencer, the entire fleet of trollers was jolted by shock after shock emanating from the grinding fault line. A woman was heard wailing into a radio, “My god, how much more can our boat stand?” At Point Astrolabe, a crewman on the troller Cameo shouted, “We just saw a whole mountain come down!”
For 150 miles along the coast, one of the bulkiest mountain ranges in the world was shaking and heaving, collapsing in a writhing cloud of dust that turned orange and red in the fading twilight. A twenty-foot wave tore a fish-buying scow loose from its moorings in Dixon Harbor amid geysers of water that shot hundreds of feet in the air. The quake was felt 500 miles away in Anchorage. A thousand miles south in Seattle, musicians in a floating orchestra pit were knocked from their chairs by a tremor. But Ulrich, who could see no other boats from his anchorage, later admitted (with remarkable understatement) that despite the presence of Sonny he felt “very much alone” as he watched the giant wave crest over the point, then roar across the head of the bay and bounce off the southern shore before it began surging toward Cenotaph Island,
The Ulrichs and the Swansons all stood watching as the wave ripped the timber off the ridge above Gilbert Inlet to a height of 1,720 feet with a force that was later calculated at twenty-five million pounds per square foot, which was sufficient to instantly strip all the bark off the tumbling tree trunks and tear away their branches. Then it rebounded to the eastern shore below Crillon Inlet, flaying the mountainside up to 500 feet above sea level; it struck so hard that every tree, shrub, tuft of grass, and bit of vegetation was wiped away down to naked bedrock. It was only after the wave lashed over 320-foot-high Cenotaph Island and tore a swath through its middle that Ulrich came to his senses. Seeing the wave rolling down the eastern shore toward them, he said, “I began to move and I moved fast.”
According to Sonny, the first thing Ulrich did was throw a life jacket on his boy and say, “Start praying.” Then he fired up the Edrie’s engine and engaged the hydraulics to get the anchor up. Because waves break hardest near shore, his best hope of surviving was to head for deep water in the middle of the bay, where the Edrie might have some slim chance of being able to ride up and over the wave.
Neither he nor the Swansons had time to think about it, but the geology and form of Lituya Bay were working in their favor. Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology later modeled a highly sophisticated miniature reproduction of the bay and the wave to understand exactly what had happened, building on work performed by the U.S. Geological Service’s Don Miller, who was the first scientist on the scene after the cataclysm occurred. What they discovered was that a high-speed landslide (such as happens when ninety million tons of rock fall a vertical half mile) impacts the water so hard that the water moves away so quickly that it cannot flow back behind the landslide. This in turn creates an immense air cavity, which displaces even more water than the landslide itself, and the combination of the two forces is sufficient to create a wave of such size and force that in mass and energy it becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In Lituya Bay this meant the wave initially surged—or “blew”—more than half a kilometer high.
As the wave ricocheted back and forth between the fjord’s steep walls, its unimaginable energy dissipated relatively quickly; the wall of water was “only” 500 feet high when it surged up the shore below Crillon Inlet, and it continued to drop as it curved back toward Cenotaph Island. Below the crossbar of the T, the topography around Lituya Bay loses altitude quickly, dropping from 3,000 feet at the peaks of the mountains on the seaward sides of both inlets, then down to a thousand or so feet opposite Cenotaph Island. Beyond Cenotaph, the terrain flattens quickly into low hills that slope into flats along the shore.
As the wave burst free of its containment between the steep rear walls of the fjord, it spread out and dropped rapidly. What Ulrich saw speeding toward him from behind Cenotaph Island as he desperately tried to raise the anchor was a solid wall of water that Miller l
ater calculated to be 100 feet high, traveling at approximately 130 miles an hour.
And the anchor would not budge. With the engine roaring and the hydraulics squealing, Ulrich tried again and again to lift it, but it would not come. “Either the earthquake had wrapped the chain around a boulder on the bottom,” he said later, “or a crevice had opened and swallowed the anchor.”
Thinking quickly, he let the anchor chain run, paying out all that was left on the winch drum in order to gain some maneuverability with the engine and rudder. He hoped that maybe—just maybe—the anchor would hold and keep the Edrie from being thrown ashore. He gunned the engine and turned to meet the wave.
On the Badger the Swansons were still at anchor, in their nightclothes, watching the wave roll toward them. Bill looked away from the wave just long enough to see the Sunmore running at full speed for the entrance.
The wave was black and appeared to be nearly vertical. In its rush along the shore it had torn thousands of trees out by their roots, and these were being rolled, tumbled, and pitched like so many great spears across its face. It is impossible to know which boat was struck first, but Swanson said that no sooner had he thrown a last look at the fleeing Sunmore than the Badger was snatched up, lifted high into the air, and thrown backward, completely across the spit.
“We were way up over the trees,” he said, “and I looked down on rocks as big as an ordinary house as we crossed the spit. We were way up above them. It felt like we were in a tin can and somebody was shaking it.”
Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaskan Wilderness, a Journey Into the Human Heart Page 8
