Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  Doug awoke on the outskirts of Seattle with the sun slowly poking through the low-hanging clouds to the east. They rolled past downtown Seattle and made the turnoff to the university district, and within minutes he was walking back into the familiar confines of the seismology lab, feeling defeated on too many fronts to count.

  Sanjay greeted him at the door with the look of an exhausted mad scientist, his hair uncombed and wild as he hugged his boss and accepted the order to go home and get some sleep.

  When he was alone, Doug tried to locate Jennifer, leaving messages everywhere in vain. He settled into a chair in front of the array of seismic drums, a pencil gyrating between his fingers as he watched the needles faithfully recording the continuous microtremors with old-fashioned ink lines across the curved paper surface. The adjacent computer screens showed even more detail, as the Cascadia Subduction Zone continued to shake off its restraints, moving inexorably toward what had to be the ultimate eruption.

  It was, he thought, a death watch.

  CASCADIA ISLAND

  The remains of his office had pancaked into the floors below, but it was still reachable, and Mick was gambling it would be worth the climb.

  He was all alone now, the cold wind howling in his ears as he climbed around the jagged, broken rebar with a large flashlight and carefully scaled the disastrous pile of rubble that twenty-four hours before had been one of the world’s most beautiful new hotels. Nothing looked familiar when he reached the top, but there were still enough sections of the floor intact so he could make his way to what had been the entrance to his office suite.

  Mick stopped for a few seconds and sat on a cold, wet piece of concrete slab, planning his next moves. One slip and he could break a leg or worse, with no one left on the island to rescue him. But he had no choice. The office procedure he’d instituted many years ago of making a sequential copy of virtually every piece of paper that crossed his desk had long since been reduced to the ones and zeros of digital scanning, the voluminous resulting files stored on removable hard drives with incredible capacity. It was a habit only he and Sherry and one secretary in each office knew about, and the resulting pristine record had already helped him win two lawsuits.

  The built-in safe had been behind a panel in the wall, hidden behind the bookcase across from his desk, but there was little to mark where things had been. The roof had cascaded onto the furniture below, crushing everything, and he played the powerful beam of light around carefully, looking for something to triangulate on. His steps had been carefully placed, but one teetering piece of broken ceiling too many shifted beneath his foot and for a moment he was grabbing air, twisting and frantically trying to avoid a headlong plunge to a black abyss of tangled steel and concrete below.

  The palm of his hand found something to grab just in time, and he rebalanced himself with a death grip on the piece of protruding metal, realizing with a start that the lifesaving shard had hours before been part of the wall behind his desk.

  Okay, then the bookcase is over there!

  Was over there, he corrected himself.

  Carefully Mick made his way across the angry tangle of debris, kicking aside the remains of a prized bronze sculpture of a wild mustang, the twenty-thousand-dollar purchase now jagged junk waiting to impale the unwary.

  There was a slab of splintered, finished wood ahead and a jumble of books below, and he walked the flashlight to one side, seeing a glint of steel beneath a piece of concrete from the roof.

  Getting to his knees to see beneath the concrete was a delicate and painful maneuver, but the reward was immediate: the undamaged inner shell of the steel safe was there, its door facedown in the rubble.

  Mick pushed at the concrete, realizing with a sinking feeling that it probably weighed several hundred pounds. He tried bracing his back against another large, angled slab and pushing with his leg muscles, but the massive chunk barely moved. In a sustained battle between muscle and the inertia of concrete and steel, the latter would win.

  He began looking for something stout to use as a lever, trying and breaking the shaft of a brass hat rack before finding a steel tube that might be stout enough. He carefully wedged the end of it beneath the concrete, calculating which way he needed to push it before checking his own footing and starting the process of transferring every ounce of energy he had into sending the chunk of concrete over the edge.

  There was an eternity of pulling, with pain rippling through his arms and sweat pouring into his eyes, despite the freezing windchill. He was coming to the end of his endurance. But suddenly, there was a small movement, then more, and he pulled harder, fearing the consequences if the metal rod broke and snapped back in his face.

  It held, and the slab slid over the edge, dragging the steel bar along with it, thundering into the debris below and dislodging a small cascade of unseen items in the dark.

  When everything had quieted, Mick picked up the flashlight again, his hands shaking with the effects of his exertion, the beam revealing the welcome sight of his safe, now free of its restraints.

  He crawled down to it, turned it upright, and dialed in the combination, feeling as much as hearing the precision-made tumblers clicking into place. The door swung open easily, revealing a small counter with a number that confirmed he had been the last person to open the safe.

  And inside was exactly what he needed to find. There was no way Diane Lacombe could have known.

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEISMOLOGY LAB

  The jumbled, troubled dream Doug had been battling ended and he awoke abruptly. The seismograph drums were still right in front of him, but something had changed. His eyes focused and he froze, almost afraid to breathe lest any movement alter the flat line he was seeing at the end of the needles.

  Apparently, the microquakes had stopped cold.

  No squiggles.

  Nothing!

  He glanced at the adjacent drums and saw the same flat-line reading.

  Gingerly, he reached for the laptop keyboard and triggered a circuit check. The quick-acting program flashed around the seismic array of western Washington and reported everything normal.

  Doug felt his heart accelerating. In several great quakes around the planet in previous years, the onset of the main quake had been preceded by an eerie seismic quiet, sometimes lasting hours. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck as if an electrical current was pulsing through his brain, trying to deny that he might be seeing the curtain coming up—or down—on the big one.

  But after nearly a minute, he dared to take a breath, looking around in vain for someone to corroborate what he was seeing.

  The drums recording the deeper areas of the subduction zone beneath Seattle were located off to one side in the lab, and their needles were still moving back and forth as normal, telling of background seismic activity forty to fifty miles down.

  But what he had named the Quilieute Quiet Zone—the trigger point—was once more living up to its name.

  Doug sat back, mind racing, eyes glued to the needles, a pencil once again gyrating at a frantic pace in his right hand as he forced himself to keep breathing normally. He reached for the intercom to call the team back in from an adjoining room where they were trying to grab some rest.

  “Either it’s about to happen,” he told a sleepy Sanjay, “or we stopped it. Not that I can dare to really believe it worked.”

  “It’s possible. And it could also be the calm before the break. I’ll be right there.”

  Two hours passed, then four. The rhythmic tremors beneath Mt. Rainier became anemic and began to decline in strength.

  The media caught wind of the sudden change. No one had yet relayed the story of how a decommissioned floating bridge had come to be jammed against a breakwater on Cascadia Island, or how that might relate to the sudden reversal of the USGS earthquake warning, but the fact that something had changed was altering the national story of the Pacific Northwest’s coastal evacuation.

  By late afternoon, the TV microwave trucks th
at had been chronicling the exodus from coastal communities were once again lining the street outside the lab, their cameramen poking their lenses over the shoulders of the scientists to record the continuous seismographic signature of a subduction zone going back to sleep. In interview after interview Doug stressed all the right caveats and warnings, but as the hours passed, he slowly began to hope.

  Chapter 43

  UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT, SAN FRANCISCO, SIX MONTHS LATER

  The panel of impeccably dressed senior lawyers representing the Chapter 11 filing of Cascadia Island Resorts, Incorporated, had spent the previous ten minutes arranging a stack of neatly prepared notebooks on the counsel table. The chairman of the corporation, Mick Walker, had been in the hallway the entire time talking to reporters, but now he, too, entered the ornate courtroom and walked to the counsel table exuding confidence and control.

  “Everything go okay out there, Mick?” Dane Henry, his lead attorney asked.

  Mick nodded and smiled. “They just can’t get their arms around someone being honest, I guess.”

  “You’ve made all the tabloids, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Most of it is leering, but essentially favorable.”

  “How can it be favorable, Dane? I’m guilty of statutory rape.”

  “Yes, but you openly admitted it and brought it yourself to the D.A. I’m not a criminal defense guy, but I agree you’re going to, at worst, get probation and community service.”

  “It’s nothing to gloat over. It was a stupid mistake.”

  The court clerk had entered again and was taking her position to call the court to order.

  “How is she, Mick?”

  “Not good. She’s still being held for psychiatric observation.”

  “Did you really pay for her criminal defense?”

  He nodded. “Against some fifteen felony counts? Not even Ralph Lacombe could handle that. Chadwick and Noble and their insurance company want her head on a pike.”

  But the worst of it, Mick thought, was the stunned loss of a lifelong friendship which had predictably accompanied the destruction of Ralph’s beloved daughter. And there was no way Mick Walker could excuse himself from his own culpability. She may have been a little girl with a crush, but he should have seen it. Physically loving her had been nothing less than a gross violation of trust.

  “All rise!” the clerk called, continuing with the usual litany preceding the arrival of a member of the federal judiciary.

  Dane put a hand on Mick’s shoulder, speaking almost directly in his ear.

  “Are you ready for the collective gasp we’re going to hear?”

  “Yes. Almost looking forward to it.”

  The opening rituals of calling the case and five minutes of routine matters before the court gave way at last to Dane Henry standing and waiting for the judge to acknowledge him.

  “Mr. Henry?” the judge said.

  “Your honor, may it please the court, the petitioner at this time wishes to file a supplementary declaration changing this action from one under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code, to a Chapter 7 liquidation.”

  “Continue.”

  “Your honor, Cascadia Resorts has reached a settlement in principle with Universal Underwriters, the insurance carrier for Chadwick and Noble. Under that agreement, Chadwick and Noble, because of the liability created by the actions of their employees, and one employee in particular, has agreed to take on all outstanding liabilities of Cascadia Island Resorts, Incorporated, agreed to refund on a dollar-for-dollar basis the capital of the corporation in return for assignment of the lease to Cascadia Island, and agreed to accept assignment in full of all liability to any third parties and former Cascadia employees as a result of the brief, catastrophic operation of the resort. In addition, they have agreed to remove all debris and other man-made items from the island and return it within five years to the status of a protected bird sanctuary.”

  The judge shook his head slightly. “I must say, Mr. Henry, this is a rather stunning turn of events. The court had the impression your client was fighting hard to rebuild.”

  “Yes, your honor, we were. But the reality is that Cascadia Island is unsafe, a reality Chadwick and Noble essentially knew and failed to communicate, and compensating all the damages still doesn’t make the island safe. We will perhaps never know if the presence of Mr. Walker’s wave-generating structure seismically triggered the swarm of earthquakes that led to the evacuation of the Washington and Oregon coasts that night, nor are we likely to ever know whether a few heroic actions authorized by Mr. Walker were the factor that ultimately prevented the massive, threatened quake from occurring. We do know two key things, however. Point one, Cascadia Resorts would have never built on that island if Chadwick and Noble had done their job and reported the extreme dangers; and point two, three hundred years of unrelieved seismic pressure is still locked beneath that island, and it’s nothing to be trifled with.”

  Amid the quiet scramble of reporters leaving the courtroom and the declaration of a recess, Sherry Thomas materialized at Mick’s side, smiling.

  “What?” he asked, smiling back.

  “May I say something very personal and off the record to the chairman?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m very proud of you, Mick.”

  He shook his head, the smile fading.

  “That makes only one of us.”

  QUAALATCH, WASHINGTON

  Marta Cartwright placed the fresh cup of herbal tea on the small coffee table and resumed her favorite chair across the tiny living room, smiling gently at the man sitting uncomfortably in a small, mismatched wicker chair.

  “The hope that I had that my grandson would find the right path was almost destroyed. But now that hope is rescued through bravery, and, frankly, ending the association with those two fools.”

  “Bull and Jimmy?” he asked, sipping his tea.

  She nodded. “No more contact is allowed by the judge, is that right?”

  “Yes. Five-year suspended charges, then it all disappears if there’s no new violation, and there’s a list of people whom they can’t contact. You included.”

  “With the name Lester at the top of the no-contact list?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Very good.” She sipped her own tea, her eyes wandering to the seascape beyond her window for a minute before speaking again.

  “I did not read the signs correctly. I let my own feelings get in the way, my anger. It was the earth ready to rise up and cleanse these things that were wrong, but there was a solution short of annihilation, and I had not expected that. I did not expect to be here to see this, and I must tell you I’m grateful for the extra time, and to no longer see that hateful light flashing in my face.”

  There was a deep sigh from the other side of the table. “I’m so sorry I didn’t sit down and listen to you a long time ago.”

  “It was easier to not listen. It was easier to let your ego rule you. There were voices all around you and you had your fingers in your ears like a little boy.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “And now the island is to be restored, there is enough residual lease money to benefit everyone, the very legitimate charges for destroying other people’s property have been dropped, and you have learned much that’s valuable on this journey, including humility.”

  “You’re right. There’s no question I’ve changed along with that island. And it’s high time I started listening to those voices and—how did you put it… let the universe bring me a few gifts for a change?”

  She smiled and leaned forward. “How long a road it has been for you from Adelaide. Thank you for these gifts of hope, and for being brave enough to bring them to me in person, Mick.”

  Epilogue

  Despite all her training and instincts as a helicopter pilot, Jennifer Lindstrom did the unthinkable and took her hands off the controls.

  Yet the big commercial Chinook helicopter
with twenty-six paying passengers aboard continued to fly straight and level, the overwhelmingly beautiful vista of the Caribbean and clouds and blue sky staying right where they should be in the windscreen. They were over an archipelago of beautiful islands baking far below in the tropical sun.

  To compound the heresy, Jennifer also moved her feet off the pedals that controlled the yawing motion of the craft.

  And still it flew on, steady as a rock.

  Smiling, exhilarated, confident, and feeling decadent, she lifted her hands over her head and clasped them together, feeling free, losing herself like a kid riding no-hands on a bicycle—a gesture no sane rotary wing pilot would make at the controls.

  The horizon remained steady.

  She closed her eyes, feeling the smile grow, her eyelids fluttering open only when a small sideways motion caught her attention.

  In an instant everything changed. Forces pulled at her the wrong way, shoving her to the right, and there were whitecaps and islands in the windscreen that moments before showed only blue skies. Her heart rate jumped to alarm level as she felt her body suddenly become lighter. Instead of flying straight and level, the big Chinook twisted to the left, its attitude dangerously nose-down, the airspeed rising.

  But she was forcing herself to trust the machine despite its apparent betrayal. She folded her arms and made a supreme effort to relax, determined as never before to accept whatever happened and surrender control.

  The surface of the ocean was rising fast as the helicopter spun inexorably downward, but still she sat and watched, willing the machine to do what it was designed to do, fly and recover.

  And suddenly the nose was rising again, the side loads gone. The big chopper steadied out to level flight just as something hit her in the gut.

  She looked down, confused, wondering how she’d come to be in a bikini all of a sudden and lying on a chaise lounge. She looked back up then to the sheepish grin of a young boy with ragged swim trunks.