Cascadia
In the face of a massive earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest, a respected geologist must make two gut-wrenching decisions: one could cost him his reputation; the other, his life.
———
IS THE NORTHWEST overdue for a huge quake and tsunami, or will the region remain safe for hundreds of years yet to come? No one knows . . . or does someone?
Dr. Rob Elwood, a geologist whose specialty is earthquakes and tsunamis, is having nightmares of “the big one,” which are way too real to disregard. His friend, a counselor and retired reverend, does not think he is nuts. Just the contrary, he believes them to be premonitions to be taken seriously. No one else does, however, even after a press conference.
Some live to regret it, most don’t.
In addition, we have a remorseful, retired fighter pilot who is attempting a twenty-five-year-late apology and Neahkahnie Johnny who has been in search of a legendary treasure chest, buried since the late 1600s, most of his life.
All are about to live Rob’s nightmare.
Cascadia
by
Buzz Bernard
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-697-0
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-679-6
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2016 by H. W. Bernard writing as H. W. “Buzz” Bernard
Published in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Cover design: Deborah Smith
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo/Art credits:
Tsunami waves (manipulated) © Ig0rzh | Dreamstime.com
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Dedication
In memory of Hal Bernard, my father, who loved to fish the beautiful rivers and streams of Northwest Oregon.
Prologue
Thunderbird and Whale
Clatsop Indian Village
The Oregon Coast Near Present-Day Seaside
January 26, 1700
THE YOUNG BOY, unable to sleep, opened one eye and surveyed the interior of the cedar-plank lodge. Embers in a fire pit near the center of the lodge cast a weak, flickering glow throughout its interior. Smoke spiraled lazily upward through a slit in the roof. Shadows danced on the walls. Cured salmon hung, like slumbering bats, from overhead racks.
A strange amalgam of sounds permeated the building: snores, wheezes, a soft belch here and there, the occasional sharp “blurp” of someone passing gas.
Other than these reverberations of life, the night seemed strangely silent. The endless dampness and incessant winds typical of the dark season along the coast had relented, at least briefly. But the boy, like all residents of the tiny village—four lodges perched above the banks of a short river rich in salmon and steelhead—knew the rains and gales would return. They always did. Thus, this period of relative dryness and calm offered a great reason for celebration.
That evening, the inhabitants of the community had dined on a special meal of elk and salmon, and berries and roots. Even now, the aromas of the feast lingered in the still air of the lodge.
After eating, the men had sat around the fire talking and smoking, sharing stories of adventures past, while the women and children busied themselves with chores: tidying up the lodge, cleaning utensils, and shaking out the sleeping mats to rid them of as many of the ever-present fleas as they could.
The pests could not be totally exterminated, however, and the boy scratched absentmindedly at a rash of bites on his hip. He sat up on the raised sleeping platform and gazed at the area around him. Next to him, his mother and sister slept. On the other side of the room, his father and grandfather slumbered, undoubtedly exhausted after their hunt for elk earlier in the day. They had brought down a large one.
They’d mentioned to the boy upon returning from their pursuit that they’d had to thrash their way deeper than usual into the dense forests of the coastal mountains. For a reason that mystified them, the elk had moved to higher ground. This, they explained, was strange behavior for the season, when moolack usually remained close to the shores of the ocean where they didn’t have to wade through the deep, wet snows that often coated the mountains.
The boy settled back onto his mat and closed his eyes, hoping sleep would overtake him. It didn’t. Outside, the kamuks, dogs, had raised a clamor, barking and baying, presumably at an unwelcome visitor—a bear, a mountain lion, a wolf—that had wandered too close to the village.
Normally, the ruckus would quiet after the intruder had fled, but not tonight. It continued, eventually morphing into whines and plaintive howls.
The boy arose from his mat and noted that several others had stirred. His father arose, too, picked up a spear, and, wearing nothing but his breechcloth, crept toward the doorway, motioning for the boy to stay put.
His father reached the door, then disappeared down a short ladder leading to the ground. Outside, the barks and yowls continued. The man returned shortly, clambering back into the warmth of the lodge and shaking his head—nothing out there.
At that instant, the ground beneath the lodge shuddered, then quieted, only to be followed by a second, more intense shake, then a third, even harder. Moments later, the earth heaved upward, a violent motion that tossed the boy and his father off balance, sending them sprawling onto the sand floor near the fire pit. As abruptly as the earth had risen, it sank, the boards of the sleeping platforms cracking like ice in a sudden winter thaw. Scattered screams and yells filled the semi-darkness as the remainder of the structure’s inhabitants jerked awake.
The boy attempted to stand, but another upward surge of the earth knocked him down once more. One wall of the lodge sagged, then, with an explosive crack, split. Two heavy logs, the overhead beams of the structure, plunged to the floor. Cries of pain and pleas for help followed, permeating the devastated interior of the lodge.
Again the ground subsided, only to be followed by yet another swell. The boy staggered to his feet and stumbled toward the exit, or at least the place where the exit had been. Nothing more than split and rent wood now marked its presence. He turned to look for his father and grandfather.
Through a gaping hole in the roof, light from a waxing moon illuminated in feeble light a horrific carnage within the lodge. Friends and relatives lay maimed, many motionless. The boy spotted his father and grandfather attempting to pull people from beneath the massive timbers that had fallen from the roof. He staggered toward them as the earth continued to roll in jolting surges. It felt no different than riding a large dugout in heavy seas. The sickness that sometimes afflicted him on the ocean attacked him now. He bent over and regurgitated his evening meal.
The violent shaking continued, unrelenting in its ferocity, and the boy fell several more times as he struggled to reach his father and
grandfather. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, but probably covered no more time than the life span of a spring rain squall, the convulsions slackened.
The boy reached his father and grandfather and joined them in attempting to pull his bleeding, unconscious kahpho, sister, from beneath a pile of splintered wood. They labored fruitlessly, unable to tug the heavy debris from her body. With each lingering, albeit less violent, heave of the ground, additional parts of the lodge, already weakened by the initial tremors, collapsed. Finally, the boy’s grandfather stood and pointed outside.
“We must go,” he said.
The boy’s father shook his head. No.
The grandfather knelt beside his son and rested a hand on his shoulder. “It is too late. We must leave or we will die.”
The shaking of the earth, now no more than dying ripples, at last relented. “It is over,” the boy’s father said, “finished.” He continued his frantic efforts to free his daughter.
The grandfather, with a strength and swiftness belying his age, jerked the man to his feet. “No, it is not finished,” he said, his words commanding, forceful. “The flood is coming.”
“What flood? There is no water falling from the sky.”
“The flood from the great water.” The grandfather inclined his head toward the ocean.
Outside, an orange glow filled the night. One or more of the destroyed lodges had apparently caught fire.
“Hurry,” the grandfather said.
“Where to?” the boy’s father asked, his voice tight with emotion as he stared down at his trapped and injured daughter. Moans and groans from others filled the weakly lit darkness.
“The canims,” the old man said. The canoes.
“Mama?” the boy asked, tugging at his father’s breechcloth.
“She’s gone,” his father said. A tear ran down his cheek. The boy had never seen that before.
He followed his elders outside. They scrambled over piles of sheared and splintered timber, the young Indian blinking back his own tears. Smoke drifted through the ravaged village. The wails of the injured and dying mingled with an eerie chorus of barks, yips, and howls from animals in the nearby forest. The boy grasped his father’s hand with a firmness born of fear.
Together they stumbled through the chilly darkness, through their ruined settlement, toward their canoes resting on the mudflats of the river. They slashed through soggy eelgrass and deep depressions and ponds that hadn’t been present a short time earlier. The boy’s father stopped to look in the direction of the ocean. The boy looked, too. The weak moonlight glistened off wet sand as far as he could see. It appeared as if the tide had receded beyond the horizon, into the depths of the sea.
“See that,” the boy’s father said, pointing. “The great water has retreated. There is no flood coming, old man.” He touched his head in a gesture suggesting the grandfather had lost his senses.
“You are wrong,” the grandfather snapped, glaring at his son. “There is a deadly flood coming, one in which the waters will flow uphill. Our ancestors knew of it. They warned us in their stories.”
The young boy looked from his father to his grandfather, trying to comprehend.
“I will explain when we get to safety,” his grandfather said. “Now we must move quickly.”
The boy’s father stared back at the remnants of the lodge, then down at his son, as though weighing the consequences of an impending decision.
The old man rested a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I am sorry,” he said, “but you must live for the one who lives.” He shifted his gaze to the boy.
From somewhere distant, well beyond the exposed tidal flats, well out over the depths of the ocean, a hissing, like that of a massive snake, cut through the human and animal cries that suffused the darkness.
“Run,” the boy’s grandfather commanded.
The boy looked around, not understanding from what they were fleeing. His father grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the canoes. A few residents of the village had already paddled into the stream. But others, ignoring the exhortations of the elders, continued rescue efforts in their crumpled homes, two of which burned with the ferocity of a wildfire.
They reached the canoes. The boy and his grandfather clambered into one. The boy’s father pushed the dugout into mid-stream, then climbed into it himself. The two older men began paddling, heading upstream. The sound that had begun as a hiss, grew louder, like rushing water or a breaking wave.
The boy’s father and grandfather stroked furiously in a desperate effort to outrun whatever was coming. Initially, the river’s course paralleled the shore, but eventually turned inland. The boy had no idea how far they had to go to find a place of safety. He knew only that something evil pursued them. He could hear it clearly now, grinding and chewing its way through the forest and up the river, snapping trees in violent thunderclaps of destruction.
Then he saw it and gasped. A massive surge of black water, not just in the river, but on both sides of it, closing in on them like a beast from the depths of the sea. Within an instant, the surge caught them, lifting the canoe as if it were riding a huge ocean swell.
The men ceased paddling and clung to the gunwales of the canoe, the vessel now merely riding the flood like a chunk of driftwood in a cascading stream. The roiling water, filled with trees, dead animals, and—the boy’s gut lurched—two bodies clothed in the garb of his tribe, churned around them in an angry surge.
Even after the initial rush, the water continued to rise, hoisting the canoe ever higher, until it reached the tops of the shorter trees along the now-inundated banks of the river. A whirlpool snatched the dugout and slammed it into a stand of towering spruce, the needled boughs of the trees clawing, like wild animals, at the exposed skin of the Clatsops.
The boy’s father grabbed at one of the boughs, caught it, and screamed for help. The grandfather, realizing his son’s intent, seized another limb. The canoe jerked to a stop. The men struggled to wrestle the canoe into a position of relative stability as the ocean continued to rush fiercely around them. The boy ventured a peek over the edge of the canoe and tried to guess how far they were above what used to be the ground. He thought six or seven grown men might have to stand on one another’s shoulders to reach them. His heart beat so rapidly he feared it would leap from his chest.
After what seemed like forever, but wasn’t—the position of the crescent moon had barely shifted—the water began to recede, draining rapidly back toward the sea. The boy relaxed. “It’s leaving us,” he said, a note of hope tinting his words.
His grandfather shook his head. No. “It will return. Once, twice, maybe three times before the sun rises. We must remain here. It will be safe.”
So they sat the night in the sheltering upper boughs of a Sitka spruce, in a dugout canoe, as the great flood attacked twice more, backing off only after whatever evil spirit had loosed the destruction seemed satisfied. For warmth, they huddled together in the small boat, but still shivered uncontrollably as chill of the winter night deepened.
Sunrise came dull and muted, the land along the river virtually denuded of life. No animals moved, no bushes swayed in the wind, no grass sprouted from the banks of the stream. All vestiges of anything living had been swept away. Nothing but a debris-littered landscape met the eye: flattened trees, shattered timber, the bloated carcasses of deer and elk, squirrels and raccoons, lynx and bear, and the remains of at least one human. A heavy frost tinged the nightmarish scene in a ghostly whiteness.
Only the small stand of spruce where the men had found shelter remained. With most of the lower limbs of the tree that had offered them safety still intact, they scrambled down from the canoe and reached the ground, now nothing but mushy, salt-encrusted layers of mud and sand topped with a thin layer of ice.
On foot, they trekked toward the village, a laborious journey over
frosty, boggy ground that sucked relentlessly at their feet. They encountered rock slides, washouts, and, where the ground had mysteriously sunk into the maws of the earth, gaping depressions filled with downed trees. It seemed as if the land itself had tried to devour whatever had stood upon it.
They moved through a morning mist in strange silence. Their exhalations, thin streaks of vapor, trailed behind them in white gossamer threads. Not even the cries of seabirds, normally abundant, pierced the morning stillness. No sounds of human presence, other than theirs, cut through the brooding hush. No voices of hunters. No thud of elk-antler wedges splitting wood. No laughter of young children.
Nearing exhaustion, they reached the site of the village, or at least where the village had stood. Nothing remained save sand, driftwood, and seaweed, and the limp, lifeless bodies of the crushed and drowned. The boy counted at least twenty corpses, mainly of the elderly and children, littering the beach and river banks. Among the human remains, seagulls pecked dutifully at the carcasses of dogs. The stomach-churning stench of death pervaded everything.
The boy turned from the scene, fearing he would be sick. He didn’t wish to display weakness in front of his father. His chest heaved as he fought back waves of gut-wrenching sobs.
A hand came to rest on his shoulder. He looked up into the face of his grandfather whose reddened eyes appeared clouded and misty.
The boy choked back a final incipient sob. “What happened here, Chope? Why did the great water and land turn against us?”
The grandfather steered the boy to a barnacled stump that had washed ashore in the immense flood, and they sat. The boy looked once more at the carnage that confronted him. His father walked among the bodies, examining each with the care of a kindred spirit. He flailed his arms and shooed away an inquisitive eagle. He stooped beside each of the dead, laid a hand on them, and appeared to utter a blessing.
Suddenly, the earth vibrated and the boy leapt from the stump, prepared to flee for his life once again. The shaking ceased. His grandfather remained seated. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “It’s just the final echo of a great battle.”
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