The earthquake overwhelmed people the way the strongest emotions do. It was pure sensation, coming on faster than the intellect’s ability to register it.
Small earthquakes were familiar occurrences in Alaska, but the recognition of this one, which struck just as the sun was setting on Good Friday, March 27, 1964, seemed to flower in people slowly.
In Anchorage, a used-car salesman, kneeling beside a vehicle that wouldn’t start, mistook the physical sensation of his body heaving from side to side for dizziness and figured that he was having a heart attack. A woman driving on Northern Lights Boulevard puzzled over why, as she put it, “the road wouldn’t stay still.” There was a sluggish process of discovery: you had to discover the earthquake, even though it already had been shaking you for what felt like a very long time.
The Great Alaska Earthquake had a magnitude of 9.2, and it whipped the city of Anchorage around for a full four and a half minutes. Buildings keeled off their foundations, slumped in on themselves or split in half. For two entire blocks, every storefront along one side of the city’s main thoroughfare simply dropped, plummeting into a long, ragged chasm that had ripped open underneath it; one theater marquee came to rest level with the street. Downtown looked “like the devil ground his heel into it,” one witness said.
At the time, the state of Alaska was only five years old and often regarded as a kind of free-floating addendum to the rest of America. But Anchorage was the biggest and most ambitious city in the state: a community of 100,000 people — nearly half Alaska’s population — whose “essential spirit,” one visitor wrote, “reaches aggressively and greedily to grasp the future, impatient with any suggestion that such things take time.” This was four years before the big Alaskan oil boom, before any genuinely self-sustaining economy had taken hold. Anchorage was still essentially a frontier town that imagined it was a metropolis, straining to make itself real.
That Good Friday, however, many of the most celebrated symbols of the city’s progress were struck down. “It’s as though the best of our buildings — the proudest of our buildings — were the ones that were hardest hit,” one prominent businessman lamented.
The walls had fallen off the sparkling new J.C. Penney; stockrooms were cleaved open to the cold air like the chambers of a dollhouse. A sweeping portion of the city’s first genuinely upscale neighborhood, a ridge-top subdivision called Turnagain by the Sea, sloughed onto the shoreline 35 feet below when the soil it was built on essentially liquefied.
So much had suddenly scrambled; the future was unclear. During those four and a half minutes, Anchorage seemed to be passing fitfully through an inflection point in history; life was ripping into a before and an after. “Even in those moments while the earthquake was still shaking the earth,” one man recalled, “I kept thinking: ‘What will Alaskans do now?’”
Maybe you’ve lived through a natural disaster like this. Maybe you’ve just lived through the last couple of weeks, or the last few years. Increasingly, daily life feels suffused with similar unpredictability — a quiet quivering that surges, again and again, into a shock. Another constitutional check or political norm is shamelessly shattered. Another wildfire leaps the highway. The virus scatters beyond the latest isolated case.
We all know there are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes, when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We don’t walk around thinking about it, but we know that instability is always there: at random, and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives.
II.
News of the Great Alaska Earthquake reached a small team of sociologists at Ohio State University early the following morning, when communication from Alaska to the Lower 48 was still scant, and rumors ricocheted wildly. The sociologists heard that downtown Anchorage had been swallowed in a ball of fire. They heard 300 people were dead. Or 600 people. The trauma and confusion would be horrific. Professionally speaking, it was too good to be true. “They roused me out of bed and I threw on my duds,” one of the graduate students said. “And I was off to the airport in an hour and a half.”
The Disaster Research Center at Ohio State was, at the time, a new, first-of-its-kind institute, aiming to dispatch social scientists to wherever disaster struck, as quickly as possible, to dispassionately document that disarray. The center, which has since moved to the University of Delaware, had been founded only the previous summer, with funding from the Department of Defense.
The Cold War was escalating. In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, America’s Office of Civil Defense was desperate to prepare Americans for the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. One of the agency’s animating insights was that a bomb dropped on the United States wouldn’t just cause physical destruction, but pandemonium, desperation and barbarism among survivors. “The experts foretold a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” the social scientist Richard M. Titmuss wrote in 1950. “They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.”
The government had locked on to natural disasters as realistic proxies for nuclear Armageddon: Each community hit by an earthquake, hurricane or flood was like a laboratory — a full-scale simulation — in which a team of sociologists could scrutinize such a breakdown of society.
But when the disaster researchers started touching down in Anchorage, a mere 28 hours after the earthquake, they almost immediately began discovering the opposite: The community was meeting the situation with a staggering amount of collaboration and compassion.
Right after the shaking stopped, ordinary citizens began crawling through the ruins downtown, searching for survivors, and using ropes to heave people out of the debris field under Turnagain. When Presbyterian Hospital started filling with gas after the quake, Boy Scouts who’d been distributing phone books in the neighborhood helped walk the hospital’s 22 patients down three or four flights of stairs, and an armada of taxis and other civilian drivers pulled up outside to evacuate everyone to a second hospital, across town. Outside the crumbling J.C. Penney, bystanders rushed to dig people out, and worked together to tow away a huge section of the fallen concrete facade with their vehicles, then extract a woman who’d been crushed beneath it in her station wagon. “Everybody jumped right in,” one man who’d been on the scene told the sociologists. “Everybody was trying to do a little bit of everything for everybody.”
By daybreak the following morning, hundreds of volunteers had spontaneously converged on the city’s combined police and fire station, similarly eager to pitch him. No one in the city government had anticipated this onrush or put any system in place to manage it. The conventional wisdom was that in a disaster, authorities had to worry about hordes of civilians chaotically fleeing the hardest-hit area. Here, everyone was piling in to help.
Unlikely heroes were emerging from that scrum of volunteers, like a self-effacing psychology professor, William E. Davis, who wound up running the city’s search and rescue operation after the fire department failed to orchestrate any methodical effort of its own. (Mr. Davis was the head of a local mountaineering club that got together on weekends to practice plucking people from cliff sides or avalanches; its members simply applied their wilderness skills to the ruined urban environment.)
Genie Chance, a part-time radio reporter and working mother, stayed on duty at station KENI virtually all weekend, disseminating emergency information with her colleagues and passing messages over the air to help separated family members reconnect. (“Mr. and Mrs. Dick Fisher are still here at the Police Headquarters at Sixth and C, waiting for any word of their children. Their home went off the bluff” — and so on, for days.)
All over town, neighbors fed and housed the displaced. A brigade of teenagers, led by a burly veterinarian, got to work salvaging belongings from the smear of houses that had careened off the cliff in Turnagain. Downtown, other volunteers were arrayed to keep the peace. A swaggering middle manager from the public works department had taken it upon himself to organize them, asking the police chief to hastily deputize the men, then tearing up bedsheets from the city jail, scrawling “Police” on each one with a parking attendant’s lipstick, and handing out those scraps of fabric as arm bands.
But virtually none of the looting, violence or other antisocial behavior those city officials expected, and that the researchers had arrived from Ohio ready to document, ever materialized. One of the few cases of looting I found mentioned in the sociologists’ notes appeared to have been perpetrated by an actual police officer.
The Disaster Research Center’s team would spend a week in Anchorage after the quake, then make five more trips to Alaska over the next 18 months, conducting nearly 500 interviews to meticulously reconstruct the community’s response.
But the pinheaded specificity of their questions often left the Alaskans flummoxed. It was as though the researchers were groping to fill in some flowchart or decision tree, when, in reality, little of the action had unfolded methodically at all. It was all improvisatory and instinctual. “Who decided what you would broadcast?” one of the researchers asked a radio announcer, about his station’s first hours back on the air. “Uh,” the man said, “we were just talking.”
Something surprising had been shaken loose in Anchorage: a dormant capacity — even an impulse — for people to come together and care for one another that felt largely inaccessible in ordinary life.
“It’s there in front of you, so you do it,” a nurse named Dolly Fleming would later explain; she could find no more incisive theory to account for all the cooperation she’d witnessed. During the quake, Mrs. Fleming had found herself on a thrashing staircase and, seeing a teetering child in front of her, instinctively tucked him under her arm and strained to keep them both steady. Decades later, at age 93, the one cogent thought she could remember having through those four and a half minutes was: “I’m thankful I’m here. I’m thankful I’m here so I can hold on to this little guy.”
III.
Watching the slow, menacing spread of a virus is altogether different from reacting to the obvious, instantaneous shock of a quake. For most of us, the danger of this unfolding disaster is still invisible and diffuse. And yet any resilient and successful response has to be rooted in the same profound feelings of interconnectedness that arose instantaneously in Anchorage, some pervasive and bracing obligation to one another and our collective safety.
Washing your hands, staying home when you’re sick, limiting travel, keeping yourself healthy, not touching your face — little of what we’re being told to do feels particularly heroic or world-changing, or nearly enough to satisfy an anxious mind. But for a lot of us, it is, in fact, the job that’s in front of us right now — the role that these disordered circumstances are calling each of us, at a minimum, to play.
There are, and will be more, situations where helping more directly becomes possible and necessary — especially if we’re not getting coherent leadership, or even honesty, from those in charge. But we can’t afford to feel that canceling a school band concert, or suspending a basketball season, is a withering retreat; we must see them as parts of an empowered, collaborative undertaking. We are coming together to keep our distance. If we want to stop our world from shaking, we need to find in even the tiniest of these acts the same meaning and immediacy, the same togetherness and purpose,— that Mrs. Fleming felt, holding onto that little boy.
You’d be forgiven for feeling pessimistic, for dismissing what happened in a small Alaskan city long ago as quaint, and far less possible in our society now. And yet: In the 56 years since the Great Alaska Earthquake, an entire field of sociology, disaster studies, blossomed around the Disaster Research Center, with sociologists parachuting into scores of other communities after natural disasters around the world, and it’s stunning to look back and recognize how much of the resilience, levelheadedness, kindness and cooperation those sociologists saw in Anchorage turned out to be characteristic of disasters everywhere.
Many of our ugliest assumptions about human behavior have been refuted by their observations of how actual humans behave — though we seem tragically slow to shed those old myths. (In some cases, disaster studies teaches us, those in power are so overcome with worry about mass panic and looting that they overreact and clamp down on a public that isn’t actually panicked at all. Disaster scholars refer to this phenomenon as “elite panic.”)
In 1975, 11 years after their work in Alaska, two of the Disaster Research Center’s founders, Russell Dynes and Enrico Quarantelli, speculated about why they continued to find essentially the same scenario repeating itself: why, rather than encouraging conflict or violence, these catastrophes appeared to bring out the best in people.
In ordinary times, they wrote, we suffer alone; any acute experience of our own vulnerability can isolate us, or even make us resentful of others: “The victim often feels discriminated against since there are others who have been spared.” But a disaster affects everyone, and peels us away from “mundane matters” to the “very issue of human life itself.”
When “danger, loss and suffering become a public phenomenon,” they went on, “all those who share in the experience are brought together in a very powerful psychological sense.” An unrelenting immediacy sets in: “Worries about the past and the future are unrealistic when judged against the realities of the moment,” the sociologists wrote, and distinctions between people fall away, leaving only “human beings responding to one another as human beings.”
Thrown all together, in one unrelenting present, we are made to recognize in one another what we deny most vehemently about ourselves: In the end, it’s our vulnerability that connects us.
IV.
I’d never heard of the Great Alaskan Earthquake until I stumbled across an account of it six years ago, even though it is still the most powerful earthquake in American history, and the second most powerful ever measured in the world. I began gathering up whatever material I could — not only the sociologists’ interview transcripts, but piles of other documents gleamed piecemeal from libraries and individual people’s closets — with an eye toward writing a book that would reconstruct that Easter weekend in Anchorage.
Eventually, I found myself in a cluttered basement in Juneau, confronting 30 or so boxes into which Genie Chance, the Anchorage radio broadcaster, had assiduously packed thousands of letters, photographs, diaries, audio recordings and other material from her life.
These were the raw materials with which Ms. Chance always planned to write her autobiography, but she’d never had the opportunity: She was struck with dementia in her 60s and died in 1998. Everything had been moldering in her daughter’s basement, mostly untouched, for nearly 20 years: a time capsule that had been scrupulously prepared but never dug up.
Just the sight of it left me with a distinct and chilling sensation that arose repeatedly while I was researching the quake, attempting to track down those whose experiences had been so uncannily preserved in the documents I’d gathered. It felt like omniscience, or time travel — but I was traveling forward, and mercilessly fast, flashing ahead to watch the characters and story lines of that Easter weekend bend toward their ultimate endings: Liver cancer. Lung cancer. Plane crash. Head-on collision. The more time I spent looking back at the past from here in its distant future, the more that time itself began to feel like a slow-moving natural disaster, imperceptibly shaking everything apart.
Looking through Genie Chance’s boxes, slowly unburying myself from under the rubble of her life, I inevitably started picturing my own boxes, in one of my own daughters’ basements one day, and imagining how many other sets of boxes are already out there, and how many people hadn’t left boxes at all. Here it was: all the joys and agonies of one person’s life, but so blurred and compressed that it was impossible not to recognize the form that all our lives assume from such a telescopic distance — a forgettable blip, a meaningless straight line from birth to death.
And yet I also knew that, sealed inside this minuscule segment of that line — this vulnerable little snow globe we call present — life feels anything but forgettable and meaningless. And that, somehow, recognizing the starkness of those boundaries enriches the fragile space we occupy within them, imbues it with immediacy, legitimacy and preciousness. It liberates us into the present, just as a disaster does, and gives us the opportunity to expand those boundaries the only way we can: laterally, by connecting our lives to the lives of others, by thatching our lines together like a net.
The ground beneath us is always moving, shrugging us off — not with a violent tremor, but in the steadiest, most predictable way imaginable: by pushing away from us, traveling forward in time. Every once in a while, the earth rears up and shakes. But it’s always, always spinning.
Each day is part of that disaster — with all the same potential.
Jon Mooallem (@jmooallem) is the author of the forthcoming “This Is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together,” from which this essay is adapted.
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