Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“He had a pretty big trauma when he was a baby,” my wife reminded her mom a few weeks ago. They didn't realize I was at the kitchen window. “A couple of traumas, actually.” She said it like she understood that it was going to be a perennial on her To Do list.

So for the last two months I've gone around the house like a demolition expert who's already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections.

It was actually flying some geologists around that got me going on Lituya Bay in the first place. I flew in a couple of guys from ExxonMobil who taught me more than I wanted to know about Tertiary rocks and why they always got people salivating when it came to hunting up petroleum. But one of the guys also told the story of what happened there in 1958. He was the one who didn't want to camp in the bay. His buddy made serious fun of him. The next time I flew them in I'd done my research, and we talked about what a crazy place it was. I was staying overnight with them, because they could pay for it, and they had to be out at like dawn the next morning.

However you measure things like that, it has to be one of the most dangerous bodies of water on earth. It feels freakish even when you first see it. Most tidal inlets are not nearly so deep — I think at its center it's seven hundred feet — but at the entrance there's barely enough draft for a small boat. So at high and low tides the water moves through the bottleneck like a blast from a fire hose. That twilight we watched a piece of driftwood stay ahead of a tern that was gliding with the wind. The whole bay is huge but the entrance is only eighty yards wide and broken up by boulders. Stuff coming in on the high tide might as well be on the world's largest water slide, and when the tide running out hits the ocean swells, it's as if surf's up on the north shore of Hawaii from both directions at once. We were two hundred yards away and had to shout over the noise. The Frenchman who discovered the bay lost twenty-one men and three boats at the entrance. The Tlingits lost so many people over the course of their time here that they named it Channel of the Water-Eyes, “water eyes” being their term for the drowned.

But the scared guy had me motor him up to the head of the bay and showed me the other problem, the one I'd already read about: stupefyingly large and highly fractured rocks standing at vertiginous angles over deep water in an active fault zone, as he put it. On top of that, their having absorbed heavy rainfall and constant freezing and thawing. The earthquakes on this fault were as violent as anywhere else in the world, and they'd be shaking unstable cliffs over a deep and tightly enclosed body of water.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” his buddy said, passing around beef jerky from the backseat. I was putt-putting the seaplane back and forth as our water taxi at the top of the bay's T. Forested cliff faces went straight up five to six thousand feet all around us. I don't know how trees that size even grew like that.

“You have any kids?” the scared guy asked out of nowhere. I said yeah. He said he did too and started hunting up a photo.

“Well, what's a body to do when millions of tons avalanche into it?” his buddy in the back asked.

The scared guy couldn't find the photo. He looked at his wallet like what else was new. “Make waves,” he said. “Gi-normous waves.”

While we crossed from shore to shore they pointed out some of the trimlines I'd read about. The experts figure their dates by cutting down trees and looking at the growth rings, and some of the lines go back as far as the middle of the 1800s. They look like rows of plantings in a field, except we're talking about fifty-degree slopes and trees eighty to ninety feet high. There are five lines, and their heights are the heights of the waves: one from 1854 at 395 feet; one twenty years later at 80 feet; one twenty-five years after that at 200 feet; one from 1936 at 490 feet; and one from 1958 at 1,720 feet.

That's five events in the last hundred years, or one every twenty. It's not hard to do the math, in terms of whether or not the bay's currently overdue.

In fact, that night we did the math, after lights-out in our little three-man tent. The scared guy's buddy was skeptical. He was still eating, having moved on to something called Moose Munch. We could hear the rustling of the bag and the crunching in the dark. Given that the waves occurred every twenty years, he said, the odds of one occurring on any single day in the bay were about eight thousand to one. There was a plunk down by the shore when something jumped. After we were quiet for a minute, he joked, “That's one of the first signs.”