Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Howard Ulrich and his little boy Sonny entered Lituya Bay at eight the night of the wave, and anchored on the south shore near the entrance. He wrote about it afterward. Their fishing boat had a high bow, a single mast, and a pilothouse the size of a Portosan. Before they turned in, two other boats had followed them in and anchored even nearer the entrance. It was totally quiet. The water was a pane of glass from shore to shore. Small icebergs seemed to just sit in place. The gulls and terns that they usually saw circling Cenotaph Island in the middle of the bay were hunkered down on the shore. Sonny said it looked like they were waiting for something. His dad tucked him in bed at about ten, around sunset. He'd just climbed in himself when the boat started pitching and jerking against its anchor chain. When he ran up on deck in his underwear, he saw the mountains heaving themselves around and avalanching. Clouds of snow and rocks shot up high into the air. It looked like they were being shelled. Sonny came up on deck in his pj's, which had alternating wagon wheels and square-knotted ropes. He rubbed his eyes. Ninety million tons of rock dropped into Gilbert Inlet as a unit. The sonic concussion of the rock hitting the water knocked them both onto their backs on the deck.

It took the wave about two and a half minutes to cover the seven miles to their boat. In that time Sonny's dad tried to weigh anchor and discovered that he couldn't, the anchor stuck fast, so he let out the chain as far as he could, got a life preserver onto Sonny, and managed to turn his bow into the wave. As it passed Cenotaph Island it was still over a hundred feet high, extending from shore to shore, a wave front two miles wide.

The front was unbelievably steep, and when it hit, the anchor chain snapped immediately, whipping around the pilothouse and smashing the windows. The boat arrowed seventy-five feet up into the curl like they were climbing in an elevator, their backs pressed against the pilothouse wall as if they'd been tilted back in barber's chairs. The wave's face was a wall of green taking them up into the sky. They were carried high over the south shore. Sixty-foot trees down below disappeared. Then they were thrown up over the crest and down the back slope, where the backwash spun them off again into the center of the bay.

Another couple, the Swansons, had also turned into the wave and had their boat surfboard a quarter mile out to sea, and when the wave crest broke, the boat pitchpoled and hit bottom. They managed to find and float their emergency skiff in the debris afterward. The third couple, the Wagners, tried to make a run for the harbor entrance and were never seen again.

Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were scoured down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trimline had their bark removed by the water pressure.

Sonny's dad was still in his underwear, teeth chattering, and Sonny was washing around on his side in some icy bilge water, making noises like a jungle bird. The sun was down by this point. Backwash and wavelets twenty feet high were crisscrossing the bay, spinning house-sized chunks of glacier ice that collided against each other. Clean-peeled tree trunks like pickup sticks knitted together and upended, pitching and rolling. Water was still pouring down the slopes on both sides of the bay. The smell was like being facedown in the dirt under an upended tree. And Sonny's dad said the time that passed afterward — when they'd realized they'd survived but still had to navigate through everything pinballing around them in the dark — was worse than riding the wave itself.

A day or two later the geologists started arriving. No one believed the height of the wave at first. People thought any devastation that high on the slopes had to have been caused by landslides. But they came around.

My wife fell asleep beside me, wrapped over me to keep me warm. We're still on the floor and now it really is dark. We've got to be late in terms of picking up Donald from his play date, but if his friend's parents called, I didn't hear the phone.

One of my professors at Saint Mary's had this habit of finishing each class with four or five questions, none of which anyone could answer. It was a class called The Philosophy of Life. I got a C. If I took it now, I'd do even worse. I'd sit there hoping he wouldn't see me and try not to let my mouth hang open while he fired off the questions. What makes us threaten the things we want most? What makes us so devoted to the comfort of the inadvertent? What makes us unwilling to gamble on the noncataclysmic?