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 Exxon-Mobil who taught me more than I wanted to know about Tertiary rocks and why they always got people salivating when it came to what they called petroleum investigations. 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. It’s a tidal inlet that’s hugely deep — I think at its center it’s seven hundred feet — but at its entrance there’s barely enough draft for a small boat. So at high and low tides the water moves through the bottleneck like from a fire hose. That twilight we watched a piece of drift-wood keep up with 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 is like on the world’s largest water slide. And when the tide’s running the other way, when it 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 there that they named it Channel of the Water-Eyes, water-eyes being their word 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 problem I’d already read about: as he put it, stupefyingly large and highly fractured rocks standing at vertiginous angles over deep water in an active fault zone. 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 T. Forested cliffs went straight up five to six thousand feet all around us. I don’t even know how trees that size 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 made a face 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 trim lines I’d read about. The lines went back as far as the middle of the 1800s. The experts figure the dates by cutting down trees and looking at the growth rings. The lines look like rows of plantings in a field, except we’re talking about fifty-degree slopes and trees 80 to 90 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.
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. He said that given that the waves occurred every twenty years, 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.”
The odds were way smaller than that, the scared guy finally answered. He asked his buddy to think about how much unstable slope they’d already seen from the air. All of that had been exposed by the last wave. And it had now been exposed almost fifty years, he said. There were open fractures that were already visible.
So what did he think the odds were? his buddy wanted to know.
Double digits, the scared guy said. The low double digits.
“If I thought they were in the double digits, I wouldn’t be here,” his buddy said.
“Yeah, well,” the scared guy said. “What about you?” he asked me. It took me a minute to realize it, since we were lying in the dark.
“What about me?” I said.
“You ever notice anything out here?” he asked. “Any evidence of recent rockfalls or slides? Changes in the gravel deltas at the feet of the glaciers?”
“I only get out here once a year, if that,” I told him. “It’s not a big destination for people.” I started going over in my head what I remembered, which was nothing.
“That’s ’cause they’re smart,” the scared guy said.
“That’s ’cause there’s nothing here,” his buddy answered.
“Well, there’s a reason for that,” the scared guy said. He told us he’d come across two censuses of the Tlingit tribes living in the bay from when the Russians owned the area. The populations had been listed as 241 in 1853 and 0 a year later.
“Good night,” his buddy told him.
“Good night,” the scared guy said.
“What was that? You feel that?” his buddy asked him.
“Aw, shut up,” the scared guy said.
What’s this thing about putting people to use? What’s that all about? What happened to just loving being around someone? Once I got Donald up off his butt and made him throw the baseball around with me, and asked that out loud. I only knew I’d done it when he said, “I don’t know.” Then he asked if we could quit now.
“Did you ever really think you’d find someone that you weren’t in some ways cynical about?” my wife asked the night we’d decided we were in love. I was flying for somebody else and we were lying under the wing of the Piper that we’d run up onto a beach. I’d been God’s lonely man for however many years — twelve in the orphanage, four in high school, four in college, a hundred after that — and she was someone that I wanted to pour myself down into. I was having trouble communicating how unusual that was.
That morning she’d watched me load a family I didn’t like into a twin-engine and I’d done this shoulder shake I do before something unpleasant. And she’d caught me, and her expression had given me a lift that carried me through the afternoon. That night back in my room she made a list of other things I did or thought, any one of which was proof she paid more attention than anyone else ever had. She held parts of me like she had never seen anything so beautiful. At three or four in the morning she used her arms to tent herself up over me and asked, “Don’t we have to sleep?” and then had answered her own question.
Around noon we woke up spooning, and when I held on when she tried to head to the bathroom, we slid down the sheets to the floor. She finally lost me by crawling on all fours to the bathroom door.
“Well, she’s as happy as I’ve ever seen her,” her father told me at the rehearsal dinner. Twenty-three people had been invited and twenty-one were her family and friends.
“It’s so nice to see her like this,” her mother told me at the same dinner.
When I toasted her, she teared up. When she toasted me, she said only, “I never thought I would feel like this,” and then sat down.
We honeymooned in San Francisco. Here’s what that was like for me: I still root for that city’s teams.
I’ve always been interested in the unprecedented. I just never got to experience it that often.
Her family is Juneau society, to the extent that such a thing exists. One brother’s the arts editor for the Juneau Empire; another works for Bauer & Gates Real Estate, selling half-million-dollar wilderness vacation homes to second-tier Hollywood stars. Another, go figure, is a lawyer. On holidays they give one another things like Arctic Cats. Happy Birthday: here’s a new 650 four-by-four. The real estate brother was 11-and-1 as a starter and team MVP for JDHS the year they won the state finals. The parents serve on every board there is. Their daughter when she turned sixteen was named Queen of the Spring Salmon Derby. She still has the tiara with the leaping sockeye.
They didn’t stand in the way of our romance. That’s what her dad told anyone who asked. Our wedding announcement said that the bride-elect was the daughter of Donald and Nila Bell and that she’d graduated from the University of Alaska summa cum laude and was a first-year account executive for Sitka Communications Systems. It
