Alaska (171 page)

He allowed his assistants time to digest the data, then added: 'So in these three gaps ...”He need say no more.

From Lapak Island to the west where it joined Tanaga and out to Gareloi, there was a neat arc of red dots; a big earthquake at the beginning of the century had resulted from the shift that occurred in the plates there, but east of Lapak to Adak and Great Sitkin the map was cadaverously white, which meant that the great readjustment of the plates had not yet occurred along that gap. A new man aboard asked: 'Can we expect a big quake out there one of these days?' and Spada said: 'We can.' He had been on solitary duty that night of 19 September 1985 when the Nazca Plate slipped violently, subducting under the bordering South American continental plate. His eye caught the vigorous activity of the tracing arm before the audible signals sounded, and he said to himself: That's rather big, and when he consulted his backup seismo-1044

graphs he whistled: Seven-point-eight! That's got to have consequences.

By now his assistants, roused by the electronic signals flashing in their bedrooms, rushed to the Tsunami Center. 'Any likelihood of a movement north?' a new man asked, and Spada said: 'Seven-point-eight could give us repercussions anywhere.'

'Where's the epicenter?' the young man asked, and Spada said: 'We can't pinpoint it yet,' but now reports from nearly a dozen other monitoring stations allowed him to triangulate the direction and place the locus of the earthquake fairly accurately at a spot well out in the Pacific Ocean and southeast of Mexico. 'It's far enough offshore not to pose any threat to land areas,' he said with some confidence, 'but the entire Pacific coastline could be vulnerable to a tsunami.'

However, within minutes, reports came rushing in of a massive earthquake beneath Mexico City, and Spada was aghast: 'To exert so much power so far from the slippage!

It must have been much bigger than seven-eight,' and after he had assembled reports from around the world, it was he who first calculated that the Nazca shift had produced a quake of

8.1 on the Richter scale, much stronger than at first supposed.

This time a tsunami did not eventuate; only inland Mexico suffered the full force of this titanic disruption, and even before accurate casualty reports from Mexico City trickled in, Spada warned his team: 'There will be many dead,' and more than ten thousand were. But three days later his attention was diverted by a modest rumbling of Qugang Volcano on Lapak Island, in an area that generated disturbances of one kind or another. He ^dispatched a plane to inspect the activity, and relaxed when the report arrived: 'Six passes, six different elevations. No sign of major activity and no indication that anything major might develop.'

Spada occasioned in his superiors both respect and amusement. He had an uncanny sense regarding volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, as if his childhood experiences near Vesuvius had acclimated him to their behavior, and he was invaluable to Russians, Japanese and Canadians alike for the thoroughness of his watch on their frontiers.

He insisted upon calling himself a vulcanologist, the Italian and perhaps original spelling of the word rather than the more popular

volcanologist.

As a classicist his father having been a teacher of Latin and Roman mythology he believed that the older word related the phenomena with which he dealt to a whole nest of primordial causes, while the latter specified too narrowly its emphasis on volcanoes.

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In his spare time, when he climbed the Talkeetna Mountains or explored the fascinating Matanuska Glacier with his American wife, they sometimes rested on a knoll and drank iced tea, munched on sandwiches, and contemplated the violence that marked the North Pacific: 'Great ice sheets grind down the mountains. The seas freeze over and throw up huge blocks of ice. Volcanoes like Qugang erupt, spewing millions of tons of lava and ash into the air. Earthquakes devastate cities, and deep in the sea tsunamis are unleashed to sweep away towns.'

His wife once responded to these reflections with a sober one of her own: 'And all the time, at the poles, ice begins to accumulate, until the glaciers spread relentlessly again to engulf all we've done.' As she poured more tea she said: 'When you live fn Alaska, you live with change,' and then laughed at her own pomposity: 'Wouldn't it be hilarious, twenty thousand years from now, when the Bering land bridge is open again, if we all walked back to Asia?'

And so the speculation continued. In his vacation sessions at Tamagata west of Tokyo, Kenji Oda conjectured on the economic future of Alaska; in his cottage east of Irkutsk, Maxim Voronov tried to predict when his beloved Russia, whether Soviet or not, would be strong enough to win back Alaska; and in his austere white building in Palmer, Giovanni Spada tracked the behavior of volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

And deep within the heart of the Arctic Ocean on T-7, Rick Venn struggled to help the United States catch up with the experts of other nations in a comprehensive understanding of the arctic seas, and the rifts in the ocean floor from which new worlds were being built, and the wandering terranes which would one day construct a modified Alaska, and the Rim of Fire which dictated life in the Pacific, and the slowly growing ice caps at the poles, south and north, which would one day engulf so much of the world in another age of ice.

'There's so much to learn,' he said to Afanasi as they studied the polar stars. 'So much to fit together.'

UNBEKNOWN TO THESE CIVILIAN GENIUSES IN JAPAN, Siberia and Alaska, there were in the latter jurisdiction three powerful groups whose duty it was to monitor whatever happened in arctic areas. From Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage and Eielson near Fairbanks, two of the most powerful in the world, pilots flew night and day keeping watch on Russian air movements, and from time to time 1046

these sentinels sent back coded messages: 'Two invaders over Desolation Point,' and American fighter planes would scramble aloft to let the Russians know they were under surveillance. Of course, Russian planes kept similar watch from secret bases in Siberia.

And out on distant Lapak Island, where so much history had occurred since the first arrival of men and women twelve thousand years ago, rose a great black windowless building ten stories tall. It contained secret devices understood by only a few hundred experts throughout the United States (plus some twenty clever analysts in Moscow) and served as America's principal intellectual shield against surprise Communist attacks. Had the ancient mummy still occupied her cave on Lapak, she would have enjoyed this great black building and approved the novel use to which her island was being put.

In this quiet, restless manner the perpetual duel of brilliant minds Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Canadian and, sometimes most effective of all, American continued, with all playing the tantalizing game of 'What's going to happen next in the arctic?'

IT WAS AUTUMN WHEN LEROY FLATCH EXPERIENCED A temporary blackout which frightened him, for his unconsciousness lasted several moments.

Fortunately, he was not flying his Cessna, but when he came to he cried aloud: 'Jesus!

Suppose I'd been trying to land!' And when he discussed the incident with his wife, she said firmly: 'LeRoy, time to quit flying,' and she started asking around as to who might want to buy their Cessna-185.

LeRoy was sixty-seven years old that year and not in the best of shape. Some old-time bush pilots flew when they were in their eighties, but they were lean and sinewy men who had cared for themselves, if not for the planes which they kept cracking up. Flatch was not of this breed; he liked beer and greasy Mexican food too much to keep his weight down, and his excesses added about fifteen years to his apparent age, so he listened to his wife's advice, even consulting with the prospective buyers for his plane.

But he was delayed in disposing of what his wife called 'your death trap' because of two seemingly unrelated events which involved him again in serious charter flying.

In early October word flashed through Talkeetna of an extraordinary discovery near an archaeology dig called the Birch Tree Site, where a lone hunter rafting down a river saw protruding from the bank at his eye level the brown water-stained tusk of a mammoth that must have been trapped there twelve or 1047

thirteen thousand years ago. The hunter had attended the university in Fairbanks for two years and from a couple of good geology courses had learned to-appreciate the significance of such a find. So, marking the area carefully on his map, he scrambled back to his raft and hurried on to Talkeetna, where he contacted the university: 'I'm no authority, but I picked about in the mud enough to think that this one still has most of its skin and hair intact.'

The response was electrifying, with two different teams of investigators flying in to Talkeetna and wanting to hire bush pilots to take them to the site. In this way, LeRoy Flatch was lured back into flying to take the college professors and their cargo the fifty-eight miles to the riverbank where, with unusual speed to escape the freeze, the scientists uncovered the complete, unmutilated carcass of a mammoth who could be carbon-dated to 12,800 years ą Before the Present Era. Of course, the remains didn't look like an erect, living mammoth, for eons underground had compressed the carcass into a flat, pancakelike mass, drenched in mud, but there was great excitement when even the novices could see that here was a complete animal, entire hide, with vital organs in place, so that investigators could ascertain what it had been feeding on in the hours before its death.

Flatch was quietly pleased when the scientists selected his plane as the one to fly the mammoth out to Talkeetna, and when the precious body was safely stowed, for there were only a few mammoth finds in either Alaska or Siberia in such condition, he muttered to himself as he prepared for takeoff: 'Don't black out now.' The flight was uneventful; the carcass was delivered to the much larger plane that would fly it on to Fairbanks, and respectful farewells were exchanged between Flatch and the scientists. Back in Talkeetna, he told his wife: 'Isn't every day a man delivers a cargo of meat maybe fourteen thousand years old,' and she said: 'I want you to get rid of that plane before New Year's.'

He was not able to do so, because when the newspapers heard of the remarkable discovery, their reporters streamed into Talkeetna asking LeRoy to fly them to the site, so he was kept busy in November taking his ski plane out to Birch Tree, but when in flying three science writers from the Lower Forty-eight he came close to blacking out, he pulled his nerves together and with little safety margin landed at Talkeetna.

Turning away from his plane, he walked the short distance to his office, speaking to no one but feeling in his chest a warning that he might faint again. Inside the cramped little office Flatch pulled off his flight cap and hung it on the 1048

wall for the last time. LeRoy was one bush pilot who would die in bed.

WITH RICK VENN ABSENT ON T-7, JEB KEELER HAD THE courtship field to himself whenever he flew in to Desolation on corporation business, and he proved an ardent suitor, bringing Kendra flowers, a cherished rarity in the arctic, and pressing her to marry him. He pointed out what Kendra already knew, that 'Rick could be up there three, four years and what happens to you?'

But attractive though Jeb Keeler was, she still could not erase from her mind the picture of Rick Venn skimming over the drifts on his thousand-mile chase in the Iditarod, and whenever such images appeared, she realized that fundamentally she wanted two things: to spend her creative years in the arctic and to share her life with Rick Venn.

So in the depth of winter she drafted an extraordinary message to T-7 which she sent by open radio from Afanasi's kitchen, for she had reached a point where she did not care who heard it:

RICK VENN, T-7, ARCTIC OCEAN. I'M GETTING MARRIED IN JUNE AND I HOPE IT'S TO YOU.

KENDRA.

The result was electric. Someone in Barrow monitoring radio traffic to T-7 was so delighted with this unusual message that he passed it along to a Seattle newspaper, whose newsmen were alerted by the name Venn, and they put it on the wire, so that people across the nation learned of plucky Kendra Scott's proposal to a very wealthy young man hiding out on an ice island. A wireless message resulted: RICK VENN, T-7, ARCTIC OCEAN. IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A GIRL LIKE HER, BE

THERE IN JUNE. I'LL BE YOUR BEST MAN. MALCOLM VENN.

It was a memorable wedding, held in the school gym, with all of Desolation and a good deal of Barrow and Wainwright in attendance. Mrs. Scott, accompanied by her husband, flew in from Heber City and was astounded to learn who Rick was, and what an admirable young fellow he seemed to be, although as she pointed out to the Eskimo women with whom she sat at the ceremony: 'God does not approve of divorce.' She told them of several other things about which God had strong opinions, and one old woman whose men had for generations sought the walrus and the whale told the 1049

Eskimo woman sitting next to her: 'She sounds like a missionary.' Malcolm Venn, who in his sixty years of dealing with Alaska in almost every imaginable capacity had never before been north of the Arctic Circle, had gallons of ice cream and several dozen yellow roses flown in and served as his grandson's best man.

Kendra could not depart Desolation without paying her respects to the Eskimo women who had been so considerate of her when she arrived among them as a stranger, so she invited them all to her quarters for a final breakfast, and afterward she walked alone through the village, staring out at the Chukchi Sea and confessing to herself an honest assessment of her three-year stay in Desolation: I've accomplished nothing.

None of my students are going on to college. None of them have awakened to the potential of which they're capable. I couldn't make them study. I couldn't make them write papers the way kids do who are going to be productive, who are going to be leaders.

I couldn't even make them come to school regularly or stop walking around aimlessly at night. I came, took my salary, and gave nothing in return. Four more years and I'd be a Kasm Hooker, jollying them along, leaving them no better than when I met them.