THE GOOD FRIDAY EARTHQUAKE
Anchorage, Alaska, March 24, 1964

I. 360 Seconds - Looking Into Hell

Where was I on March 24, 1964 between 5:36 and 5:42 p.m.? Sitting in my car at the west curb in the middle of the block on K Street between 4th & 5th Avenues in Anchorage, Alaska. Those six minutes are stitched into the fabric of my memory so tightly that I'm always semi-conscious of them. The rest of that day and the following week are there, too, in my memory.

When I recall those minutes and that week, I relive them, not just think about them as a past event. I am there in that place at that time and with all my visual, emotional, and thoughts intact, instant by instant. I've heard lots of theories about what happens when you think you are about to die -- your life flashes before your eyes, for instance -- but none of them have met the reality of that day.

March 24, 1964 was Good Friday. At 5:30, it was clear and cool, a lovely spring afternoon. The snow was gone, and it was a little too early for "break-up", the melting of permafrost that turns dirt to mud and cracks pavement. I worked for the Anchorage Superior Court, 9th Judicial District, and lived in what was then a suburb of Anchorage called Spenard. My workday ended at 5 p.m. ordinarily, but the Supreme Court was holding a special hearing that evening and since their In-Court Deputy was absent, they asked me to stay. It was quite an honor and I was delighted. The hearing was short, and when it was over I labeled the tapes (we used tape recorders instead of live court stenographers, and my job was a combination of monitoring the tapes, swearing witnesses, marking exhibits, drawing names for and swearing in Petit Jurors, and, when the court adjourned, I transcribed the recordings.)

After finally leaving the courthouse, I walked across the street and around the corner, got into my car, lit a cigarette, and turned the key in the ignition. The car started to rock like it was going to stall; when I gave it gas the engine revved but the rocking didn't stop. I thought, "Oh, it's an earthquake." I wasn't worried because having grown up on the West Coast, I'd experienced several, a couple of them quite large. So I waited for the shaking to stop. It didn't.

It got worse. And worse.

I felt pretty safe inside my vehicle, still, but took a quick look around to be sure nothing was going to fall on me. I noticed that the telephone pole behind me was rocking really hard but if it fell, it would land between me and the car parked behind me. As I turned back to the front, the shaking got violent. My car began bouncing and rocking so hard I could feel the rear wheels jumping on and off the curb, and I figured I'd better put out my cigarette because some gas mains might break, so I crushed it in the ashtray and turned off the ignition.

I looked out the driver's side window and could see the AIR! It was like full of little sparks and glitters (later I figured it was caused by ionization from its being stretched -- I don't know if that's the real reason or not, but who cares, the fact is, I could see the air). I started speculating, then, that I just might die, and wasn't it weird to be born on Christmas and die on Good Friday? What I remember most was how calm I felt; I had no fear whatsoever.

Catty-corner from where I sat in my car, a man stood in the doorway of a hexagonal building on the corner, looking down 5th Avenue and holding on to the door frame for dear life. The two-story building was twisting dreadfully -- the top going one way and the bottom the other, and whipping back and forth at the same time. There was a little triangular roof over the man's head and I worried that it, and perhaps the building itself, might fall on him.

The look on his face was incredible: a mix of horror, fascination, fear, awe -- an expression that said, "My God! I'm looking into hell!" My attention turned to watching the telephone poles on 5th Avenue; instead of rocking like the pole behind me, they were being bent steadily to the west, toward Cook Inlet. Amazingly, the wires didn't break, but I heard the poles snap one right after the other.

In the next block ahead of me, a group of about six or eight men and women ran out of one of the buildings and into the middle of the street, and stood in a circle with their arms linked across each others' shoulders in a football huddle. The ground was now shaking so hard that the circle of people seemed to be performing a primitive dance.

The sounds I heard weren't the usual rumble that accompanies a lot of earthquakes, but was a high, ghostly keening, a steady, inhuman scream, and seemed to come from everywhere.

Finally, the ground was quiet, almost as suddenly as it had begun, and the keening was replaced by total stillness.

The man in the doorway started running east on 5th Avenue; the circle of people down the block broke up and they ran in all directions.

Still not panicked, and aware of how calmly I was taking all this, I re-started my car and pulled away from the curb.

II. Heading Home

At the intersection of 5th and K, I intended to turn left, toward Cook Inlet, and pick up L Street, which was the "main drag" heading home. I looked for oncoming traffic from the west and noticed that all the telephone poles had snapped partly through about 2 feet off the ground. I began to move around the corner.

And stopped dead. I found out what the man in the doorway had been watching.

A trench (graben) had formed from north to south across 5th Avenue. It was about 100 feet wide and perhaps 30 feet deep and I couldn't see the beginning or end of it. There was a two-story house sitting on a large lot, right smack in the middle of the trench, that had sunk, whole and undamaged, with the ground.

A thought came to me that I should drive down K Street to 9th Avenue, somehow I knew I would be able to get through there. How I knew I will never know, but I was right.

A large condominium apartment building was being constructed at the corner of 9th and L Streets. It was formed concrete and was nearly finished. It was now a low pile of rubble, the intact elevator shaft fallen over and rising from the ruin like the stern of a sinking ship.

There was still almost no traffic, and I turned north on L Street. There seemed to be little other damage except for the 14-story L Street Apartments, which had big "X" cracks beneath every window, from the bottom of the window above to the top of the next down, all the way from the roof to the ground.

In 1964, L Street went downhill and then started uphill again at what was called "Romig Hill" (this area has now been replaced by a freeway). L Street was intact, but there was a huge, 4 or 5-foot high upthrust crack across the base of Romig Hill that cars couldn't drive over. I knew this area, and hoped that I would be able to get to 5th Street, which intersected Romig Hill, and would be able to cut across. Fortunately, I was early enough that that street wasn't blocked by traffic. Again, I "knew" that C Street and Fireweed Lane would get me home.

I was still calm, you understand. I was using my turn signals and looking both ways at intersections, mildly interested in what was happening but feeling detached -- it was almost as if this was an every-day occurrence.

Well, I thought I was calm, but several days later I found out the truth. On the last leg of my drive toward home, I drove for several blocks in the direction of, and with full view of, West High School. I didn't notice anything unusual about the building at all -- but the whole of the second story had collapsed into the first. I know that my mind protected me -- we lived right across the street from the school and if I had seen that damage, God knows what I would have done.

III. What I Found

Neveal took care of the girls at my apartment while I was at work. When I pulled into the driveway, Neveal's car was gone, so I knew she had taken the girls (2 years old and the baby almost 1), to Grandma's. But I still HAD to go inside and check.

The door opened into an L-shaped kitchen. The refrigerator was upright but moved away from the wall, and all of my dishes from the shelves above the stove, counter, and sink had landed INTACT on those surfaces, including three crystal wine glasses that had belonged to my great-grandmother! It was funny because all the dishes were stacked in the same order as they had been on the shelves above, bowls nestled inside each other and sitting on top of dinner plates.

The "L" was another matter -- that was a sort of open pantry area, and on the narrow floor, piled about a foot deep, was broken baby food jars and broken bottles of mayonnaise, pickles, spices, catsup, mustard, and flour, sugar, rice, coffee grounds -- a royal mess.

In the living room, my upright piano had moved away from the wall and onto an oval braided rug that had been sitting in front of it. What was left of the bookshelves and my large collection of books and records filled the greater part of the living room floor.

Even though I knew the girls weren't there, I still ran into their bedroom and checked in and under their beds. I knew it was irrational but there was no way I could have NOT done it.

In the bathroom, all the water had sloshed out of the toilet and the lotions and shampoos and fallen out of the medicine cabinet, and everything breakable, broke. All that goop plus the extra rolls of toilet paper and the bath towels made a soggy mess. Smelled good, though.

Don (my ex-husband) and I were photographers and we had a Leica enlarger sitting on top of the chest of drawers in our bedroom. When the chest overturned, the enlarger landed across the double bed and the only damage was that it was knocked out of focus. Had we been in bed though, we would have at least suffered broken bones. Unbelievable.

This whole examination of the house probably didn't take a full minute. I drove immediately to Grandma's house, expecting the very worst because they lived in a house trailer. When I ran in, Grandpa was reading the newspaper, Grandma and Neveal were sitting at the kitchen table playing cards, and the girls were napping on the couch. Grandma had a large cup collection she'd started before I was born, which she kept in a glass and mirrored, free-standing French cabinet. Not a cup was out of its saucer. Everything looked so normal I thought I had gone crazy and asked them if they'd had an earthquake. Of course they had, but for some reason, it was not as violent at their place, although the Turnagain Slide happened less than a mile away, where some 100 or more homes were totally destroyed.

Neveal had been feeding the kids when the earthquake hit. Joni was sitting in her highchair and Teri was in a baby seat on the kitchen table. Neveal said that when the shaking started, she just literally threw the kids under the table, highchair, baby seat, food and all. It seems odd, but the only thing Joni remembers about the earthquake was that Neveal hurt her when she threw the highchair under the table.

IV. Aftermath

I was so shaken that I didn't go to work the following week and couldn't face tackling the mess in the apartment -- Don had to clean it up by himself. All in all, we lost virtually nothing.

We learned that the earthquake was the strongest ever felt on the North American continent. It was also abnormally long-lasting, most quakes seldom last longer than a minute. At the time, it was rated at 8.9, and later listed as greater than 9 on the Revised scale. The graben across 5th Avenue between K and L was caused by the horizontal movement of a large block of earth that moved about 24 feet to the west (I never learned what that did to the property lines). The Chugach Mountain Range to the east rose 14 feet at the same time. The high keening noise I heard came either from ground movement or from the breaking in half of the houses across the sidewalk from my car -- their fronts remained intact but their backsides went down with the sinking of the graben.

Elaine, who lived in Taft, California, at the time, was hanging clothes in the backyard when the neighbor lady rushed up to the fence. She asked Elaine how she could be so calm, and then said that the news was reporting Anchorage was totally destroyed and all the people were dead. Of course, that wasn't true (only 7 were killed in Anchorage), but I've distrusted the media ever since. Two or three days later, I was able to get a message to her through a Ham operator, but for all that time she didn't know if we were alive or dead.

All of our utilities were out for several days; the radio station had a generator so was on the air right away and Grandpa's battery radio kept us informed. The amazing thing was how the people rallied -- sharing blankets, food, and sleeping space with people in need. Although downtown Anchorage was almost totally destroyed, there was no looting whatsoever. Even though the ground shook from aftershock after aftershock, rescuers -- ordinary people as well as police, fire and military from the army and airforce bases that adjoin Anchorage -- were out before it even got dark that evening, helping wherever they could. It snowed lightly the next morning, but the Salvation Army was out before dawn with free coffee and donuts (the Red Cross didn't arrive for three days, and then charged 10 cents for a cup of coffee, 15 cents for donuts, and a dollar for sandwiches -- I will never contribute to the Red Cross; so far as I am concerned, they are a joke).

As I recall, the earthquake was responsible for some 250 deaths, all tolled, some as far away as Crescent City, California, which was hit by a tsunami. On a scale of earthquake-caused deaths (such as in China and South America), that's hardly any -- but at the time, the Good Friday Earthquake was the greatest natural disaster in the United States, affecting the largest land area and costing billions of dollars in damage.

V. Psychic Precursor

The Friday afternoon a week before the quake, I was stacking baby food jars very carefully in the pantry -- veggies with veggies, juice with juice, etc., all labels facing forward -- when a voice spoke very distinctly inside my head: "Why are you taking so much trouble? They're just going to fall down in the earthquake!" I laughed and felt silly. But they did.