But Spada also monitored those earthquakes which were not submarine, or those which transmitted their power directly to inland locations. Thus, in 1964 he had caught the first tremors of that violent quake which struck Anchorage, dropping sections of the city forty feet, raising others, and creating havoc across a wide area. More than a hundred and thirty lives were lost in that quake which first registered on the Richter scale as 8.6 but which was later calculated to have been 9.2, the greatest ever recorded in North America. It was about ten times greater than the quake which had destroyed San Francisco in 1906.
Spada maintained a master map, one that showed in extended detail the supposed structure of the Aleutian chain, and whenever an earthquake struck in that region he filled in with red crayon that portion of the Aleutian arc. To his assistants he said, when his map was completed: 'Gradually, since 1850, we've noted the areas where the plates have shifted,' and he pointed to nine different arcs which filled in spaces on his map. 'At each of these sites an earthquake has eventuated. The plates have readjusted.'
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 seismographs 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.
1In 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 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 t
o 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 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 ± 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 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 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.
Tears started in her eyes, and to control them she snapped: 'To hell with their learning and ambitions. The two I loved, I couldn't even save their lives,' and when she thought of Amy and Jonathan she cried out in despair: 'Wasted years. Wasted lives.' Had some villager whispered to her at this moment, 'But, Kendra! The people of this village, the men who tossed you in the blanket, we'll remember you as long as we live, for your spirit walked with us, and we felt it,' she would not have believed her.
AS SOON AS SHE ADJUSTED TO THE FACT THAT SHE WAS the only woman on the island, Kendra's life on T-7 became as exciting as she had hoped it would be. Afanasi, as manager of the station, assigned her a paid job of supervising the paperwork streaming into and out of the offices, a task which the senior scientists were happy to have her perform. At first she was not happy with the apparent assumption that as a woman, secretarial work was all she was capable of performing, and she complained to Rick: 'It's not exactly what a liberated woman has in mind these days.' But when she found that monitoring the flow of information placed her in a critical position, because she knew the latest news before anyone else, she conceded: 'A job like mine does have certain advantages.' And gradually she inserted herself as an aide to anyone who could utilize her, and thus made herself invaluable.
But th
e more profound reward she garnered from her bold decision to propose to Rick over public radio and her later insistence that she accompany him back to his ice island came from the long, unstructured discussions these great scientists held during the endless hours when the perpetual darkness of November to February made human contacts and the dissection of human problems almost essential. Kendra frequently found herself in conversation with several scientists at a table in the mess, and one of them would casually say something like: 'Suppose that the Soviet Union were somehow to gain total control of Norway. She would then dominate exactly fifty percent of the Arctic Ocean,' and another would counter: 'But if Alaska, Canada and Greenland can maintain a union of mutual interest, they'll control the half that's nearest the North Pole, and that provides its own advantages for domination.'
Almost always the debate called for maps, and Kendra kept folded in her pocket a dog-eared copy of the National Geographic map which had accompanied the issue containing that compelling portrait of the little Eskimo girl on the cover, so quite often the scientists, although they had government maps of their own, gathered about Kendra, looking at hers. From such discussions she learned that the group of islands named Svalbard, which she had known as Spitsbergen, was vital to any military use of the Arctic Ocean, and everyone predicted that it would be used, because only in the trough off Svalbard were the seas deep enough to allow sophisticated submarine warfare; all other exits were much too shallow. 'And,' explained a scientist with military training, 'since the Svalbard Trough connects with the Atlantic, that ocean will be twice as important as the Pacific.' When the Pacific experts challenged this, he admitted: