A Crack in the Edge of the World (47 page)

But all is in fact nowhere near so well as it looks. The town of Portola Valley, it turns out, has been built exactly astride two of the most active traces of the San Andreas Fault. It is a deeply dangerous place, liable to be destroyed at any moment. Much of the community is quite uninsurable, and many of its houses and offices deserve to be evacuated and abandoned.

For the last twenty years geologists—fascinated by the hubris that they seem to encounter more than most, and shaking their heads at humankind's insistent folly in living in places where they shouldn't—have been arriving on Portola Valley's elegant doorsteps, making risk analyses and recommendations, some of them called for, some not, and all, in essence, telling the townsfolk they are errant blockheads for remaining where they are. One report says the town hall must be moved. Another suggests the school be shifted. The firehouse has to be somewhere else. The water lines, the electricity cables, the sewers—all are at risk from this trace or that trench or that area of expected liquefaction. But as to where each and all should go—a hundred yards this way or that, a mile away, ten miles away—no one ever agrees.

Certainly everyone purports to care. All of the various reports are read, digested, and discussed, and town meeting are staged and PowerPoint presentations are made—quite possibly by the very same scientists whose millions permitting them to live in so pleasing a place were made from inventing PowerPoint and the machines on which the presentations are shown in the first place.

But then the reports are quietly shelved, and another bottle of sauvignon blanc is uncorked, and Portola Valley's well-contented and outwardly happy residents settle down once more to watch the stars come out, and to reflect perhaps on how splendidly American is their way of life. It is a way of life quite unrivaled in its quality anywhere in the world, and certainly is in no way like the lives of those countless thousands in more obviously earthquake-prone places like Bam or Agadir or Tangshan or Banda Aceh—or even, for heaven's sake, like the lives of those who had perforce to go off to live in the great tent cities of San Francisco almost a hundred years before.

          
Fell Giesar roar'd, and struggling shook the ground;
          
Pour'd from red nostrils, with her scalding breath,
          
A boiling deluge o'er the blasted heath;
          
And, wide in the air, in misty volumes hurl'd
          
Contagious atoms o'er the alarmed world
.

E
RASMUS
D
ARWIN
, The Botanic Garden,
1791

I
T WAS THE MIDDLE OF MAY 2004, AND I HAD FINISHED MY
spring term of teaching in San Francisco. I packed up—the paltry amount of luggage I had brought with me from Massachusetts somehow having expanded alarmingly—then pointed my car northward to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. From there—no northbound toll, I was pleased to see—I drove briskly off homeward, though somewhat indirectly, since I was adding an extra 4,000 miles going by way of Alaska.

I had long cherished an ambition to drive through early-melting snowfields along the entire length of the Alaska Highway. But now there was more than a little geological resonance to making such a journey—not least because two of America's largest-ever earthquakes occurred in the state in 1964 and in 2002, with the latter taking place on a fault system that has provable links with the San Andreas. The connection between the events of San Francisco and Alaska serves as a reminder—in just the way the Gaia theory likes to suppose—that everything that happens in the natural world is connected in one enormous and living global system.

Everyone who is old enough and who was there remembers every last detail of the first, the great Good Friday Earthquake of 1964 that ruined Anchorage, the biggest city in Alaska. Not all who experienced it chose to stay. When I was on the San Andreas Fault, investigating a site south of Mendocino close to where the pygmy redwood trees grow, I went flying with an Alaskan, a pilot who told me he had lived through it. He had fled but was still disturbed, still undergoing a prolonged period of therapy, and still terrified by the sudden onset of anything unexpected.

His memory is vivid and indelible. He remembers being parked by the side of the road in his parents' Ford station wagon, maybe five miles south of the city. He recalls, as though it were yesterday, being thrown out of the car onto the road, and then holding on to the asphalt with his fingers for what seemed to him like five full minutes while the road bucked and kicked like a bronco beneath him, never giving up, roaring with the sound of a typhoon. Today, forty years later, he is terrified by any sudden noise, and he feels sick crossing bridges and standing beside tall buildings, anything that looks as though it might be vulnerable to an almighty quake. Only when he is aloft, far from the danger that the earth can bring, does he feel perfectly safe.

The Prince William Sound Earthquake of March 27, 1964, as the Anchorage quake is officially known, remains the second largest ever recorded in the world, with a moment magnitude of between 8.9 and 9.3—far more powerful than San Francisco's. It was only marginally less gigantic than the 1960 earthquake in Chile, which holds the record for all modern observed events: This had a magnitude of 9.5, killed 2,000 people, and left 2 million homeless. It was slightly stronger than the Sumatran submarine quake of 2004, which killed more than 275,000 with its terrible tsunamis.

Although far fewer people lived nearby, the 1964 Alaska quake could have been proportionately just as terrible, had it not been a bank holiday in the state. The event occurred at 5:36
P.M.
, and, as the pilot in California recalled with more accuracy than most, it did indeed last a very long time: Almost four minutes of continuous and highly destructive shaking occurred.

The ultimate cause of Alaskan earthquakes generally is, once again, the northward movement of the Pacific Plate—the same plate whose same northward movement in California, where it rubs up against the North American Plate, triggers the notorious events that occur along the San Andreas Fault. There is, however, a difference. Up in Alaska the curves of the plates and the topographical setting are such that the northward movement of the plate does not necessarily cause it to slide along beside the North American Plate when it encounters it. Instead it dives underneath it, dragging trillions of tons of material down as it does so and causing the North American Plate to bulge up and wrinkle.

That is the ultimate cause. The proximate cause of the event was that the northbound Pacific Plate had for some reason become stuck beneath its neighbor in one place; and, because it had been stuck like that for several centuries, enormous stresses built up around it. Suddenly on this particular black Good Friday, whatever had been holding it back suddenly released. The Pacific Plate dived down and northward, the North American Plate jumped up and southward—and a vast shaking occurred and a huge amount of damage was done in consequence.

A barely imaginable 100,000 square miles of territory was deformed by the event, all of it centered around the earthquake's focus in Prince William Sound. In some places whole tracts of landscape were thrust upward by more than thirty feet, by far the greatest vertical displacement of any modern American earthquake. Much of central Anchorage was ruined: Huge cracks opened up in the ground, scores of houses sank without trace into liquefied earth, and throughout the region tsunamis—one in particular topped with blazing oil from a Texaco tank farm it had destroyed en route—came roaring up narrow creeks, flattened villages, and carried boats and flotsam far inland. Some 135 people were killed, and damage said to be worth $300 million was done. Waves killed and injured people in Washington and Oregon and caused mayhem in Northern California. Power stations, docks, bridges, roads, and railway lines were damaged all around the central part of Alaska—a cruel blow to a state only five years old and barely much beyond the pioneer stage of its young history.

The second earthquake, which occurred on November 3, 2002, some seventy miles north of Anchorage, was by contrast a true strike-slip event, much like the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Moreover it took place on a fault—the Denali Fault—which looks, from a cursory glance at any good tectonic map, to be a northern extension of the San Andreas. It killed no one and did precious little damage, but it was enormous. It caused sideslips of as much as eighteen feet, having struck with a magnitude of 7.9—almost the same as the 1906 event. It was of particular concern because for 200 miles it tore along a fault trace that crosses the state's most vulnerable asset—the huge four-foot-diameter pipeline that brings crude oil down from the drilling sites beside the Arctic Ocean to the docks on the Pacific, where tankers can load it to take it to fuel the world.

ONE OF THE MAIN
reasons for my taking this trip to Alaska was to see how the pipeline had fared, curiosity tourism aside. But not only that: The journey up to the Arctic would also take me along the natural northern extension of the Californian fault systems, and it would allow me to see, for one final time, the great Pacific Plate in all its northern manifestations.

And so, one by one, I would pass by—and on occasion stop beside—the monumental pieces of scenery that owe their existence to the relentless movement of this plate. Mount Shasta, an enormous snow-covered volcano in Northern California; Crater Lake in southern Oregon; St. Helens and Rainier and Olympus and the peaks of British Columbia—all were active and spectacular pieces of evidence of the movement of the confused mélange of plates that jostle for space to the north of the Mendocino Triple Junction.

DECIDUOUS TREES
began to fade into the forests full of evergreens a couple of hundred miles north of San Francisco, and there was still thick snow on the rim of Crater Lake. I stopped in a comfortably eccentric country inn a few miles south of the old volcano—eccentric because the owners, great dog enthusiasts, were in the middle of organizing a boot camp for husky mushers. Dog teams, most of them preparing for that most Olympian of dogsled races, the Iditarod, were practicing their skills in the meadows around the hotel. The huskies, friendly and with ever-searching tongues, were everywhere; they rose at 5:00
A.M.
with a chorus of happy howls, and so I rose, too, and pushed on northward, past other mountains, past other breathtaking manifestations of raw North American geology.

Once across the Canadian frontier, there are three possible routes north, each around 500 miles long, between Vancouver and the southern end of the Alaska Highway. I chose the most westerly, through Squamish and Whistler, up to the small town of Lillooet, where the scenery became more rugged and the feel of the country suddenly more remote. I met a farmer who grew ginseng, and a forester who worked in a place called Bella Coola, as pleasing a name as I had heard for many months.

And indeed, the names of places began now to have a pioneering sound to them: 93 Mile House, 150 Mile House, Soda Creek, Moose Heights, Summit Lake. Others were simply peculiar: Cinema, Hydraulic, Horsefly, Stoner. In even the smallest towns there were Chinese restaurants, their owners all new immigrants: I spoke more Cantonese there in the heart of the Rockies than I did when I lived in Hong Kong. And between the towns, the rivers began to rage more wildly, the mountains were needle sharp, and up on the passes there were still drifts of late-spring snow.

And there were bears. Big black bears, lumbering along the now all-but-deserted roadway, looking up briefly as I passed, hoping for something more interesting than the grubs for which they were foraging. But the highway code in these parts discourages feeding: In a bear's brain, it is a mere step from the idea that
roads mean pantry
to
child means lunch
.

I reached the Alaska Highway after a day and a half of driving: I turned onto a side road to go down the Peace River Valley and joined the highway itself a few miles up from where it officially begins, at Dawson Creek—I had a deep desire not to take a photograph of my Land Rover beside the sign marking Mile Zero, as every other driver with a bull bar and a jerrican of fuel likes to do. So, after turning left at Chetwynd (with chain-saw sculptors plying their unamusing trade on all sides), I joined it at Fort St. John, beside Milepost 47. To reach the official northern end, next to where the American government is putting up a new antimissile site at Delta Junction, Alaska, would be a further 1,343 miles. Three days' hard driving.

The Alaska Highway, work on which was started by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at President Roosevelt's order in the spring of 1942, took 10,000 soldiers just eight months to build. It had two avowed purposes: to connect a set of airfields that allowed aircraft to be ferried from Great Falls, Montana, up to Fairbanks and from there to Russia, as part of the Lend Lease program; and to allow troops to be sent quickly to Alaska in the event the Japanese tried to invade. (They did, however, by seizing a scattering of islands along several hundred miles of Alaska's Aleutian chain; but the logistical threat posed by the newly built Alaska Highway prevented their pressing any farther east.)

The route that the engineers took followed old Indian trails, logging routes, and rivers, and the unpaved gravel Alcan Highway, as it was first known, was formally opened to military traffic in September 1942, a scant five months after the Japanese had taken Attu and Kiska Islands. The two teams that had been constructing it from either end met at Contact Creek, beside the present-day Milepost 568. Which is close to where I spent my second and only bad night on the road.

The first night had been spent in an inn at Fort St. John; the second was at Milepost 613—and the only respite from a thirteen-hour day of driving those 566 intervening miles was (aside from my first caribou, moose, Stone sheep, mountain goat, and baby buffalo sightings) a boiling water pool at Liard Hot Springs, a park in northern British Columbia that supports small gray fish that seem to thrive in scalding water, and any number of passersby who imagine they will be refreshed by the sulfurous waters that, courtesy of the Pacific Plate's activity, are bubbling up out of the ground. There were six supersized San Diegans in the waters, disobligingly stripped to their underwear. I kept my clothes on, and drove ever northward.