Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THIS IS CHANCE! The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It TogetherBy Jon Mooallem A thrill junkie who embraced every tempest of nature, John Muir was in Yosemite in 1872 when an earthquake made him feel like a sailor on the deck of a sea-tossed ship. “A noble earthquake!
” he shouted in wobble-legged joy. “A noble earthquake! ” It’s unlikely that anything close to Muir’s exuberance was heard in Alaska on March 27, 1964, when the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America remade the topography of the fledgling Last Frontier State. It was a monster.
Measuring 9. 2 in magnitude, the megathrust quake shook the ground for more than four minutes, as 600 miles of fault ruptured and moved up nearly 60 feet in places. Large buildings were knocked from their foundations, houses slipped and crumbled, sidewalks and sewer mains twisted and broke apart. Beaches became cliffs, and cliffs flattened into beaches.
Much of downtown Anchorage looked like “the devil ground his heel into it,” as one reporter wrote. The J. C. Penney, the city’s cherished department store, was largely rubble.
The quake shook Seattle’s Space Needle, more than 1,400 miles to the south, and rattled many parts of California. The tsunami that followed was a lethal punch, drowning at least one coastal village in Alaska, nearly overwhelming others. In all, at least 129 people died, mostly from landslides and huge waves. The Great Alaska Earthquake, also known as the Good Friday quake, left behind a graphic tutorial in the power of plate tectonics, which was then still mostly a theory.
Today, if you drive southeast of Anchorage, along Turnagain Arm, you can still see scraps of the ghost forests, trees that were plunged below the briny surface and frozen in place. It’s an earth science lesson that even those who failed Geology 101, Rocks for Jocks, can comprehend. This colossus of crustal upheaval is at the center, though it’s not the star, of Jon Mooallem’s nonfiction account of a handful of quirky characters who rose to the occasion on that dreadful Friday. His story is built around Genie Chance, a part-time radio reporter at KENI in Anchorage, a mother of three who became the voice of reason, sanity and vital information at a time when Alaska felt as if it had been cut off from the rest of the planet.
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The book is a portrait of a young woman, a young profession and a young city. Chance’s journalism-on-the-fly was heroic. When other voices went for hyperbole and panic, she was measured and mesmerizing. It won her a large following, and a near cultlike status in the state where she later served as a legislator.
She was a feminist before that word came into wide use, an Alaskan original by way of her native Texas. Imagine Sarah Palin without the you-betcha malaprops and the political grievances. She also suffered under the blunt northern variation of institutional sexism, and from the physical blows of her husband, who regularly beat her when he was drunk. Her life was “the whole women’s movement in a nutshell,” as one colleague said.
On that Friday when the earth moved in Alaska, Chance more than met her moment. Anchorage was barely 50 years old, with a metro population of around 100,000. Chance was 37, “lithe and bewitchingly beautiful,” with a charismatic smile, in Mooallem’s sketch. She was in her car with her son at 5:36 p.
m. when everything changed. Electrical wires snapped overhead.
“The ground started to roll.”
People who’d been strolling suddenly tumbled; it was impossible to walk. The pavement didn’t instantly crumble, but rolled in waves, rippling like sheets in the wind. Amid a showering of glass, Chance heard men shouting, “Fourth Avenue is gone! ” Chance would soon be on the air, her station powered initially by emergency generators.
She tried to vet information before going live with it, and passed on pleas and updates from family members looking for loved ones. Over the next three days, the state experienced 52 separate aftershocks, 11 of them greater than 6 on the Richter scale. Through it all, while racing back and forth to take care of her family, she remained calm. She understood, better than most of those around her, that mass hysteria would lead to mayhem.
She asked grocers to open their stores, and cautioned people against hoarding. “I was responsible for reassuring them that the world had not come to an end,” she said later. Mooallem does a nice job of showing the domino of damage in cinematic slow motion — the crevasses opening in city streets, the land slinking and sliding, the indiscriminate collapse of homes of both the rich and the poor. And he’s astute in explaining the science: the crust of the Pacific Plate pushing under the North American Plate.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Anchorage was nearly unrecognizable after the quake. He also brings to life a half-dozen or so ordinary people who acted in extraordinary ways. The old saying of how women feel about Alaska men — the odds are good, but the goods are odd — certainly applied. But these oddballs were heroic, each in his own way.
There was a psychology professor, Bill Davis, who marshaled the volunteers of his Alaska Rescue Group into action. A theater director, Frank Brink, was determined to stage “Our Town” soon after the disaster, to prove that life and storytelling go on. A sociologist, Enrico Quarantelli, doggedly documented human behavior under extreme duress. And Alaska’s first governor, William A.
Egan (no relation), proved as steady as Genie Chance. But this is a very strange book. The big land of Alaska and the outsize people who inhabit it have long inspired some terrific tomes — Jack London’s “Call of the Wild,” John McPhee’s “Coming Into the Country,” Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild. ” The main problem with “This Is Chance!
” is that it fails to rise to the drama of the event. That would be fine if the character drama played out in a satisfying way. But here it comes up short as well. The book moves about in time, jumping ahead and then back again.
It’s one thing to leap off the chronological ladder, quite another to leave the reader confused or — worse — caring less about people in the story. Our hero fades and then disappears rather suddenly, with many pages still left in the book. At that point, the author appears, a “wry and sometimes laconic-seeming writer with an off-kilter jaw,” as Mooallem writes about himself. This is trouble, and things go downhill from there.
All due respect to my fellow scribe, a bright and resourceful writer, but I wanted more of Genie Chance and less of her chronicler. Chance divorced the abusive husband, had a good run at state politics, but then suffered illness and family tragedy at a relatively young age. She got dementia and died at 71, in 1998, at the Juneau Pioneer Home. She left behind many recordings, not just of the days when she was a lifeline through the airwaves, but of her experiences as a true pioneer in a state where that tag is too easily thrown around.
The quake certainly has its place in history. This remarkable woman deserves her own.
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