Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [95]
Careful not to dismiss the story as myth, Heaton and Snavely tried to imagine what sort of geological event might explain it. The tsunami from the 1964 Alaska quake, which did so much damage to Port Alberni and Crescent City, delivered to Neah Bay a wave that was only 4.3 feet (1.3 m) above the tide, so a tsunami that could completely submerge the entire cape seemed a remote possibility. Then they wondered—what if the land behind Neah Bay had been hoisted up during a seismic event, draining sea water from the bay and leaving the land temporarily dry? Heaton cautiously wrote that “crustal deformation associated with a nearby subduction earthquake could explain the uplift. However, this and any other conjectures about the significance of this legend are purely speculative.”
If there was a quake, why didn’t Balch mention the shaking when he told the story to Swan? Living as close as they did to the subduction zone, the Makah people must have experienced the worst imaginable ground motion. This doesn’t sound like the kind of detail a person could easily forget. Heaton and Snavely found enough inconsistencies to consider that the story might be “entirely fictional.” In the end, however, they decided it was “noteworthy that such a report exists for a region where there is growing concern that large subduction earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis may be a real possibility.”
Farther down the coast, along the beaches of southern Oregon and northern California, Deborah Carver gathered stories told nearly a hundred years ago by Wiyot, Yurok, Tolowa, and Chetco people. From six different villages along at least two hundred miles (320 km) of coastline came similar cultural memories of a violent rupture that struck at night followed by many aftershocks and tsunami waves that rolled in for hours. Many people were killed as villages were inundated or swept away. By the light of day the survivors found places where the ground had liquefied and slumped. In a Yurok village near what is now Redwood National Park, south of Crescent City, Carver learned that one purpose for the ceremonial “jumping dance” was to repair or relevel the earth after an earthquake.
As geologists continued their investigations, more and more stories like this came to light, including one that I heard in Pachena Bay on the west side of Vancouver Island. Seismologist Garry Rogers of the Pacific Geoscience Centre had told me about a reference he’d found in the provincial archives to an earthquake that rocked villages along the west coast of the island in the middle of a winter’s night long ago. It didn’t take long to find an elder who knew the details, a descendant of the people who once lived in Pachena Bay. The year was 1998 and I was filming another documentary for the CBC called Quake Hunters.
Crossing the rocky spine of the island westbound, I thought about living on the edge of the known world two or three centuries ago when the earth tore itself apart. Wild, remote, and spectacular were words that came to mind. Not for the faint of heart. Since getting from the sheltered eastern shore at Nanaimo to the wild west coast presents a challenge even today, imagine what it was like back then.
After a fast and curvy two-lane tour along the postcard edge of Cameron Lake and through the ancient cedar tunnel of Cathedral Grove, the slow grind up and down the switchbacks of Mount Arrowsmith and the deeply rutted trail beyond Port Alberni became more work than fun. Potholed and scattered with fallen rock, the unpaved washboard logging road that runs parallel to the fjord out to the fishing village of Bamfield and Pachena Bay