Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [96]
Around a crackling fire in a big stone hearth in a house just above the beach sat half a dozen young children, mesmerized by one of their elders. Outside, pounding surf and a fine mist of rain washed against the dark green shore. Sitting on a spattered windowsill, his back to the churning sea, Robert Dennis, chief councilor of the Huu-ay-aht Nation, waited until all the young eyes were trained on his weather-beaten face and then began his story in a low, quiet voice that forced the children to sit forward and listen carefully.
“The story that I’m about to tell happened a long, long time ago and was told to us by Chief Louis Nookmis,” said Dennis, grandson of Nookmis, the man who originally told this story to an anthropologist back in 1964. “Some of you are directly related to that man,” the chief added, nodding and calling the names of several children at his feet.
Like the ancient cedars of the ghost forest in Willapa Bay, the Huu-ay-aht people felt a violent shudder in the earth one dark and stormy winter night many generations ago. “They had gone to bed,” said Chief Dennis, “just like any other normal night. Had gone to bed, gone to sleep. And they were awoken during the night when the earth began to shake.” He paused, letting the words sink in. “The earth shook. Startled the people. They woke up.” He shrugged very slightly. “Thinking everything was over, they just relaxed. A little while later, the water came in real fast. Swept their homes away. Swept everything away.” The children were transfixed. “The water just came too fast. They didn’t have time to go to their canoes. So all the people that were living there were drowned. They were all wiped out.”
Chief Dennis let the thought sink in and then explained how it was that the story itself survived the death of an entire village. The modern fishing village of Bamfield is next door to the rebuilt Native community where Chief Dennis and his people now live. On slightly higher ground, however, in the trees behind the beach, was another settlement of people who watched what happened that horrible night long ago and who did live to tell the tale.
“They who lived at ‘House-Up-Against-Hill’ the wave did not reach because they were on high ground ... Because of that they came out alive. They did not drift out to sea with the others.” This according to the 1964 transcript of the story told by Chief Nookmis. For scientists eager to follow the story back in time, the original translation was a bit garbled, making it impossible to figure out when this disaster might have happened. Years later Robert Dennis would help organize a more thorough translation that narrowed the timeframe somewhat. The newer, more detailed version placed the event some time between 1640 and 1740, the same period in which geologists had pegged the last megathrust earthquake on Cascadia’s fault.
Brian Atwater is fond of saying that “the earthquakes had written their own history” by dropping segments of the coastline a meter or two, by forcing sandy seawater across the freshly sunken land, and by causing the edge of the earth to crack. The problem was that by the mid-1990s researchers had reached an impasse in their attempts to define how large the quakes had been. The answer to this question was important because emergency planners and civil engineers needed to know what they were up against when it came to designing new buildings and reinforcing old ones. “How great an earthquake should a school or hospital be designed to withstand? How large a tsunami should govern evacuation plans on the coast?” asked Atwater in a book he cowrote several years later.
Atwater’s colleague David Yamaguchi had come closer than anyone else to nailing a more specific date. He went back to the ghost forest at Copalis River several times in search of wood cores that might contain enough growth rings to reveal what year the trees had died. He put together a