Alaska (172 page)

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 advan-1050

tages.' And gradually she inserted herself as an aide to anyone who could utilize her, and thus made herself invaluable.

But the 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: 'I'm speaking of submarine warfare only, as it relates to major shipping lanes. Think of the haven the Arctic Ocean will be if submarines can lurk here, dart out into the Atlantic, and control traffic between North America and Europe!'

This comparison of the two oceans led Kendra to ask: 'Why is it that the Pacific is rimmed by active volcanoes and the Atlantic not?' and this led to the suggestion that they invite Giovanni Spada, the volcanologist from Palmer, to fly north to conduct a seminar for them on recent developments in his field.

In these years T-7, in its ordained peregrinations, lay closer to Barrow than to any other American-Canadian point with a usable airfield, so it was a relatively simple matter for an

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air force plane to ferry Spada and his charts to Barrow and thence to the ice island, where he was greeted warmly by men who had worked with him in the past. His visit was surprisingly rewarding because he had the latest details of the earthquake which had produced the destruction in Mexico City and educated guesses as to when Mount St. Helens might let loose again.

But now discussion focused on copies of the map he had distributed, showing the disposition of volcanoes clustering about the rim of the Pacific, and he warned: 'If I'd had space to show each of the volcanoes along our Aleutian arc, there'd be sixty, and more than forty of them have been active since 1760. This chain of fire, guarding the approaches to the Arctic Ocean, is incomparably the most active in the world insofar as island building, submarine earthquakes and volcanic activity are concerned.'

'Is Alaska that volatile?' a scientist from Michigan asked, and Spada offered a somber statistic: 'Take any time span you wish a decade, a score of years, a century and list all the major earthquakes in the world, all the gigantic volcanic eruptions, and four out of the ten top disturbances, earthquake or volcano, occurred in Alaska.

This is incomparably the world's most volatile segment. Plate tectonics make it so.'

Everyone but Kendra knew this term, and when she asked: 'What's that?' Spada gave a brilliant half-hour summary of how in the middle of the Pacific Ocean' and also in the Atlantic, because in this part of the puzzle we're not unique' magma flowed up through an extensive fissure. 'Believe it or not, this erupted material spreads the ocean floor outward, forming the great plates upon which the surface of the earth rests, including the tallest mountains and the deepest oceans. Accept that and the rest becomes simple.'

Using his hands he showed how the Pacific Plate collided with the North American Plate along the line of the Aleutians, with the former subducting under the latter: 'And voild\

Where this great clashing occurs, volcanoes are born, earthquakes help discharge the tensions.'

The scientists at T-7 queried him for several hours on recent refinements of accepted theories, and he flashed about the Pacific, laying out data from New Zealand, South America, the Antarctic, but coming always back to the Aleutians and his specialty, the Tsunami Warning System, which protected the people of Japan, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and the Hawaiian Islands from the disasters that used to strike them without warning when vast submarine earthquakes launched outward in all directions what used to be called tidal waves.

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There, in the continuous darkness of winter, with their island moving imperceptibly in clockwise motion as if held in orbit by an invisible thread attached to a nonexistent North Pole, the scientists listened as Spada told of the event which had modified the marine history of the Pacific: 'April Fool's Day 1946. Qugang Volcano, out here on Lapak Island, erupted. No great deal. Ashes from the fiery belch didn't even reach Dutch Harbor, let alone the mainland.

But a little while later one hell of a submarine earthquake occurred on the south side of the island. Displaced millions of tons of soft, sliding earth.

'It gave birth to a tsunami of epic dimension. Not a tidal wave rearing its head high in the air, but a lateral displacement of tremendous force headed for the Hawaiian Islands. Three ships that day had it pass right under them and only one even noticed it. ”Sudden rise ocean surface, but less than three feet,” read the log. But five hours later when it hit the town of Hilo on the north coast of the Big Island, at a speed of four hundred eighty miles an hour, it just kept coming and coming and'

coming. But it did no damage. However, when the runoff back to the ocean came, it sucked cars and houses and nearly two hundred people to their deaths.

'A tsunami from somewhere wiped out the first Russian settlement on Kodiak Island in 1792. And you've heard about Lituya, where the water level rose more than seventeen hundred feet.'

The scientists wanted to know if such things were likely to be repeated, and Spada said: 'Absolutely not. The Rim of Fire will act up, of that we can be sure, but the consequences will always be different. If the April '46 earthquake had been pointed two degrees differently, its tsunami would have missed Hawaii by hundreds of miles.

And even so, it wasn't of maximum size, only seven-point-four on the Richter.'

Here Kendra broke in: 'Everybody talks about the Richter scale, but nobody ever says what it is,' and Spada offered a succinct description: 'It's an imprecise but helpful rule of thumb. It's a measurement taken about sixty miles from the point of origin and is reported on a logarithmic scale, which means that each major division is ten times more powerful than the one before. Thus, a four-point Richter has ten times the magnitude of a three-point, which is so weak that humans might not even feel it, while a nine-point ”Richter, which tears 1053

the place apart and is close to the maximum so far recorded, has a magnitude a million times that of a three.'

He told them what they must remember in their studies was that Alaska did have those sixty-odd potentially active volcanoes, and that the word active meant that each one was capable of exploding at any moment: 'So in this part of the world we must be prepared for anything. I'm uneasy about being away from my warning system even for an instructive meeting like this, because a significant volcanic eruption or major slippage of the ocean floor could happen at any time.'

The more the scientists interrogated Spada, the more Kendra saw that their worlds and his interlocked, and that in the Arctic Ocean, while it presented unique features, mainly a permanently frozen body of water, the ever-changing ice followed patterns of its own, just as the edges of plates, where they clashed, established their own bizarre rules. 'But nobody's told me yet,' Kendra said, 'why it's the Pacific that's rimmed with fire and not the Atlantic,' and this provoked considerable guesswork, with some reminding her that Mont Pelee and Etna and Vesuvius had not been trivial volcanoes in their day, but the answer that she preferred came from Spada: 'I've considered two theories. It could be that the size of the Pacific Plate, its sheer magnitude, releases greater forces when it collides with the various continental plates. But a more likely explanation would be that the Atlantic Ocean does not ride upon its own plate. It's not surrounded by fracture zones.'

On this satisfying note she was about to go to bed, but as she left the mess hall alone, Rick being on duty monitoring ocean-current recordings, she saw in the night sky the most tremendous display of the aurora borealis she had witnessed in Alaska.

Running back to where the others still debated, she summoned them outside, where in a mild and windless minus-twenty-four degrees, they witnessed what even they admitted was an incomparable show of vast heavenly arcs, undulating waves and shifting colors.

When the others returned to their work or their beds, for clocks were of little significance in January, Kendra remained behind, trying to correlate these towering cathedrals of the northern lights, the eruptions of the Rim of Fire, the altering salinity of the various parts of the ocean, and the relationships between the Soviet Union and Norway, each of whom claimed with historic justification the ultra crucial Svalbard islands, past which the submarines would have to go in time of trouble.

As she stood there, she became aware that someone had joined her, and she saw that it was Vladimir Afanasi, who

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said: 'It's breathtaking. Maybe twice in a lifetime, spectacles like these.'

She led him to a bench, and as they sat there in the arctic night he said: 'Kasm told me that you took Amy's death . . .' He faltered.

'Amy and Jonathan... it pains me even to say their names. Sometimes I feel that my stay in Desolation was full of heartbreak.'

'The heartbreak never ends, Kendra.' He fell silent and remained so for some time, but it was obvious he wanted to say much more, and so Kendra began, and with her sympathy for people she touched the precise nerve that was troubling him: 'I heard you say once, Mr. Afanasi, that your father and uncle taught you what not to do.

But you never explained.'

'They were tragic figures who tried to do the impossible. Stand with one, leg in the Eskimo world, one in the white man's. Can't be done.'

'You do it.'

'No, no! I've never really left the Eskimo. At the university I was an Eskimo. That's why I didn't graduate. At work in Seattle, always an Eskimo. Here on the T-Seven, I'm the Eskimo, me and the polar bears.'

'What happened with your father and his brother?'

'It really happened with their father, Dmitri Afanasi, my grandfather. Remarkable man. Born and dedicated a Russian Orthodox priest, had no trouble whatever becoming a Presbyterian missionary. But his Athapascan wife was a powerful influence on the boys. She was Russian Orthodox and refused to change. No fuss. No public argument.

”Just leave me alone as I am.”So my father and uncle were Russian and Eskimo, Orthodox and Presbyterian, white man's world, Eskimo's world. And they both died.'

'Are you afraid of the word suicide?'

'No. Not afraid. My son committed suicide, just like the others. My father and uncle were murdered by the dreadful changes in their world.'

'It seems to skip generations, the impact I mean. Your grandfather had no problems.

His two sons did. Your generation had no problems. Your son did.'

'It's never that simple, Kendra. My brother, a wonderful lad, committed suicide at nineteen.'

'Oh Jesus! What a terrible burden!' She choked, lifted her hands to her lips, then turned to embrace this sterling Eskimo who had brought so much meaning to her life.

As new cathedrals were built, great towering edifices constructed of move-1055

ment and Hght and heavenly design, they sat side by side on the bench, speculating on the dark significance of the north.

HISTORY OFTEN REPEATS, BUT RARELY DOES IT MAKE A complete closed circle, yet that is what happened to Malcolm Venn when he was called upon to reverse his family's efforts of over half a century ago.

The Ross and Venn families of Seattle were among the most respected on the Pacific Coast. Self-educated, principled, concerned always with the advancement of society and generous with their charities, they demanded only one thing: a monopoly on trade with Alaska. Once assured of that, and satisfied that it was protected by legislation in Washington, the Ross & Raglan heirs were about as worthy public citizens as the nation produced.