Marrow Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

foundations poured and abandoned, now overgrown with vetch and fireweed.
    I parked in what would have been a driveway. There were cans and cigarette butts strewn about the gravel. A potato chip bag in the tall grass. Unimaginative graffiti all over the walls. Half a dozen gangly adolescent red alders stood around the rocky floor like derelicts. Alders take root like this after disturbances to the ecosystem. For generations after logging and fires and other disruptions, the swift and the adaptable take over, not letting a spare inch of earth go to waste. Like the local teenagers who clambered through the nettles to scrawl their secret names into the cement, the alders were opportunists. A couple of the trees even sprouted from cracks in the bottom corners, reaching up to touch the tagged walls. I could almost see spray-paint canisters at the ends of their skinny branches.
    I walked around the foundation, found the place where the cement had caved enough to create a few steps—the way in. I stretched one leg down into the space and drew it back. I didn’t want to climb down. I knew how the crack came to be there. If you looked closely enough at me, you would find cracks from the same day, the same hour. Minute fissures in my bones. A few half-connected pathways in my brain.
     
    May 1, 1993, was warm, with a taste of summer in the air. The primroses and hyacinth and daphne were blooming. Chartreuse tree tips and pink blossoms. Sunshine on water. All the water: the lakes and rivers and canals; and Puget Sound, the Salish Sea. After weeks of rain, people on the streets of cities and towns in the region were cheerfully stupefied by the glare.
    At 9:09 a.m. the ambient noise of the cities and suburbs and seaside towns went mute. A barely recognizable shift, like how the air softens just before a lightning storm. This was the moment when pets became perturbed, barked or squawked or fled under beds. Then almost before registering the difference, there was a rumbling that at first sounded like faraway thunder, then felt like a truck barreling by, then a train coming head-on. Then everything not bolted to the walls, and some things that were, fell. Books off shelves and dishes out of cupboards, food out of refrigerators and art off walls. Lamps, chairs, televisions, toppled. It was loud, not just the city tumbling, but the earth itself. Louder and louder because the sensitive bones of the inner ear register both movement and sound. The ground was rippling, rolling. Witnesses in downtown Seattle described the skyscrapers of the skyline as “doing the wave” like fans at a Mariners game. As the shaking continued, doors fell off hinges when their wood splintered. Foundations cracked and sunk, and houses clattered free of their supposedly solid bases. Streets split like stretched fabric, and parked cars rolled down hills. So many cars scraping and tumbling down the hills and into piles, into the sides of buildings. Bridges wobbled, weak-kneed, and drivers felt like a great wind was blowing across the road; they careened into guardrails and one another. Skyscrapers bowed, dropping whole gleaming pools of window to the ground below. People were in stairwells and doorways and under desks and in the aisles of grocery stores with cans and cleaning products and cereal all over them. Parents and nannies and teachers held children to their chests, covering their heads, practically suffocating them, the shaking going on and on—so much longer than they thought possible. Patrons of the Woodland Park Zoo held tight to the railings and clenched their eyes as the elephants trumpeted and the mother lion froze, crouched with her young, and let out a deep, uncanny yowl, and the polar bears, diving in their pool, clawed at the Plexiglas, wide-eyed, staring into the eyes of the people on the other side who fled as the glass crackled and droplets of water crept through.
    All that time, while we cowered—nauseated, crying, waiting for the stillness—a