Marrow Island Read Online Free PDF

slab of rock beneath the terranes of Puget Sound was shifting, slipping into the mantle of the North American plate along the South Whidbey Island Fault. Tremors were felt as far north as Juneau, Alaska, and as far south as Salinas, California. It was three minutes in which most of the West Coast of the United States and Canada braced itself.
    “It’s the Big One,” we all thought, we all felt in our hearts. The one geologists had been warning us about for years, the one we had been preparing for at school with earthquake drills. There we were, the children of Puget Sound, under our desks, holding on to the legs as they scooted back and forth across the linoleum, doing what we had practiced. I became motion sick; others peed their pants or wailed for their moms.
    Meanwhile, all those sparkling waters, displaced by the drop in the seafloor, were drawn back, away from their shores, leaning to the west, and even before the first aftershocks, like an unseen hand smoothing a tablecloth, the waters began their inevitable rush back into their basins. The ten-to-twenty-foot waves washed out waterfronts, sluicing up river deltas, pounding docks, houseboats, locks, bridges, grain and coal terminals, capsizing fishing boats, and scouring the decks of barges. Landslides along the rim of the bays caused more tsunamis, so that the thunder of water and the thunder of earth folded over each other, and our ears couldn’t distinguish which death might be coming for us.
    Just over three thousand people died, but it wasn’t, in fact, the Big One. Three minutes and twelve seconds of a magnitude 7.9 quake. It was a relatively shallow quake, in one of the many tertiary faults within the Cascadia Subduction Zone. But the nature of the sound, with its cities built on wetlands around river deltas and in floodplains, created a sort of echo for the earth’s waves, a reverberation of the earth that amplified the shaking on the surface.
    The story of the May Day Quake was told over and over again, in different ways, by different people. By scientists and engineers and first responders. By pilots and passengers of planes taxiing into SeaTac who witnessed it from the air. By survivors of the fires that broke out and survivors of boats and ferries capsized and survivors of collapsed bridges and tunnels. Like aftershocks, the stories. To retell it was to relive it. For years afterward, the quake was documented, analyzed, broadcast, and anthologized. I even wrote about it once, on the tenth anniversary, for the Sentinel , my college paper. By then, the May Day Quake had been consumed in the popular imagination and nearly forgotten, relegated to anecdote, the way Katrina would be a dozen years later. It hadn’t been the Big One, after all; there would be more stories to tell someday.
     
    I turned my back to the foundation to look at the view. Through the trees across the street and down a rocky embankment was a drop to the strait, where the currents at tide change churned like water in a washing machine. Up the road were other abandoned parcels, barely visible driveways leading to vacant foundations, as if someone had plucked the houses right out of the ground, leaving cavities in the shape of living spaces. I could feel the house that wasn’t there, rising out of the gaping concrete mouth. The alders shivered in the breeze, a sound so familiar that I shivered, too.
    Turning back to what was behind me—or not behind me—I did what most people in my generation do when faced with the ubiquitous and strange: I took pictures with my phone. Then I climbed back in my car, turned on Neko Case, and drove the rest of the cracked road into the village.
     
    Orwell had hardly changed in twenty years. What had been destroyed had been rebuilt or replaced or grown over, but everything still matched up with the map in my mind. Anchorage Street ran the length of the business district. A small-town main street, with the ferry terminal and a shoreline park, a few