Here are some highlights from this 2020 book about the 1964 Anchorage earthquake, which measured 9.2 on the Richter scale:
* Twenty-three hundred miles south of Anchorage, in an elegant, modernist ranch home in Pasadena, California, a sixty-three-year-old man and his wife were settling down in their living room with cocktails. The man was an odd duck—a rumpled intellectual and avid nudist who wrote many abjectly bad love poems about women who were not his wife. But he was also an accomplished seismologist—he’d developed the scale on which the magnitude of earthquakes is measured—and was passionate and single-minded enough about his work to have installed a seismograph in his living room. The machine was cumbersome and ugly, mounted on its own cabinet and topped by a large metallic tumbler. He’d wedged the device between a grandfather clock and a stylishly upholstered club chair.
The man’s wife hated the seismograph—she initially regarded it as “a rather brutally coarse intrusion among her neat furnishings,” he wrote. He insisted that she had come to appreciate having this apparatus in her living room—but, room—but, really, who knows: the man was not necessarily someone whose sensitivity to the emotions of others should be trusted.
Now, at 7:42 p.m.—5:42 p.m. Anchorage time—as they sat together, listening to a concert on the radio, the man looked over and saw the seismograph’s needle jerking.
“There’s a great earthquake recording,” Charles Richter remarked to his wife.
“Yes?” Lillian Richter replied sleepily. He was talking over the concert.
* Suddenly, the Stage Manager starts talking to those people a thousand years in the future. His logic here is convoluted, but sound: knowing that he is a character in Wilder’s play himself, he knows that what he says to us, in the theater, will be preserved in the script for those future humans to read. “So—people a thousand years from now,” he says. “This is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”
It’s among the most famous passages in Our Town —a kind of existential credo whose mix of determination and desperation echoes the feeling in Anchorage in 1964. The Stage Manager is saying: Remember us. Recognize us. It’s one community’s simple insistence that it mattered, made urgent by a suspicion that, ultimately, it might not matter. In other words, the overwhelming disaster everyone in Our Town is confronting is irrelevance: a creeping awareness that no matter how secure and central each of us feels within the stories of our own lives, we are, in reality, just specks of things, at the mercy of larger forces that can blot us out indifferently or by chance.
* …time itself started to seem like a slow-moving natural disaster, imperceptibly shaking everything apart. Maybe nothing in our world is durable or stable. Maybe everything runs on pure chance.
He wondered how we are supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness. What can we hold on to that’s fixed?
* The Cold War was escalating. It had been less than a year since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Civil Defense was increasingly desperate to fulfill its mandate of preparing Americans for nuclear war with the Soviet Union. One of the agency’s animating insights was that a bomb dropped on the United States wouldn’t just cause physical destruction, destruction, but pandemonium. Civil Defense experts predicted “a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population,” as one historian would put it. “Under this strain, many people would regress to an earlier level of needs and desires. They would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children.” Survivors would be panicked and powerless, but also aggressive and cruel—liberated into violence, left to compete for limited resources and food. It was up to Civil Defense to preemptively suppress that disorder, to guard against this self-inflicted second wave of any Soviet attack.
Armageddon proved to be a hard thing to practice for, however—or even to envision in detail. The government saw natural disasters as realistic proxies. Each community hit by an earthquake, hurricane, or flood was like a laboratory—a full-scale simulation—in which to scrutinize the turmoil of nuclear war in advance. A team of sociologists, parachuting into those disaster areas, might glean truths about human behavior that could help Civil Defense maintain control when the world’s most fearsome unnatural disaster struck. In Washington, the three sociologists were taken aback by the military’s interest in their work. (It was a bizarre meeting, Quarantelli would remember—“mostly them talking, rather than us.”) But they accepted the government’s offer without hesitation and immediately got to work.
* Official records, Quarantelli realized, were “social constructions”: authoritative fictions that didn’t always match the reality they claimed to preserve.
By the time Quarantelli finished his doctorate in 1959, he had learned to distrust documents and official narratives of any kind. They possessed a kind of problematic gravity, pulling at people’s memories of an experience and distorting them. After a dramatic event, it didn’t take long for people to begin revising their stories of it, if only subconsciously, to conform to their expectations of how it was supposed to have gone: in retrospect, decisions were always said to have been made methodically and by the appropriate people; smart decisions made by women during an emergency were frequently attributed to men. To piece together the real story, Quarantelli was learning, you had to talk to as many different people as you could, or be there to scrutinize the situation for yourself. At the time of the quake, five years into his career as a sociologist, Quarantelli’s compulsion to notice everything and passively accept nothing already appeared to define him—not just as a social scientist, but as a human being. Years later, near the end of his life, he would begin an oral history interview for the Disaster Research Center by saying, “I was born on November 10, 1924”—and when he added, “For some reason, I remember nothing about the first five years of my life,” he was clearly joking, but also sounded genuinely aggrieved by this lapse in his observational record.
* Virtually none of the panic, violence, or other antisocial behavior the sociologists had arrived ready to document seemed to be materializing, either. Yutzy soon learned that some of the volunteers Dick Taylor recruited to guard the vulnerable storefronts downtown after the quake, and whom he’d outfitted with armbands and offered firearms, were transients who’d scampered into the Public Safety Building from the bars on Fourth Avenue: “denizens of the Skid Row section,” as one of the sociologists’ reports would label them. Some even had criminal records. Still, the report concluded, there had been “very little looting and pilfering in a situation where many stores and offices were wide open so that anyone passing by could enter.” One of the few credible cases of looting the sociologists were told about in their interviews appeared to have been perpetrated by a police officer.
Instead, the stories people recounted illustrated a staggering amount of collaboration and compassion. Yutzy pieced together the impromptu evacuation of Anchorage’s Presbyterian Hospital, for example. Twenty-two of the hospital’s fifty beds had been occupied by immobilized patients when the building started filling with gas after the quake, and more people, injured in a landslide nearby on L Street, were already arriving. Right away, the hospital’s chaplain rushed outside and started flagging down vehicles, amassing an armada of taxis, police cars, and ordinary citizens driving by. Soon, everyone was loading stretchers into the backs of station wagons. Boy Scouts who’d been distributing phone books in the neighborhood walked patients down three or four flights of stairs. Bob Fleming, the KENI announcer who had been picking up his wife, Dolly, from her nursing shift at Presbyterian, wound up with three patients in his back seat, including one woman in labor, plus a nurse to help hold their IV bags high. In the end, all of Presbyterian’s patients were transplanted safely to Providence Hospital, on the opposite side of Anchorage, in under two hours.
“It’s there in front of you, so you do it,” Dolly Fleming would later explain; she could find no more substantive theory to account for all the cooperation she’d witnessed. She herself had been leaving the hospital when the quake struck, and spotted the young son of one of her coworkers outside—all alone on the thrashing front staircase. She tucked the child under her arm and strained to hold them both steady against the railing as it shook. “It was as if I was an observer,” Fleming said. “You lose all sense of time. You lose all sense of reality. What’s happening is almost beyond what you can absorb.” Decades later, at age ninety-two, the one cogent thought she could remember having through the four and a half minutes of the earthquake was this: “I’m thankful I’m here. I’m thankful I’m here so I can hold on to this little guy.”
SO MUCH OF WHAT the researchers learned in their interviews that week was only an elaboration of what Yutzy’s driver had told him shortly after he touched down: everybody in Anchorage had done a little bit of everything for everybody. It was startling, and cut against conventional wisdom’s predictions of savagery and hysteria.
* Fritz tried to synthesize what his team was learning from their fieldwork in an essay he called “Disasters and Mental Health.” “Disasters,” he wrote, “are, of course, occasions for profound human misery.” But they didn’t appear to create the chaos people feared. “The notions that disaster survivors inevitably or typically engage in panic, looting, and scapegoating, or become helpless, hysterical, and neurotic simply do not stand the test of critical research scrutiny.” In fact, Fritz claimed, the people in those ruined communities seemed pretty happy. There might even be “therapeutic effects” to disasters, he argued—and from there, his speculations grew even more radical: “As social animals,” he wrote, “people perhaps come closer to fulfilling their basic human needs in the aftermath of disaster than at any other time.”
* Even amid all that devastation, people seemed happy—even gleeful. Somehow, [William] James wrote, the shattered city was overtaken by “universal equanimity.” He described people sleeping outside for several nights afterward, partly to keep safe from aftershocks, “but also to work off their emotion, and get the full unusualness out of the experience.” People felt a connection to one another, a kinship that’s often lacking in ordinary life, and this togetherness seemed to make their problems more bearable.
“Surely the cutting edge of all our usual misfortunates comes from their character of loneliness,” James wrote. In regular life, we suffer alone. But in San Francisco, each person’s “private miseries were merged in the vast general sum of privation.” As a result, to James, the victims didn’t seem like victims; they seemed empowered. He did not hear “a single whine or plaintive word,” even among those who’d suffered the starkest losses. There was only “cheerfulness.”
* What is safety, anyway? Genie seemed to be conceding how randomly our lives are jostled and spun around, that nothing is fixed, that even the ground we stand on is in motion. Underneath us, there is only instability. Beyond us, there’s only chance.
But she’d also recognized a way of surviving such a world. It was what Genie had created in Anchorage that weekend by talking on the radio, and what she planned to stay focused on now: not an antidote to that unpredictability, exactly, but at least a strategy for withstanding it, for wringing meaning from a life we know to be unsteady and provisional. The best she and her family could do was to hold on to one another.
Our force for counteracting chaos is connection.
