Marrow Island (4 page)

ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON

OCTOBER 9, 2014

THE LAMP UPSTAIRS
still glowed from the window of Rookwood when I set out for the village, so I walked across the lane and up the drive to introduce myself. No one answered my knocks and there wasn’t a sound from the house.

Julia Swenson died when I was in high school, and a nephew had taken over her estate for the rest of the Swenson clan, who were in Boston or New York, somewhere back east. If I had ever met the nephew, I couldn’t recall. My mother had once called him “an odd one”—some friends staying at the cottage had reported a run-in with him; he had been friendly but extremely drunk.

The curtains were drawn in all the windows along the porch. I walked around the house. There wasn’t a car in the drive, so I took my time, looking over the place. I peeked in the door of the carriage house—a half-barn, half-garage structure beyond the house. There was a small car parked inside, covered in dirty tarpaulins, though a faded red corner of the rear gleamed in the dim space. At the back door, I noticed something strange: what looked like a piece of cloth, stuck in the crack. I peered in the window: the door had been closed in haste and caught the edge of a raincoat hanging from a hook on the mudroom wall. I tried the knob—it was barely latched; the door swung open with a nudge.

Having come this far, I knocked on the door and called inside. “Hello? Mr. Swenson?” There was no response. I put one foot inside and half my body, craning my neck to see up the stairs and into the kitchen. There was a distinct odor of kitchen trash, rotting food. I pulled back, carefully closing the door.

He must have been out of town. Bachelors weren’t known for their housekeeping. Something struck me as off, but I brushed it aside. Julia was gone; it had been so many years.

I walked back down the lane to my car, feeling the house watching me with one bright eye.

Some people always left a light on when they left home, to ward off thieves.

I drove the long way round the island to the village. If Orwell Island had a primary artery, it would be Hornsea Road, which breaks off from the village’s main thoroughfare, Anchorage Street, and circles the island’s perimeter almost completely. Almost. Hornsea doesn’t actually go all the way around the island. It dead-ends by a small county park with a turnabout. But if you drive on, about twenty yards past the turnabout, the pavement gives out to pitted gravel.

Locals know that after a quarter mile of increasingly rutted road along the shore, there is an unmarked, abrupt left turn into the trees, and a hard-pack gravel road that turns into asphalt just out of sight. Up the slope the fir trees become denser, the woodland changing from straggler pines and madrones to hardy fir and hemlock and Western red cedar. The road continues for almost four miles, where it eventually meets Anchorage Street at the south end of Orwell Village with a rusted sign that says
NO OUTLET
. The road is old, but the asphalt is younger than I am. It follows a track that ran around the island before Orwell was even a town, back when it was a trading post for the Coast Salish people and the Europeans who came after Vancouver’s expedition. It was our shortcut, those of us who lived on that side.

I drove the grassy, rutted track to the place where asphalt appeared out of nowhere. Then three-quarters of a mile on, at the site of an aborted housing development, I pulled off the road into a weedy patch of gravel. All along the road ahead, between stands of taller trees, were more of the same weedy, treeless spaces: parcels of land, marked and cleared, 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 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 waterfront hotels and cafés on one side, houses set into an increasingly wooded and rocky hillside on the other. All the old buildings in downtown that had survived the quake were still there—many of them with structural improvements and seismic retrofits. There was a cooperative grocery in the place of the general store that had been condemned after the quake, and next to it a gravel parking lot edged by flowerpots and signs advertising the local farmers’ market, every other Saturday,
JUNE THRU OCTOBER
. I walked up the street. Tourism had rebounded. Most of the storefronts were occupied, and there were two shops selling the kind of knickknacks that islanders call “bait.”

“How’s things?” you’d hear islanders asking.

“Oh, you know. Selling lots of bait,” they would say. Or maybe, “Not biting. Need better bait, I guess.”

Bait was always at the front of the store and by the register. If the store had a public toilet (most didn’t; unreliable plumbing), there might be some toward the back too, for the people waiting to use it.

I peered into the bookstore, at the same storefront it had occupied when we left, though its name had changed to Sound Books & News, and it had been painted, reorganized, with racks of postcards and orca magnets and crab key chains by the door. It was Filgate’s Books before, named for the old salt who owned it. My dad and Danny Filgate had been good friends, though Danny was a generation older. He, like my dad, was an autodidact who read everything from the
Wall Street Journal
to Toni Morrison to pulpy airport paperbacks. He had refused to sell bait. He catered to the islanders. You might wander into the shop and find a gathering of fisher-poets: fishermen and -women who spent long hours on the water composing verses—often ballads and other old forms—in their heads. They weren’t readings, these gatherings; they were dramatic performances, sometimes with musical interludes on banjo or harmonica or fiddle. The gatherings took place in the off-season, so tourists didn’t often run into them. But if one happened to wander into the shop when the fisher-poets were there, it was another of those things that make people fall in love with the islands. The locals set the scene and the mood, like the cast of characters in a Melville novel.

I assumed Danny must be dead. He couldn’t have lived to see his business like this: it looked orderly, sanitized; a display of T-shirts with famous novel covers printed on them on the wall behind the cash register.

I sat on the steps outside City Hall, a newer building that looked like a lot of government buildings—squat and gray and featureless—easily the ugliest building in town. The old City Hall had burned down after the quake. The new one housed a small public library, a state police precinct, and various other municipal entities. It opened in fifteen minutes. Something else that hadn’t changed about Orwell was the pace. Nearly ten o’clock and shops up and down the street were just starting to show signs of life.