Many of KENI’s employees had been living in the Fourth Avenue Theatre all weekend. They were sleeping on couches or on the plush carpet of the station’s offices and taking shifts, along with several of their wives, to run the radio broadcast and field the dismayed phone calls from around Alaska and the Lower 48. Every evening, the Salvation Army pulled into the alley behind the theater and unloaded a hot meal for the staff, and every morning and afternoon, volunteers came through the studio offering coffee and a bemusing selection of sandwiches: turkey on raisin bread, or tuna on cinnamon bread—whatever ingredients they had to work with.
The building still had no heat and only minimal electricity; everything was running off an auxiliary generator downstairs. But at five o’clock on Sunday evening, power from the city grid was suddenly restored, and the building burst back to life. Right away, Charlie Gray and his engineers wondered if they could put KENI-TV on the air again.
Gray headed to the basement and started tinkering in the television studio, testing the equipment. It looked promising, he reported back. The police had imposed a curfew; they’d seal off the downtown area at six. So, at 5:25, KENI put a call over the radio for the station’s young projectionist to hustle into work. He had thirty minutes to get there, they said, and should come prepared to spend the night.
There was an aftershock—a sizable one—but the engineers carried on working. By six o’clock, Gray was convinced they could make it happen: the gear in the studio was now operational; the antenna on the roof was tuned. The crew put a test pattern on the air and scrambled to throw together a quick, bare-bones newscast. Soon, Gray was hollering for a movie, too—something lighthearted, he said, to relieve the city’s nerves. Before long, they were live. As the sun set on Easter, televisions around Anchorage were once again humming and bright.
A few hours later, shortly after ten, Mayor Sharrock’s Task Force sent over an announcement for KENI to broadcast. Since its formation that afternoon, the Task Force had been working diligently in the Public Safety Building, probing every conceivable city record to draw up a master list of Turnagain residents and ascertain, once and for all, if anyone else had vanished in the slide. They’d also been working with the Salvation Army, which was operating its own clearinghouse to reunite separated families. Gradually, they had collected the names of 330 people—all still potentially unaccounted for. Now, on the radio, they were asking anyone who lived in Turnagain to simply call in, hoping to scratch off whomever they could.
The response was tremendous; the station’s phone lines sparked right away. People called in, reporting themselves safe or confirming the safety of others whom they’d taken into their homes. Four hours later, the Task Force sent its updated list to KENI: a hundred names remained. Each name was read over the air, then read again at daybreak. And again, the number of potential casualties shrank rapidly as voices around Anchorage rose up, reached out, checked in. By Monday afternoon, the number of names on the Task Force’s list had dropped to fifty. By Monday evening, there were only sixteen names left. Ninety minutes after those names were broadcast, the list had been cut in half again.
But gradually, some of the hopefulness seemed to drain from the project. Everyone understood that, at some point, the calls from the public would level off, and without the broadcasters even realizing it, this winnowing roster of names they were reading on the radio would no longer be a list of those who were potentially missing but a list of those who were definitively dead. And so, before going through the last names again on Monday night, a KENI announcer chose to do something unusual, to flip that dynamic around. “Now I would like to go over that first list, and give you the names of the people who’ve been heard from,” he said. “In other words, they are safe and are not in trouble.”
He recited the names slowly and stoically. “Joe E. Clauson, Robert D. Clarkson, Peter M. Clack—all these people are all right,” he said. “Ralph W. DeLaRonde: all right. Opal M. Everett: all right. Donald C. Hartman: all right. Clarence A. Hirschbeck: all right. Donald Crow, also all right.” The recitation took on the steadying cadence of a prayer. The announcer’s “all rights” became tick marks with which to take a reassuring measure of how much they’d accomplished, working together, and how many souls they had found.
The Task Force would stop clearing names off its list the following morning. Ultimately, one hundred and fifteen deaths were confirmed around the state of Alaska, the vast majority of them in the small communities that had been struck by tsunamis. But the final death toll in Anchorage was only nine. Among the dead were the two Mead brothers from Turnagain, whose bodies were never found. A story surfaced that the older boy, Perry Jr., had died running back into the house to rescue his baby brother. But on the fiftieth anniversary of the earthquake, in 2014, the boys’ sister would explain to a reporter in Anchorage that the media must have invented that detail, to make the tragedy more palatable. The truth was, she had watched the earth swallow her brother Perry with her own eyes. Seconds later, determined to protect her two younger brothers, she’d lifted the first to safety on the roof of the family’s car but, when she turned back to grab two-year-old Merrell, she found he had vanished, too. “A crevasse opened up and took him, sand peeling from its sides,” she explained. She saw it seal shut around him.
“It is unbelievable,” Genie explained on the air, once the final death toll had been confirmed, “that such mass destruction could take place with so little loss of life.” Anchorage had been lucky: when the quake struck, most people were home for the start of the holiday weekend—safe, in small and durable wooden structures. The city’s larger buildings and roads hadn’t been crowded; its schools had been empty. The tsunami that was projected never arrived. There were no major fires.
There was another reason, too, why the city’s search-and-rescue workers hadn’t kept finding more victims all weekend, like everyone had expected they would. As Genie interviewed more people in Anchorage, it became clear to her that the frenzied rescuers she’d seen digging in the rubble at Penney’s and peeling that woman out of her flattened car weren’t an anomaly. All over town, she wrote, “organized groups consisting of teachers, bankers, lawyers, laborers, bookkeepers—from all occupations and all walks of life—first methodically searched the ruins for survivors and fatalities.” There was the airline employee she’d interviewed on the radio that first night, who described running toward the wreckage of the control tower. On Fourth Avenue, store owners had climbed out of the trenches into which their buildings had fallen, then immediately scurried back in to search for anyone who’d been trapped. People in Turnagain described hauling neighbors out of the debris field with ropes, loading the injured into their cars and driving them to Providence Hospital—effectively picking the area clean hours before Jim Scott descended into the slide for the first time with his mountaineering buddies to hunt for survivors, in the middle of the night. In the end, this diffuse wave of unofficial first responders had reclaimed almost all of the city’s injured and dead before nightfall on Friday night—and most within the first hour after the quake. Everywhere in Anchorage, clusters of ordinary people had gone to work immediately, spontaneously, teaming up and switching on like a kind of civic immune response.
The individual stories went on and on; it would take months to compile them all. On Monday morning, as some of the stress of the weekend seemed to slacken, Genie would sit at her typewriter and start getting them down. At the top of the page, she put a title: HEROISM IN ANCHORAGE.
AN OUTSIDE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO’D been visiting Alaska that Easter weekend later wrote an article describing how uncannily his experience of the disaster mirrored the description of another earthquake, written a half century earlier by the psychologist and philosopher William James. James was a New Englander who—similarly by chance—had been visiting California when the great San Francisco earthquake struck in April 1906. James astutely chronicled its aftermath in an essay he called “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake.”
Wandering around the city, James was left with two major impressions: “Both are reassuring as to human nature,” he wrote. “The first of these was the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos.” James saw no panic, only purposefulness—people, “whether amateurs or officials, came to the front immediately” and got to work. “It was indeed a strange sight to see an entire population in the streets,” he explained, “busy as ants in an uncovered ant-hill scurrying to save their eggs and larvae.”
His second observation was less concrete, more spiritual. Even amid all that devastation, people seemed happy—even gleeful. Somehow, 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.”
This was also true in Anchorage. Many Alaskans discovered a peculiar joy in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, as they fed and sheltered neighbors, or huddled around a shared radio. There was camaraderie and altruism flowering everywhere. When, for example, the Alcantra family, who ran Alaska’s largest egg farm, on the outskirts of the city, discovered that the earthquake had spooked their hens out of laying, they invited the whole town to come and take home six or eight chickens apiece—meat with which to keep themselves fed through the emergency. The family claimed to have thirty thousand chickens when they started. “And a week later,” Patricia Alcantra would later explain, “the chickens are gone.”
It was as though daily life had suddenly separated from history. The fallibility and arbitrariness of absolutely everything was exposed, and other, more generous ways of being seemed possible. “I think people’s values have changed considerably,” one man said. There was no such thing as “prestige” anymore, he explained: “A home has no value. The car has no value. If you have your wife and your family, you’re rich.” That simplicity, and the spirit of possibility and togetherness it fostered, reminded many residents of the Alaska they’d first moved to, a decade earlier or more. Everyone in town trusted each other again, another man said: “Just like it used to be up here.”
Maybe these sentiments sound cliché. But for a time, they didn’t—and that’s the point: a special window had been cleaved open by the quake, during which such feelings were experienced as meaningful and real, untainted by irony or self-consciousness. A ticket agent at Northern Consolidated Airlines remembered that magic taking hold right away, before the earth had even stopped moving. He’d found himself standing face-to-face with the ticket agent from Pacific Northern Airlines, both of them fighting to stay upright as they watched the airport’s control tower crash to the ground. “We both had our arms on each other’s shoulders, supporting one another,” he said. “Somehow, at the time, he wasn’t a competitor.”
After Sunday night, that heightened quality of the atmosphere in Anchorage began to dwindle. The disaster hadn’t ended; the city still had a slew of fearsome problems ahead of it—How would Anchorage pay for its reconstruction? How much help would the federal government provide? Was the ground even safe to rebuild on?—but those challenges were of a different magnitude, and far less straightforward, than the ones the community had been scrappily surmounting so far. Finding solutions to them—if solutions even existed—would take months, if not years, and involve towers of paperwork, recondite financial calculations, studies by Outside geologists and soil scientists, and protracted squabbling with aloof bureaucracies in Washington. The work would be embittering and exhausting, convoluted and boring; as time wore on, the story of Anchorage’s recovery would sprawl far beyond the satisfying outlines of the drama that had unfolded in the city over the last three days. Before long, Genie would vent about “chasing around at the heels of federal officials that have been traipsing in and out of Anchorage. Each one would have the same type of syrupy, say-nothing public statement to make at planeside when he arrived, then have his picture taken standing in front of the rubble, then talk to some groups and repeat the first statements he’d made to the press, then have a press conference prior to departure and say the same thing.”
But that fuss was in the future. In retrospect, that Sunday night would feel like a turning point, a hazy transition between one chapter of the disaster and the next. As the Task Force’s list of missing persons was recited over KENI and the responses streamed in over the phone, Anchorage appeared to be finishing off the last of its first kind of problems—the immediate and obvious ones that everyone in the community had been hacking through, collectively, since the moment the shaking started on Friday night. They were resolving the last, big question they were equipped to answer for themselves: Who in their town was living, and who was dead? Once they figured that out, the emergency would be over. The long catastrophe would come into view.
THE SIGNS WERE EVERYWHERE that Sunday night: life was depressurizing, resetting. The heat was back on at the Chance home, and Genie was in her own bed, lying next to a husband who both comforted and terrorized her, getting her first real night of sleep in three days. Meanwhile, on an airplane overhead, KENI’s cheerful and arthritic patriarch, Bram, was returning home, too, descending out of a brilliant scrim of stars toward the city he loved, after what felt like a head-spinning intercontinental fever dream.
Bram’s trip to Tokyo had been brief. He and his cohort of Alaskan business leaders were just settling into their hotel on Saturday morning when they first got word of the quake. One of the men received an emergency phone call from Fairbanks; there’d been an accident at one of his coal mines, killing an old friend. But then the voice on the other end said, “Wait a minute, we’re having an earthquake here,” and the connection cut off.
The men didn’t think much of it initially; in Alaska, earthquakes happened all the time. They went and had lunch. But after a preliminary report about the disaster aired on Japanese radio, the group scrambled for more information. What Bram heard, he later explained, “made my hair stand on end.”
The Alaskans started making arrangements to fly home, through whatever circuitous connections were available, coordinating with the American embassy, then with a kindly lieutenant general of the armed forces in Japan—all while trying to reach their wives and children back in Anchorage by phone. Many of the businessmen lived in Turnagain, including Bram. They had heard about the slide.
The delegation departed Tokyo about twenty-four hours after it arrived, first thing Sunday morning. The flight back was long and somber. The men braced for the worst. “We traveled a total of 12,000 miles over the weekend,” Bram would explain, “and we had two Easter Sundays. I can’t say they were the happiest.”
When their plane finally landed at Anchorage International late on Sunday night, the airport had just reopened, but barely. The runway lights were out. The terminal was shut down. There were no airline employees to assist them. Taxis and wives drove straight up to the aircraft on the tarmac, as Bram and the other passengers trundled down the stairs. A worker unloaded their bags directly onto the ground. The disordered carcass of the control tower still sat where it had fallen, in a thirty-foot pile, silhouetted beyond them like a jagged mountain range in the dark.
Bram surveyed the sprawl of luggage. It was hard to see; you just had to do your best to figure out which suitcases were yours. Then, there among the businessmen waiting on the tarmac, Bram noticed an unfamiliar face: “a typical urbane tourist type,” he said, who had somehow wound up on the last leg of their flight—slipping in like an apparition from the ordinary world. The man was complaining, obliviously and loudly enough for everyone around him to hear. He was griping about the lack of service.
Bram couldn’t believe it. He watched the man flail, confronting the unimaginable: this upended, amenity-free reality into which he’d suddenly been dropped. Whatever was happening right now, Bram heard the man insisting, was the most outrageous thing he’d ever experienced in his life.