Early the following Friday morning, one week after Good Friday, Genie was flying with Governor Egan to Juneau where, returning to the capital for the first time since the disaster, he would address a special joint session of Alaska’s legislature. The traveling party had assembled in Anchorage at three a.m. and lifted off at four. The weather was frigid and foggy, and they were forced to fly low, through a single, ceaseless cloudbank; for four and a half hours, it was like they were tunneling through the interior of a pillow.
There were twelve other people on the flight, most of them packed awkwardly into a renovated house trailer that had been installed in the hull of the military cargo plane, in lieu of a proper cabin. Genie looked around, took out her portable tape recorder, and tested some material for the story she’d be broadcasting about the trip. “If you think politics makes strange bedfellows,” she whispered, “you should see what disaster and fatigue does to the politicians as they’re bedded down on this Alaska National Guard C-123, and sleeping under most cramped conditions.”
All the men looked wrecked. Genie, wide-awake, amused herself by taking stock of the strange positions each had wound up in. A few had curled up on cushions they’d stripped from the benches and laid side by side on the floor. Others were crimped into medical stretchers like unwieldy infants in bassinets. On the opposite end of the aircraft, Genie had watched the adjutant general of the National Guard sit directly on the floor, cross his legs, fold his arms, and tuck his head, touching his chin to his chest, then—pinched together this way like a contorted Buddha—somehow pass resolutely into sleep. More incredibly, he would seem wholly reinvigorated when he woke up later. This was Thomas Carroll: the self-possessed major general whom Genie had interviewed in the Public Safety Building on Good Friday night, and who would die on a National Guard airplane just like this one—likely this exact plane, in fact—when it plunged into Prince William Sound twenty-three days from now.
Genie was sitting next to Governor Egan. The governor seemed to have taken a liking to her in the preceding week as Genie shadowed him, reporting on the state’s relief efforts and the many federal officials swishing through Anchorage to meet with him. When President Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, arrived for a tour of downtown, Egan made a point of introducing him to Genie—“the voice of Alaska to the outside world,” he called her. (Rusk thanked Egan for the introduction, Genie later wrote, but also noted that one privilege of being secretary of state was that “you can talk to pretty ladies without being introduced.”) After takeoff, as everyone aboard hunkered down and fell asleep, Genie watched Egan take out a pen and begin reworking his speech. But eventually, his eyes drooped and his head slumped forward, coming to rest on his script.
The future of Alaska was riding, in part, on how Egan’s address would be received. The quake had dealt a profound and potentially irreversible blow to the state’s economy and infrastructure. It seemed like it would still be months before any definitive damage estimate could be reached, though one federal official had already projected that the reconstruction could cost half a billion dollars—far more than Alaska could afford, particularly with some untold share of its future tax revenue now obliterated. In truth, Alaska had never reached a point of full, financial self-sufficiency to begin with; nearly half of Anchorage still collected its paychecks from the federal government. As one newspaper put it that Friday, “Uncle Sam shares Alaska’s problem whether he wants to or not. He will have to decide whether he wants to rebuild his stepchild.”
In two days, Egan would be flying to Washington to ask President Johnson for federal assistance. But he first wanted to show the administration that Alaskans were willing to help themselves. And so, in Juneau that afternoon, he planned to ask the legislature to pass an emergency, $50 million bond measure. For Alaskans, this was a startling proposition—“far, far larger than anything we have before attempted as a state or territory,” Egan would concede. He was essentially groveling. He felt he had to—here, among his fellow Alaskans—before he went groveling to the president of the United States.
Egan’s address was scheduled for early that afternoon. As soon as Genie entered the capitol building, a state senator recognized her and enthusiastically introduced her around. One after another, lawmakers kept thanking her. “They would shake hands or hug me, each with tears in their eyes,” she remembered. An unfamiliar energy seemed to be crackling in the air around her: the same prestige that would estrange her from her colleagues at KENI in the following months, then eventually get her elected to a seat in this very chamber. One lawmaker invited her to sit with him. And then, with all of Alaska listening, on a statewide radio hookup that Genie herself had organized for the speech, Alaska’s Speaker of the House called the session to order and surprised Genie by formally introducing her and asking her to stand. She was struck dumb—thrown into “complete stupefaction,” she said—when everyone in the chamber suddenly stood up, too, and started applauding.
The governor did not speak long. “In all of our history,” he said, “there has never been a natural disaster equal to the one Alaska suffered almost at this very hour exactly one week ago.” Those four and a half minutes, and the entire week that had followed, Egan said, would be hard for Outsiders to comprehend. “What is it like to have your world turned upside down?” he asked. “To lose relatives and friends? To lose homes? To watch buildings crumble and familiar landmarks erased from the earth in an instant? And then, to bounce back, pick up the pieces and look to the future? That is what the majority of Alaskans have done since Friday.” Any despondency people felt would be understandable: their state was still new; they’d only just built what the quake had rent apart. But Egan believed that “a united and determined people has been welded together from the heat and shock of disaster,” he said. “We are a young state. We are a young people, but we are mature.”
When the speech was over, Genie mingled through the hall, recording interviews for KENI’s coverage. Soon, she felt someone tugging on her sleeve. He leaned in to whisper some news: another earthquake had just hammered Anchorage.
THE AFTERSHOCK HIT AT 12:41, Anchorage time. “We could feel it coming,” one woman said. The rattling was mild at first, and everyone had become so desensitized to the tremors reverberating through the city by then that their first instinct was to wait out the inconvenience.
People stopped on the streets downtown and stared tentatively at each other. Around a table at the Alaska Methodist University cafeteria, forks and spoons froze halfway to people’s mouths. At city hall, the city manager, Robert Oldland, stood near his secretary’s desk, receiving two visitors from out of town. The secretary was the first to feel the motion and, looking down, saw her hand vibrating on the surface of her desk. “That wasn’t an earthquake, was it?” she asked. Then the bucking started in earnest, and everyone ran out the back door.
Genie would later report the aftershock’s magnitude as 6.7 on the Richter scale; it was a quake that demanded attention. People scrambled for the door of a bank downtown and clogged it. Policemen fled the Public Safety Building. At the public library, an aging librarian vaulted over the reference desk like a gazelle. The tremor lasted only several seconds, but the experience registered less like riding out yet another aftershock than as living through a second big one: after a solid week of exhausted, little pushes, the earth now seemed to birth a breached and screaming twin.
The damage to Anchorage was minor. The real, lasting wreckage was emotional. The first quake had already left people traumatized, trampling their sense of security. For days after escaping J. C. Penney on Good Friday, a young jeweler had refused to take off his clothes before bed, in case he needed to evacuate again. Then, he did start undressing, but would leave his clothes strewn in a trail between his bed and the door, roughly in the order he’d want to snatch them up and throw them on if he had to make a run for it. This second quake was too much. It tore people down.
“Many spur of the moment decisions were made to leave Alaska” that Friday afternoon, two researchers would find. All at once, the aftershock set off an exodus for the Lower 48 that would continue, just as heavily, the following day. Regular flight schedules had only just resumed from Anchorage International Airport. One airline had sold only thirty seats on its night flight out of Anchorage before the aftershock, but that afternoon, the flight sold out. By nightfall, the airport was jammed; the scene was viscerally tense. Children were crying. Many of those fleeing were mothers, taking their kids back to wherever they’d moved from initially, while their husbands remained to weather the rawness that would characterize life in Anchorage until the city could be rebuilt. That is, the city was being drained of its families in precisely the opposite way it had been settled in the boomtown days, when men from the Lower 48, like Winston, came up first on their own.
Time seemed to be rewinding, heading toward history. An estimated four thousand people would leave the city that spring. As the first full flights lifted off, it was easy to worry that Anchorage was losing its status as a “city of permanence,” as a local paper had put it on the opening night of Cap Lathrop’s Fourth Avenue Theatre all those years ago—a “city in which families live, work, play and die.”
The fragility of the city’s future seemed even more dire from afar. Genie’s mother, Den, had spent the week since the earthquake in Texas vibrating with anxiety. Unlike many Outsiders with children in Alaska, Den had been lucky enough to hear her daughter’s voice on the radio right away; she knew the Chance family was all right. Yet she’d been subject to the same barrage of catastrophic misinformation since then, and seemed especially susceptible to it. Den’s mind kept generating exaggerated chains of worst-case scenarios. The Chance family might be all right, she reasoned, but their home had undoubtedly collapsed, leaving them out in the cold. If Genie was up all night broadcasting, she’d get pneumonia, and without proper medical care, in the burned-out ruins of Anchorage, she’d never get healthy again. And even if Genie did kick the pneumonia, she’d be irrevocably scarred emotionally. “She’ll break up after the stress is over,” Den predicted. “She’s that much like her mother. Through crisis, she puts down all fear, anxiety, and lets it serve as a dynamo for her apparent poise. Then, in the end, she’ll go to pieces.”
Den had no outlet for her dread. She’d heard on the radio that families should refrain from phoning Anchorage, to keep the lines clear, and her friends told her not to bother sending mail. “My thought,” Den explained, “was to grit my teeth and sit it out.” But she’d continued to read about, or simply imagine, her daughter’s city as a buckled and charred dystopia, where ruptured sewage lines would inevitably lead to epidemics of communicable disease.
Finally, the Wednesday after the earthquake, Den wrote to her daughter. “Emma Gene,” she began sternly. “I am so concerned about health hazards in that area of impurities. Why don’t you get those children out of there!! The entire family should get out, at least until sewage is corrected all over the area. Come home and stay until conditions are not so conducive to pestilence. And if you don’t come yourselves, please send those children!” The kids’ well-being was paramount, Den insisted; Genie shouldn’t take any more chances with their safety. “Please do something,” she wrote.
Genie was inclined to dismiss her mother’s worry, but couldn’t—just as she couldn’t fault those families in Anchorage who were drawing similar conclusions and decamping for the Lower 48. In fact, writing her mother back, Genie confessed:
I must admit that during that first dark, cold night, as I began to understand the tremendous scope of the problems that would be facing us in the months and years to come, I toyed with the idea of sending the children out on a plane to stay with you until everything settled down. Working there in the headquarters, where the reports were coming in from the survey teams throughout the city, I realized that there could possibly be a real health hazard for some time to come. I realized that the schools might not be able to resume for an indefinite period of time. It looked for a few hours as if the damage had been so extensive to all utilities and streets that even a semblance of normal life could not be resumed for weeks or months. If this were to be, I knew that Winston and I would stay here and do what we could to help—but this might mean that the children would be neglected.
But this was just a fleeting thought in a weary mind. I would have been ashamed of myself had it not been for the next thought that came so swiftly: We must be together. They must not be a great distance away and wonder and fear about the safety of their parents. That night I saw strain, heavy hearts, and fear in people separated from their loved ones by the sudden disaster. I could not make my children live through that. And Winston and I could not leave. As long as we are together, we are confident of the future…
That Good Friday night I knew that we had survived miraculously. And for this reason, there must be a purpose to our lives. Apparently the children must sense this, too. For they have remained calm. They have been fully aware of the emergency, but they have not feared. We are proud that they are such dependable, responsible youngsters. I would not undermine their confidence in the future—in themselves—by sending them away for safety.
What is safety, anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens. These children have learned this—and they are all the better for it. They were in the midst of devastation. And they feel that they are a part of the tremendous task ahead in rebuilding this land we love…
The children are not afraid. Their father and I are not afraid. Please, don’t you fear for us.
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.