9
INLAND OVER 101 SOUTHBOUND
Businesses and homes in the Highway 101 South area were the hardest hit, as the surges from Elk Creek joined here with the direct ocean thrusts to form the deepest inundation. The ocean powered over six blocks of sand and sagebrush in some places before reaching buildings, but without structures blocking it as in the downtown, the tidal waves delivered the full force of its blows. The Texaco bulk plant, Nichol’s Pontiac, and other structures went up in flames, and the tsunami demolished many of the buildings that didn’t catch fire—whether they were trailer courts, motels, or gas stations.
Mrs. Dorothy Dorsch owned the twenty-unit Log Cabin motel, next to a car repair shop. The surges ripped all of the units from their foundations, pummeling some blocks away while dumping others in mounds over Highway 101. The Breaker’s Motel lost units when houses carried by the waves slammed into it. The surges completely inundated the Surfside Hotel, battered the Gypsy Trailer Court across from the Long Branch Tavern, and destroyed all of the units at Van’s Motel south of the Long Branch. These structures and their remains surged inland, circling with the flow of the currents.
Joseph McKay had lost his job as a cook at Elaine’s Restaurant in Los Angeles. The restaurant had gone out of business when the owner died. Joe decided to return to Crescent City with his wife, Eleanor, and find another job. The McKays arrived at 9 P.M., that Friday, March 27. They asked themselves afterwards why they hadn’t stopped at a motel in San Francisco.
They had driven straight through from Los Angeles, a fifteen-hour drive, at best. They were quite tired when they checked into Cabin No. 5 at the Surfside Motel on Highway 101 South. After a quick dinner, they went straight to bed and slept soundly, not hearing a thing—that is, until they heard the ocean crashing against the window, which quickly broke apart from the pressure. The surge ripped their cottage from its foundation and carried the unit towards Highway 101 and the mountains. The bungalow smashed over their car and turned it over on its side. McKay crawled out of the window facing land when the sea began pouring in through the back window.
Its roof fell down on top of the cars originally parked on a concrete apron by the motel buildings. He was standing on this debris, when it surged up and broke apart, seemingly coming apart around his legs “like putty.” Joe was badly bruised and cut by the broken jags of debris that pounded up. Grabbing hold of the windowsill, he pulled himself back into the flooded room.
When the seawater sucked back out later to the ocean, Joe and Eleanor were able to crawl out the window and reach the motel office. Their unit was now located in the back of the motel, rather than the front where it had first been. Someone quickly drove McKay to the emergency room of Seaside Hospital for treatment of the serious cuts and bruises he had sustained.
Living at the time behind the Del Norte Ice Company on U.S. Highway 101 South, Joyce London late that night had made a pot of coffee. She and her husband, Paul, were each sipping a cup when their cottage front door suddenly burst open. Her best friend, thirty-six-year-old Lavella (Belle) Hillsbery, and Belle’s boyfriend were standing in the doorway.
Belle had come to warn her friend about the tsunami. Since Joyce was having trouble with her television reception, she and Paul had no idea about the tidal wave until Belle then loudly exclaimed, “There’s a tidal wave comin’! We gotta get outta here!” Placing a calming arm around her, Belle’s boyfriend looked at the coffeepot, then said evenly, “Let’s first have a cup of coffee.”
Just after 1:00 A.M., Joyce, Belle, and the two men sat down to have that cup of coffee together. The first two small surges had raced over land by now, and presumably the Londons had seen those flows rushing in, but then decided that the second smaller one had ended the ocean’s activity for that night. It is also possible that they had left their home before the first “wettings”, driven away to eat, then returned to find wet sand and debris, concluding that was the end of the matter. But the worst was still to come.
A few minutes later, they heard the roar of the tidal wave approaching again and rushed outdoors, seeing the mass looming up at them in the moonlight. This wave was the larger third one, but not the last “big one.” The two couples raced for Belle’s car, jumping in as the first rush of ocean approached. Belle’s boyfriend started the car and hit the gas pedal, just as the sea slammed into the vehicle, engulfing the engine and killing the motor. The foursome worked their way from the car in the now high, roiling currents, as it bobbed on top of the swiftly moving sea.
The first powerful waves, unfortunately, pummeled and separated each one from the others, as they tried to swim or float towards higher ground. The tidal bore swept the people inland, somersaulting each over and over underneath the turbulent seas. Huge logs and debris indiscriminately battered at them. A large log smashed Joyce London in the face and nose, while another savagely struck her on the forehead and knocked her out, the others disappearing from one another into the darkness.
PEGGY SULLIVAN had moved to Crescent City from Perris in Riverside County that previous September. She was thirty-one years old, expecting her third child, and in the sixth month of that pregnancy. Her two other children, Gary (age nine) and Yevonne (age two), lived with her. She had been watching television in her unit at Van’s Motel on Highway 101 South that night. Her neighbors, Donald and Nancy Colcleaser, were visiting with her when they heard the reports of the possible tidal wave. The Colcleasers soon left for their unit. Although her friends reassured her that all would be fine, Peggy didn’t undress to sleep and instead stretched out fully dressed on her bed.
The ocean at the time seemed to sound to her much louder than usual. She had dozed off at about one o’clock when she heard a roar. Looking out the cottage’s window, she watched disbelievingly as the black mass of ocean poured towards her. Peggy said, “I grabbed the baby and wrapped a blanket around her. I got my son and by the time we opened the door, the water was two feet deep inside.” Turning in the direction of the ocean, she saw the wall of water now crashing toward them, picking up houses and units as if they were miniature toys and pushing them ahead. She stared at the back motel units that spun around and then crashed into one another.
“The water was so swift that I couldn’t hold on to my son and he was swept away,” she said. “I fell with the baby in my arms, and we were swept under the ocean twice.” The sea tumbled her son in one direction, while Peggy and the baby were pummeled in another, ripping away Peggy’s shoes and the baby’s blanket. She and the baby were swept down the driveway. “A car was parked in front of a market, and we were washed up to slam against the car. I reached up, grabbed the door handle, and held on. Logs pinned us to the car, and I was screaming for help. I just knew that my son was gone.”
The cold ocean deposited Peggy against a sports car, one block away from the Wayside Market. Her feet were jammed underneath the car, and driftwood and logs piled up against her back. One hand still held the baby bottle, the other clutched to Yevonne. As the brackish water started to recede, she screamed loudly for help and threw the bottle on the top of the car while trying to free herself.
Electric lines were snapping and crackling in the sea, as they fell when power poles snapped or lines sagged into the roiling ocean. She didn’t know that her landlady, Ruth Meindorf, had also been swept away, until she heard Ruth cry out from behind her, “Oh my God, Peg, it’s you.” As Ruth pulled at the wood pinning her against the car, Peggy cried over the fate of her son.
She then heard her son’s small voice murmur from behind her, “Mommy.” Turning quickly, she saw a neighbor holding her son. The ocean had savagely swept Gary into the back of a garage next to the office, and the man had rescued him from there. Although severely injured, Peggy didn’t feel her wounds.
At the same time that Peggy Sullivan had stepped outdoors, Ruth Meindorf was at the Colcleasers’ front door, screaming at them that the tidal wave was coming. As Donald Colcleaser jumped from his bed, the onrushing waves swept away the landlady, Peggy, and her two children. The lights in the units blacked out, and the flashes from the electric line sparks “caused an eerie glow.” The floor of the Colcleasers’ unit buckled, and the sounds of the shattering, moaning, and groaning wood structures were distinct, even over the rushing water. The ocean ripped their unit away from its foundation, and it lodged against another building.
Donald tried desperately to get the jammed front door to open, but when he did, he said, “It was frightening to find myself looking headlong into another unit’s wall, with about twenty inches separating us. As the building was driven further into the ground, water pouring in and walls buckling, I saw hanging electrical wires in the path of our only escape route.” Fearing another tidal wave, he jumped anyway into the waist-deep water, as another man held a flashlight to guide him. His wife, Nancy, handed their two small children, Everett and Tina, to him.
Nancy carried their son while Donald held their daughter. The water at times was over their waist, and Nancy became hysterical when she fell into a hole. However, “the man with the flashlight took Everett until she got out, and he then gave our son back to us when we reached high ground.” They didn’t know or find out who the man was that had helped them that night. Donald Colcleaser wrote later, “There was many a hero born on that terrifying night.” Later research showed that Mr. Francis Cussen was the man with the flashlight and their hero.
Some accounts differ over whether there were three or four waves and which one caused what damage. Most experts believe that there were four tidal-wave surges within an overall abnormality of eight land-encroaching movements. Although different areas experienced varying heights and differing “fingers” or severity, the third wave was the one that swept several of these people away—and led to their survival. Had the next wall of water been the near twenty-five-footer that roared in at 1:45 A.M. and unleashed the greatest damage, those people wouldn’t have had a prayer of surviving. Those who lived in some of the trailers or motel units and survived would have otherwise drowned, since that fourth wave would have pile-driven their structures into splinters. People who survived would have been listed instead as dead or missing.
Approximately three miles south from the harbor area, the city engineer marked the fourth wave’s height at 23.7 feet at the Pozzi Ranch on Highway 101 South. A picture at this remote beach spot shows a stop sign that had been wrenched from its initial position at third and J Streets and carried those three miles south. Any car and passengers that had happened to be on 101 at this time, or caught between the roadblocks, would have never been seen again. Nothing blocked the way of the tidal waves that crashed over land at this point.
IRENE JUANITA WRIGHT was separated from her thirty-year-old husband, Billy “Irish” Wright, for two reasons. First, they were having marital problems. Second, Billy “Irish” Wright was serving two concurrent six-month jail sentences for disturbing the peace and public intoxication. Billy seemed constantly to find himself in scrapes with society and the law. Gary Clawson’s father once decked Billy with a punch at the Long Branch Tavern; he had discovered Billy punching holes in the Tavern’s bathroom wall. Deputy sheriffs said that Billy Wright was a “bad apple” who had been in and out of jail a number of times and who just couldn’t seem to get the hang of not getting into trouble.
Juanita lived in a little cottage house behind the Frontier Chuckwagon, across the street and on the ocean side from the Long Branch Tavern. She was raising her three children at the time, Debbie Lee (age nine), Bonita Ione (age three), and William Eugene (ten months old). Jim Burris, Gary Clawson’s friend, had arrived at Irene’s house an hour before, finding her worried about the first surges that had flooded the insides of her house and awakened her children.
Jim and Juanita heard the rushing sounds of the next surge. Looking toward the sea, they stared with fright at the looming ocean racing towards them with waves on top of larger waves. Shooing the two small children from the house, Juanita rushed off the porch, carrying her tiny baby, William. The first currents struck them just feet from the cottage, as Jim Burris was leading them towards Highway 101. Debbie Lee was in front of her mother, as Juanita held her baby in one arm, while clutching the small hand of her child, Bonita, with the other.
The sea smacked the group with savage force, splitting everyone apart. When the large wave hit, like the violent currents of a high rip tide churning onto land, the ocean tore Bonita and William from their mother’s hands. Juanita and Debbie Lee tumbled away in the surf, as the two babies disappeared under the frothing mix of debris, ocean, and sand. The pounding surge carried Jim Burris off with the others, shaking him like a rag doll underneath the water, bearing them inland and over Highway 101.
As the sea rushed Burris in an angle over the highway, he spotted a telephone pole looming ahead in the moonlight. He managed to slightly change his path, as the sea and Burris collided directly with it. His hand outstretched at the time, the pole caught Jim in his middle, whereupon he quickly reached around and grabbed it with both hands. He held precariously to the telephone pole, as the ocean continued to rage past. With an effort caused by his will to live, to somehow survive, Burris pulled himself higher up the pole as the ocean stormed higher and higher. He held on as best he could.
In the moonlight, he stared as a structure bobbed and raced in the currents, becoming larger as it sailed towards him. As the fractured house spun toward Burris in a black-and-white silhouette, he braced for the collision. He knew he couldn’t let go, since he would surely drown in the currents that now engulfed the landscape. The house seemed to move slightly away, as it towered over him, then crashed into the pole. Lumber smacked into Burris’s body and one hand, but at first he didn’t feel any pain.
Looking up, he saw the roofline above and its tentacles of wood surrounding him. The creaking structure eddied around with the current, then drifted away in the moonlight to disappear into the surrounding shadows. Jim began to feel pain, but kept his body tightly wrapped to the pole. He knew he would have to hold on for a long time if he wanted to stay alive.
AS BILL WHIPPO and LaVelle Torgenson watched television, an announcer broke into the program and tersely said that the tsunami had hit some areas with only a slight rise of water. He announced that information just received from Newport, Oregon, reported that campers on the beach apparently had been swept out to sea. (This was the McKenzie family.)
Hearing sounds coming from the sea that quickly escalated to a “loud roaring from the back of the trailer court,” Whippo rushed out the trailer door. He stepped into water that was to his waist. Seeing his pickup truck being carried away, he waded inland through the surging sea to try and get it. Quickly realizing that the current was moving his vehicle away too fast, Bill turned back toward the trailer and saw LaVelle’s silhouette for a moment in the doorway.
At the moment he looked back, Whippo saw a monstrous wave thundering over the back of the trailer court with logs, driftwood, and trash dancing on its top. He only had enough time to yell at LaVelle, “For God’s sake, get on top of the trailer, if you can.” The crush of ocean with driftwood cascaded over him, and as the currents slammed him under, Bill was worrying that LaVelle couldn’t swim. From the situation now confronting him, the fact that he could swim didn’t seem to make that much of a difference. He knew that this was going to be “some battle.”
The huge wave pummeled Whippo underwater, and as the waters tossed him around, he scraped first over the sandy, scrub-brushed bottom, then felt driftwood pound against him. When he finally surfaced, coughing and trying to gulp air, he was swimming free and heading out across Highway 101 on top of the wave. The lights were still on at the service station, and Bill Whippo watched its plate-glass window shatter, leaving jagged pieces of glass around the frame. Looming closer towards him, he surged in the wave’s grasp towards the shredded structure of the gas station.
Just when it seemed he would crash through the window and be sliced by the jutting glass and metal shards, a Plymouth seemingly drifted out from nowhere and shot in front of him. The car struck the station and hung up long enough against the building that the boiling water backed up. The currents whipped back into him, as Bill spun around the crashed Plymouth and service station.
As Whippo passed the vehicle in seemingly slow motion, he stared at a person inside, looking back at him similarly with wide eyes. Whippo never would forget the fear on that man’s face, then the driver and his car disappeared behind him. Bill shot past the structure as if he was speeding down a steep waterslide at an amusement center. Spotting a large propane tank about one hundred feet to his right and moving with him at the same speed, Bill swam over to the tank to hitch a ride. Although the butane smell “was nearly too much,” he grabbed onto the large, seething container and held tight.
Whippo next heard a loud explosion towards his left, as the raging seas drove him and the propane tank inland toward Elk Creek. One of the fifty-thousand-gallon tanks at the bulk tank farm had become a barrel of shooting flames and thick smoke. Thinking that another large tank might also blow up, taking the rest along and spreading burning fuel over the sea, Whippo let go of the propane tank and swam toward Elk Valley Road, away from the flaming fuel.
By the bright moonlight and sharp light of the burning gasoline, Whippo could see tiny shapes by him in the ocean. He wasn’t sure what they were, but knew that they weren’t dogs or cats. This surprised him, because the trailer court was always full of those animals. He soon discovered that he was swimming through the tops of willowy trees, none of which were large enough to do him any good. Whippo swam right into what seemed like “part of a building.” Try as he might, he couldn’t pull himself up on it. Since he didn’t have the strength to do more, Bill Whippo just held on. “Boy, but was I cold,” he said later. “I can’t ever remember being so cold and so tired. I didn’t realize that the current was so strong, and I could hardly hold on.”
Whippo held on for what seemed like ten minutes or more. Then, he felt a strong surge in the water. The building moved at the same time, rolling over and snagging his clothes, pulling him down and under the ocean as it moved forward. Before he could kick free, he ran out of air. Whippo started involuntarily gulping seawater instead of breathing air. He finally broke free and shot to the surface just in time to hook his arm over a large tree limb. Bill couldn’t pull himself up into the tree far enough to get his whole body out of the water, but he did manage to bring up both arms, shoulders, and his chest high enough to keep from falling out of the tree if he passed out. Then, he began throwing up the saltwater that he had first swallowed, losing his dentures in the process.
Still gagging, Bill turned to his next problem: He was covered with rats. The small animals swimming in the water were rats that had been making their way through the ocean for safety on his larger body. One by one, he slapped at them and finally knocked the last one away. “It seemed like hours that I hung there,” he said. “My lower body swung from side to side in the strong currents like a windsock at an airport.”
He clung to a large tree, deeply rooted into the raised bank of Elk Creek. “This tree no doubt saved my life,” he said later. At the time he found it, Whippo didn’t have the strength to take another stroke. He was frozen but alive, but still in a very dangerous situation. “If I had missed that tree, I would have sailed right out into oblivion and no one would have ever heard of me again,” Bill recalled.
Other than the car driver he had passed, it seemed odd to Whippo that he hadn’t seen one other person since last seeing LaVelle in the trailer doorway. Where were all the people? It seemed to Bill that people should have been “swarming all over the place,” but here he was alone with nothing else around except rats. The answer to his question soon came, as he heard shouts for help coming from his left in the ocean lake holding him captive. Bill answered, “Who are you and what’s your condition?”
“I’m LaVelle Torgenson,” he heard the reply. “And I’m on the top of my trailer and it’s stuck out here. I’m trying to get it to move closer to shore.”
Bill at first didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He yelled back, “Thank God, we’ve made it.” Whippo told her to sit down on the trailer roof before she fell off and drowned in the sea. As soon as he had said those words, he felt like a fool in telling her how to behave on top of a trailer.
Although happy that each was alive, their condition was precarious at best.
TWO BLOCKS from Bill Whippo and LaVelle Torgenson, where another grove of trees had captured what was left of the Long Branch with its marooned people, Mac and Gary discussed quietly what next to do. Mac mentioned he owned another small boat, located on land about a mile from where they were. The two decided to swim out and get it. They would use the boat to bring everyone to safety and avoid the fires. Gary told Bruce and Bill to watch out for the others during this time.
Gary and Mac slipped into the numbing cold water and swam away, realizing the water’s depth was over twice their height and that they might not make it. They had no idea what the ocean would do next. Each swam through shadowy debris until coming to one that could hold his weight. They would grab momentarily onto it, then find the silhouette of another and swim towards that one. They would grab on the door handle of a trailer, hold onto a car antenna, or tread water while clutching the branch of a large log. Swimming similarly from object to object, Gary and Mac finally made their way back to Highway 101. This had been over a quarter-mile journey.
They found the road flooded but walkable. The ocean had receded somewhat, and Highway 101 had been built in most places higher than the surrounding land. Due to its construction, the thoroughfare now marked the division between the deeper ocean lake they had come from and the sea itself. Depending on the bank contours and road dips, they waded through seawater that varied from their neck to knees. The two men headed away from the city and the old Long Branch location toward Elk Valley Road, being careful to avoid downed electric lines, lumber, and an occasional abandoned trailer that bobbed in their way.
After wading for five minutes, they discovered that the water wasn’t as deep as before. The level soon decreased to voluminous wet spots, then to where the highway looked like it had only been rained upon. Traveling half a mile down 101, the men reached the Elk Valley Road intersection. They turned up this road toward the mountains and angled around the large tidal lake that spread for miles around.
Another half mile up, they came to the old weathered house where McGuire operated his “Seaorama” company, selling lacquered sea-life specimens such as starfish and sea horses. The grounds around the house were soaked, but the waters had receded, and Mac’s boat was still on the trailer where he had left it. The skiff was small, built comfortably for three to four people, and fourteen feet long. It was made of aluminum with a wide back ending in a sharp prow.
As the ocean already had claimed Mac’s flatbed truck, they needed to find a way to get the boat back on water—and fast. They had no idea what the tidal waves were going to do next. The two men walked to an adjacent house and discovered a light shining from a back kitchen. Hailing the neighbor, Mac soon convinced him to haul the skiff in his pickup back to the sea lake.
Highway 101 was still wet but passable in the beginning, and the pickup dodged around the large logs and debris in its path. The water level, however, soon deepened to where the road became impossible to drive further over. The neighbor stopped his vehicle, and they quickly unloaded the skiff from its back. The driver then quickly turned around and sped away into the darkness.
Worried about the safety of his parents and girlfriend, Gary manned the skiff and took the first run. McGuire stayed behind on the highway to open up one more space for someone else to use. They planned to alternate making the two runs they estimated necessary to get everyone back. As Clawson rowed away, the men did not know that neither would see the other again that night.
As Gary rowed towards the captured Long Branch, he heard people crying out for help. Following the sounds of the pleading voices in the dark, he first came across an older man who struggled to stay afloat by tall trees. The man was coughing up saltwater, then began sinking underneath the black sea. Gary quickly reached down into the cold water, grabbed the man, and yanked him closer to the skiff.
At first, he couldn’t get the drowning man onto the skiff. With a mighty pull that nearly overturned the boat, Gary finally managed to pull him in part way. The shivering man was so cold and suffering from exposure that the man couldn’t move or help himself. While leaning back and tugging the same way, Gary finally manhandled him into the skiff.
Clawson then rowed “thirty or forty more feet” to the second terrified voice. Gary discovered what first looked in the shadows to be a “young guy about twenty” who was stranded on a mobile home in deep water. In fact, it was a woman.
The ocean was up to her chest, and she was standing on top of a submerged trailer. When the woman reached for the boat, Gary grabbed her arm and tugged the woman up. As she kicked upwards at the time, she slipped with less effort into the skiff. Gary told her to start massaging the older man, as he was “near blue” with hypothermia.
Gary had to let these people off somewhere. He needed to get on with rescuing the others. Although nearly everything that could be identified was now underwater, with the help of the moonlight, Gary picked out the outline of a mound. Remembering that a high berm encircled a log pond, he rowed quickly to the embankment. Docking momentarily to the bank, Gary let the two people off. He told them to walk down the berm towards Highway 101. They eventually would find a large sawmill where the berm and Elk Valley Road intersected.
“Go south,” Gary advised, “You’ll be safe at the mill.” He never saw the woman again. However, when the old man met Gary a few days later, he cried when seeing his rescuer approach. It was then that Gary Clawson learned the identity of the people that he had rescued. The older man was Bill Whippo and the woman, his girlfriend LaVelle Torgenson.
After getting the couple to safety, Clawson looked around and knew that he was down from the fires and partially submerged trees. With the licking flames as his guide, he rowed in a northwesterly direction as fast he could toward the inferno and, he hoped, the still-marooned people. Dodging drowned cars and even dead cattle, Gary didn’t feel pain or tired, even though he had been at this for some time. Constant shots of adrenaline does that.
Shortly, he made out the outlines of the treetops, the roof structure, and small sticklike people huddled together. Gary pulled harder to close the distance. As he glided up to the rafters, Gary saw his father holding his mother, the Edwards also close together for warmth, and Bruce by Joanie. The dazzling fires in the background created a near-Halloween look to the surrounding tree limbs, roofline angling into the sea, and submerged trees.
People shivered or were numb from the cold air, hypothermia, and uncertainty, and no one spoke as Gary first approached with the boat. His mother, Gay, and Earl Edwards hyperventilated with sharp, whistling breaths. It would be impossible to select who would stay behind for a second run. As people inched wordlessly closer to the boat, there was no question that everyone wanted to get onboard. This would be a tight fit, but making two runs over the burning sea lake didn’t make any sense.
Gary said evenly, “Get in the boat.” No one at first moved. Then everyone began stirring at once to get into position. From the roofline, Bruce Garden helped the others into the back of the skiff, as Gary assisted them from there. Joanie worked her way to the front, followed by Bill Clawson. Earl and Nita sat in back of Bill. Gay was helped in last at the back. Bruce bent down on his knees to paddle on the right side, while Gary sat on the cash box and ledger book to paddle on the other. With people crowded against one another, the boat sat low in the water.
It was a scene from Dante’s Inferno when they pushed away from the tree limbs. The shadowy black-and-white contrasts from the moonlight, the high stretching gasoline and oil fires, the sounds of sirens wailing from land, and the overpowering smell of saltwater and rotten seaweed prevailed. The skiff was overloaded but they could survive. They had no other choice.
The weighted-down boat moved low in the choppy water, and Gary and Bruce had to be careful not to slam into anything that would puncture its hull. They paddled as best they could, Gary navigating the craft toward the business district. With the fear of further explosions happening so close to them, they had to avoid the Texaco gas station tanks and bulk station, which were both burning savagely out of control. Flames leapt higher as continuing explosions shook the air. It looked to Gary like a July Fourth fireworks display gone terribly awry.
They couldn’t go back the way Gary had taken, as debris had sailed into the way and now blocked the once-clear path. Too many propane tanks, parts of cars, and redwood logs bobbed in places like mines, and the low-riding skiff didn’t have the maneuverability that it once had. The skiff was now three-quarters of a mile inland, and the burning Texaco bulk station was to its left or ocean side. Gary said later: “As I found the way I had come out was blocked with debris, I spotted a smooth place about seventy-five feet wide right up to Front Street. We took off that way with everything smooth and quiet. The waters were smooth as a glass tabletop.”
To avoid the Texaco fires and angle toward Front Street, the skiff had to cross over Elk Creek, now totally inundated by the washes of the last great wave. Elk Creek angled toward downtown from behind the old site of the Long Branch. It bound the burning buildings on 101 in a parallel course, curving to the west to intersect Highway 101 at the Elk Creek Bridge and running eventually into the sea. Highway 101 at M Street forked sharply to the right where Elk Creek crossed underneath the bridge.
A direct course to avoid Elk Creek would move them uncomfortably close to the fiery holocausts. Turning around in the opposite direction would take them straight out to sea; going east moved them away from the populated areas. There were no good options, except to row in the original direction that the Long Branch had been thrust, angling towards the left and downtown but across Elk Creek and away from the fires.
This was an instinctive decision, and no one thought or said anything about where Elk Creek was. The laden-down skiff proceeded in that direction with its huddled, shivering occupants. Gary had been too busy to worry, although at times the thought flashed through him whether he would ever make it out of this alive. He maneuvered the skiff around the flames, heading it towards the reflected landmass that was ahead.
Spirits seemed to lift as the boat narrowed the distance. People thought they were going to survive, despite the horrors that they had already endured. Joanie turned her head away from the flames toward Gary and for the first time since the disaster gave a hopeful smile. He even kidded his father about their lost bar, joking to his father, “How does it feel to be in the grocery business? You’re now a half-owner of Gary’s Grocery.” Staring intently ahead, Bill didn’t answer.