11
OF FISHERMEN AND DOCKS
THE FIRST WAVE washed over the inner jetty and sand barrier, flooding Citizen’s Dock under one foot of water but causing no serious damage. It dragged boats from their moorings and smacked them against others. The first wave action, however, apparently didn’t mount the outer breakwater on the lighthouse and Seaside Hospital side of the harbor. Although littering the docks and beach with debris and some boats, the second wave didn’t contribute to the disaster either, being smaller than the first.
The Coast Guard cutter Cape Carter, a lumber tug, and a few fishing boats managed to escape the harbor and ride out the next waves in the open sea. The tsunami caught all of the other vessels. Although the Coast Guard did the best job it could, the limited amount of warning, and the reluctance of people to act countered their efforts. Chief Matthews of the Cape Carter stayed behind when his cutter cruised out to sea. He cleared the dock area, warning people of the impending tsunami and its dangers. When fishermen tried to reach their boats as the waves came in, Matthews and his volunteers turned many of them back. However, they weren’t able to stop everyone.
The third wave started the serious destruction of the harbor. In fact, when the third wave emptied out, the ocean’s movement sucked the entire bay dry and left many boats lying on their sides in the mud. When the fourth wave surged over every jetty and breakwater—returning lumber, cars, boats, and debris—what was left in the way was then crushed. The constant surging and ebbing of the seas compounded the devastation, and this destructive cycle occurred at least six times.
Whether they worked on the ocean or not, Crescent City residents weren’t “city folks” and were used to the outdoors. Although most weren’t college-educated, they were hardy people with practical instincts. When it came to survival, they didn’t have to think about what to do. Those who were fishermen were used to riding out rough water or being dumped in it, and they didn’t give in to panic as a rule. This is why these people survived through their incredible experiences.
One fisherman, Larry DeWolf, tried to motor his boat out to sea as the currents surged in, but lumber spilled onto the water from the huge barge and inland mills blocked his way. He threw out his sea anchor, but the swift currents kept it from catching bottom. Knowing that his larger forty-foot boat was now a liability, the man jumped into his skiff and abandoned the bigger one. However, the fourth wave and large debris smashed into the skiff, sinking it and tossing him with his heavy boots still on into the raging waters. DeWolf bodysurfed over lumber and debris while the tidal wave roared over the beach and land. The tsunami swept him several blocks over Highway 101 South, where he managed to catch onto a tall tree. The man stayed there until he could make his way to safer ground. DeWolf said later, “Don’t believe you can’t swim with your boots on!”
Marty Holenbeck tried to row another small skiff from the boat basin out to his commercial fishing boat. Barreling in the other direction, the tsunami swept it up from there to Elk Creek. It pushed him towards the grate at the Highway 101 intersection with the Elk Creek Bridge, but the surge then stopped and eddied around. He stayed in the boat. When the ocean receded, it sucked the skiff and Marty out to sea and Muscle Rock—three-fourths of a mile from shore.
Jack McKellar was watching the Friday night fights on television. When Jack learned about the threat, he phoned Ray Thompson who owned the sailing sloop the Ea. Ray, Jack, and Ray’s fourteen-year-old son, John, drove down to the harbor in Ray’s jeep. They parked the jeep by the south jetty, and Ray and Jack rowed out to the boat to take it to deeper waters. Ray told his son that if any waves came, he was not to try and outrun them, but to jump on top of the jeep.
As the two men loosened one mooring from the Ea, a second one snapped from a violent tidal surge. Another surge spun the boat around like a top, and as the ocean receded to prepare for the big fourth wave, the strong currents shot the boat from the harbor toward deeper ocean.
John during this time waited on shore for his father, who was now out to sea in the currents. As the ocean roared over the jetty, John climbed to the top of the jeep. Two other fishermen, Pat Grogan and Calvin Bradshaw, came down to the jetty to check on their boats. They discovered that the third wave had sucked their boats out to sea. As they drove away, they came across John who was sitting on top of the jeep.
John jumped from his perch and ran over to the other vehicle. As the threesome sped away, the fourth tidal wave surged after them and raced up to their car’s muffler. Although the ocean pushed against their bumper and over the muffler, they made it to higher ground. Speeding at upwards of fifty miles per hour, they out-raced the tsunami.
Meanwhile, Jack and Ray spent the night on the Ea, mutually reassuring each other that John was smart enough to have followed his father’s advice. They decided to stay in safe waters, knowing it would have been foolhardy to sail back into the harbor under these conditions, especially with the explosions and fires on land that they were seeing.
John finally found a working phone and telephoned his mother at 4:30 A.M. to tell her that he was safe. With the help of the Sheriff’s Department and radio station KPLY, this news was broadcast over the radio. A fisherman sailing by heard the news and sailed over to the Ea to tell Jack and Ray. They were overjoyed, of course, at hearing about John’s safety. However, it took two days before the boat could wind its way around the floating obstacles and back into the harbor.
MICK MILLER had borrowed his dad’s Lincoln Continental that evening to take his girlfriend to the drive-in, the same one that Guy Ames and his buddies were at. Afterwards, he drove to the beachfront and parked. The beach area at the time was completely undeveloped with two dirt roads that snaked though scrub brush, beaten driftwood, sand, and silt.
They were engaged at the time in some “post drive-in activities,” when he heard “tapping sounds” at the side of the car. As it grew louder, Mick opened the car door to look around—and water gushed in. He started the ignition and luckily the car started up. He turned the Lincoln around, but his brakes were too wet to work.
As he drove back toward Front Street, the water was three feet high behind him. Mick was lucky in that this was the first and smallest wave that had caught him at the beach. The last one would have been over twenty feet high. However, he was speeding over a one-way, narrow dirt road, and a police car with its red lights flashing and headlights bouncing was accelerating toward him. There was no room for either car to pass one another, and Mick’s brakes were gone.
The young man flashed his headlights and honked his horn to alert the policeman. However, this didn’t seem to make any difference, as the patrol car sped toward him, its headlights becoming larger in the night. At the last moment, Mick spun his car to the right and swerved onto the sandy embankment, as the police car flashed past. Unfortunately, his dad’s Lincoln Continental was now stuck in the sand.
The policeman backed up his car and yelled out the window, “Run for your life, there’s a tidal wave.” Fortunately for him, the area where he was stuck—in front of the Surf Hotel, some one hundred feet from Front Street—was on slightly higher ground and they were still dry. Mick and his girlfriend abandoned his father’s “limo” and ran the rest of the way to Front Street. By this time, people had poured out of the restaurants and bars to check out the ocean’s actions, including Gary Clawson and his party, and the ocean was lapping already up to Second Street. “After all these years, scares, warnings, and false alarms, it was actually happening,” Mick said later.
A friend picked up the two, took his girlfriend home, and then drove Mick home. Mick decided to get his father’s Lincoln Continental out of there, feeling that, “A tidal wave was small potatoes compared to the wrath of my old man.” His father was sound asleep. “Usually, waking a sleeping gorilla is not a sound idea under any conditions,” he later wrote. “These were, however, very unusual circumstances.”
Once awake, his father became more upset over the policeman’s reckless driving than about his son’s reason for being there in the first place. With Mick and his friend in tow, his father drove their four-wheel Land Rover into town. The second and third waves had hit the town by this time. Mick said, “Elk Creek had backed up, creating a whirling undertow that was destroying the foundations of the old buildings. Stores had six feet of water inside, merchandise was floating outside, and skiffs and small commercial boats from the harbor were rushing up L Street toward Third.” As the party stared at collapsed structures, his father tried to avoid the police barriers erected blocks up, as the officers tried to bring “order out of chaos.”
However, his father was now more interested in finding the cop who had forced his car off the road, than trying to rescue the Lincoln Continental. He would slow down at a roadblock, splashing saltwater over “angry flashlight-waving lawmen.” He ordered Mick to identify the guilty party. Mick’s friend, Steve, and Mick himself pleaded with his father to forget it—but he wouldn’t. “To try and put my father’s behavior into some perspective,” wrote Mick, “you should know he was the only man I ever knew that physically forced a policeman off the road and placed him under citizens’ arrest for speeding.”
Finally, they found the unfortunate young policeman. “After standing in running saltwater halfway to his knees, nearly getting arrested by one cop and shot by another, my father finally moved on,” Mick stated. They drove down J Street to the Surf Hotel, then onto the dirt road and finally located the stuck car. Although it was still intact, they couldn’t pull it from the sand dune. His father threw up his hands and said, “The hell with it. Roll up the windows and lock the doors, we’ll get it in the morning. I’m going back to bed.” With that, he had Mick drive him home.
However, Mick wasn’t finished. Steve and Mick found another friend, Steve Burtschell, who drove a jeep with a V-8. They again went after the now-famous Continental. This time, the threesome was able to free the car. However, Steve Burtschell saw something in the darkness, and yelled out, “Let’s get out of here, I think it’s coming back in again.” Tires spinning in the wet sand, the two cars sped up the unobstructed road, as the last wave had sucked everything back into the bay. At that time, the ocean was continuing to surge out through the funnel created by the inner and outer breakwaters.
The two teenagers drove rapidly away and made it to the high ground over the town. Mick and Steve Burtschell watched quietly from there, as the big one surged in. The area they had just left was now completely inundated by a raging torrent of boats, logs, cars, parts of stores, and boiling water. It was only then that Mick realized how close he had come to real danger. Stunned, he watched the swirling sea rise to seventeen feet against the Surf Hotel, right where he had been before. There was now an overwhelming “briny smell” of saltwater and seaweed, that then changed to the stench of gas. As the ocean snapped electrical lines into the sea, jolts of exploding lightning streaked from pole to pole over the power lines along Front Street. Other explosions occurred and the “whole end of town seemed engulfed in flames, casting an eerie, evil glow over the water.” After the water receded, Mick drove his dad’s car safely home and he and Burtschell went back down to help in the clean up.
JOE PITT and “Bricky” Proctor lived directly above the Klamath River. Hearing the sharp crash of ocean raging up the river, Joe woke his neighbor, Bricky, and the two men ran to Joe’s pickup truck. His rowboat was tethered on a trailer behind the vehicle. Navigating gingerly over a dirt road that led down to the river, Joe stared intently ahead as Bricky leaned out his window, straining to hear or see what was causing the commotion. The moonlight painted the surrounding landscape with black and white streaks, outlining the distinct shapes of the tall evergreens, along with the surrounding chaparral.
Joe stopped the pickup at a ridge close to the river. The engine idled as the lights cut through the late night. Looking down and silhouetted by the moonlight, both men “saw what appeared to be a large log with two people on it, on the south side of the river.”
Pitt quickly drove to the river’s edge, his car lights sweeping over the raging currents, but the log and its occupants had disappeared from view. The men smelled the salty air and saw the ocean boiling up and over the banks of the river that normally was gentle. The choppy water was full of huge logs, debris, and foam, as the currents moved up in the wrong direction.
Without hesitating, both men set the rowboat into the water, jumped in, and immediately were swept up by the flowing sea. It was as if a flood had leapt the banks by over ten feet, swirling with deep encroachments into what once had been protected land.
“Can you hear me?” yelled Proctor, trying to project his voice over the noise. He heard no answer. Both men continued yelling, as they dodged debris and worked their way, stopping to hear only the thump of floating objects bumping into one another. Then, the river stopped moving and became quiet.
They heard a “voice answering their cries, but now on the north side of the river,” or opposite from where they were—on the Crescent City side of the Klamath. Proctor yelled as loud as could, “Hang on, we’re coming,” and Joe Pitt rowed in the direction of what seemed to be two voices. Before he could go any distance, the currents began frothing again. With a rush, the sea heaved back towards the ocean, picking up the boat and its shocked occupants with a lurch. Joe put his muscle into trying to keep the rowboat on course, but his efforts weren’t successful as the current had turned into rapids. The diagonal route of the boat, however, took them eventually to the opposite side of the river.
They heard a plaintive cry for help—barely audible over the rushing of the currents—to the land side of the boat. Working against the current with the oars, Joe tried to maneuver the boat towards land, as the moonlight partially illuminated a large rock with what appeared to be a man clinging to one side. The rock was some six feet from the receding currents in eddying water.
The boat clunked into several rocks to one side. Scampering into the cold ocean, Proctor waded to the rock. The man gasped for air and “was in a state of shock,” as Joe and Bricky said later. He trembled as they picked him up, unable to answer their inquiries as to what had happened. Finally, the limp man said with considerable effort, “My buddy is still out there,” and pointed back towards the black morass. After he was wrapped in a blanket, the man told them his name: Stuart Harrington.
Despite being tired from their previous efforts, Joe and Bricky pushed the rowboat back into the currents with Stuart to search for Harrington’s lost companion. Bricky rowed out into the currents, venturing even farther toward the river’s mouth. Despite the risk of being swept out to the sea, they continued their search.
Shortly, they realized that they couldn’t navigate in the choppy waters, so Pitt and Proctor took turns rowing back to a boat landing that was close and approachable. Once there, they bundled Sgt. Harrington into a waiting car that raced him to an area hospital.
They started out a second time into the froth of salt-water to continue searching. Strange objects bobbed around in illogical directions due to the eddying currents. Being locals, they knew full well the treachery of the river’s mouth and the dangers of venturing out into it. Nevertheless, they continued their search on the Klamath River for Sergeant Donald McClure.
After a long struggle against the abnormal pitching and flowing of the Pacific Ocean, Pitt and Proctor finally gave up their efforts at approximately 5 A.M., March 28th, that Saturday morning, still rowing in the dark.
ROY MAGNUSON and his wife, Marilyn, were visiting her parents in Ferndale, south of Crescent City. He had heard on the news that there had been an Alaskan earthquake and a tidal wave. Although Roy was a local high school teacher, he also owned a thirty-two-foot commercial fishing boat that he used in summer to catch salmon for extra spending money. It took two hours to drive back to Crescent City. When he approached town, red flares already marked the road and considerable debris was scattered over Highway 101.
“It’s too late,” he said to his wife. “It’s all over. And this one’s really different.” Most of the tidal wave scares before had not resulted in such major flooding over Highway 101. He drove further down and parked his Volkswagen across the street from the Curly Redwood Motel, close to the Lighthouse Sporting Goods store on Citizen’s Dock Road and 101. Sheriff deputies waved him through when he told them they were going to check out their boat.
Roy left Marilyn behind in the car and started walking on Citizen’s Dock toward where his boat was moored. He was about two-thirds of the way down, when he heard a noise sounding like huge rapids inside a narrow canyon. A man driving a heister—a small vehicle that can raise its forklift ten feet or more to pick up and move large lumber stacks around—rumbled past him in the other direction. The operator yelled out, “Here comes another wave.”
Roy stared at the wave quickly sweeping in, frothing and about two feet high. Behind it, other waves were racing toward him on top of those. As this mass came over the dock, he heard a terrible grating sound and next saw the Dock Cafe restaurant sliding across the wharf. The ocean was right behind it and seemed to be running southeast, nearly reversing its direction from when racing onto land. Roy started running for his life, as the ocean quickly ate up the distance. He jumped into the Volkswagen and started to drive away. “No way,” he said, looking at how close the black mass was. Roy and Marilyn hopped out and raced to the adjacent Curly Redwood Motel. They scrambled up its staircase to the second story just in time, as the sea cascaded into their car. It floated away, the water rising toward where they were standing.
A large bundle of lumber, ten feet long and six feet wide, drifted against the floating car. However, this seemed to protect the Volkswagen, by keeping it close to the motel. When the water began to recede, Roy heard and saw the oil tanks and transformers further south of them blow up with skyrocketing fireworks. Amazingly, once the ocean receded this time, he was able to start up his car and drive away. Roy and Marilyn couldn’t drive into town, due to the destruction, debris, and possibility of larger waves surging in, so Roy drove around the city on Elk Valley Road back to his house.
AFTER ROY MAGNUSON arrived home, Gary Clawson was now outside the Elk Creek Bridge and swimming with all his might against the currents surging out to sea. Although the ocean was actually returning fast with a strong pullback, it seemed to Gary to be going by slowly. Coughing mightily and in fits, he treaded water while searching for other survivors. Angling his way toward the closest bank, he swam against the current. Gary spotted nearby what looked like the shape of a body, floating down with the currents. He swam to the silhouette. Grabbing and shaking it, he felt no response. As he turned the body around, he saw Earl’s face staring back. The waters had pushed both through the gate, one seemingly dead and the other one alive.
Gary swirled around and around, but didn’t see anyone else. With Earl in tow, Gary swam to land. He pulled Earl on shore, then felt a growing tiredness and throbbing inside his body. He started coughing and fell to his hands and knees, as if hit by an axe. Aching from the cold, bruised and dazed, Gary kept coughing up brine from his lungs.
As he coughed, he numbly realized he was on land. He had survived, somehow. Trapped underwater, grabbing at unknown objects to push yourself down to the bottom; taking in saltwater the entire time, but keeping your cool so that you can live: this reaches levels of survival rarely seen. Try to imagine the panic from being churned around, smashed into huge objects, driven down and held deep underwater, gulping in drowning seawater, arms and feet flailing, lungs filling with water, roaring sounds, pinned in darkness, flashes of light, and dying. This is a horrible way to die. Yet somehow Gary Clawson survived.
Hearing a noise echoing from the bridge, he pulled himself up slowly and looked toward the sound. Bruce was staring down at him. Gary yelled to his friend to come down and help him. As Bruce scrambled down the embankment, Gary started artificial respiration on Earl, pushing hard and down on the man’s upper back. No matter how hard he tried, the man didn’t move or react. Froth poured out of Earl’s mouth and nose on the wet sand, as Gary continually worked on him. Looking down at Earl, Gary was struck by the fact that the man had no marks on him, except for “one little two-inch cut over his eye.”
With no response to his lifesaving attempts, Gary called Bruce over to continue the resuscitation. Clawson then ran up the banks and back to the bridge. He stared into the raging waters inside the grate, outside it, and down to the ocean, but there was only debris piled up. He desperately looked for some sign of the others, but Gary found none. He wished there would be more light. The sun should come up sometime soon, he thought, estimating the time to be somewhere around 4:30 A.M.
Again without concern for his safety, Gary leapt into action. He jumped from the bridge onto the wreckage packed into the grate, then worked his way over to the connecting I-beam. From there, he began frantically digging through the tree limbs, clothing, store merchandise, and other debris in his way. He ended up to his shoulders in the rubbish, as saltwater sprayed and surged around him. However, this time he was on top of the logs. Although he tried everything in his power to find the others, he didn’t come across any signs. Tired, spent, with a gnawing feeling inside him, Gary gave up and made his way back to the bridge.
Meanwhile, Bruce’s efforts to revive Earl also had not worked. Knowing that there was nothing further he could do, Bruce came back for Gary. After all that they had endured through the night, both men reluctantly concluded that their friend Earl was, in fact, dead. And that everyone else in their group had disappeared.
They walked away from the bridge on Highway 101 toward Front Street. Coming across two deputy sheriffs, they brought them back to the bridge and pointed out where Earl’s body lay below. Taking one look at the bruised and bloodied Gary, then at Bruce, the sheriffs tried to convince them to go straight to the nearest hospital. The officers would even drive them there. Both Gary and Bruce declined. The two men stumbled to Bruce’s nearby home, changed into dry clothing, and returned immediately to the bridge.
The California Highway Patrol now stood guard over the span. Despite their pleas to be let back in, the authorities refused to allow them to continue their search. Gary became so enraged at this turn of events, the sheriffs had to physically restrain him from wrestling his way back. He couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t let him find his parents, friends, and lover. In more normal times, he would have been arrested on the spot.
In defense of the authorities, they were quite concerned over the abnormally high, in-and-out tidal surges still pounding through the culvert. Worried that another series of fatal waves would rise up, they cordoned off numbers of places around Crescent City, including this bridge. The search and rescue efforts would have to wait until the sun rose.
HIGH UP THE TOWER of the Battery Point Lighthouse, Roxey and Peggy Coons watched with horror as the receding waters sucked out the guts of Crescent City and as explosions and broken electrical wires cast a weird Fourth of July display. The lighthouse was not damaged, because the tidal waves stretched around the high island, flooding lower parts of the island but not touching the much-higher lighthouse structure.
The lighthouse had been in continuous operation since 1856, and the Coons were the lighthouse caretakers working for the Del Norte Historical Museum that maintained the facilities. Peggy had awakened just before midnight and stood at the window of her bathroom. A full moon shone on the bay and the shimmering waters below. When she saw the ocean, Peggy immediately knew that something was wrong. The rocks around the island had disappeared under the sea. She knew that it was time for high tide, but the rocks had always been visible, even in the severest of winter storms.
She awoke her husband, they dressed quickly, and both quickly ran outside. They watched in awe as the first “huge wave” crested over the breakwater with its debris and churned toward the town. Within minutes the wave came back, as fast as it had first headed in.
Peggy wasn’t sure how long it was before the next wave rolled past, but it surged by the lighthouse with more logs, driftwood, and debris than before. Lights flickered out on shore, as this one streaked further inland. When the back flow of the ocean started for the second time, they stared as the water drained from the bay. This time, the water receded even further.
The third wave was larger. The flashes and sparking of downed power lines at the south end of town sparkled in the night. A fire started, lighting up the sky, and more lights blacked out through the town.
Peggy Coons wrote:
The water withdrew as if someone had pulled the plug. It receded a distance of three-quarters of a mile from the shore. We were looking down, as though from a high mountain, into a black abyss. It was a mystic labyrinth of caves, canyons, basins, and pits, undreamed of in the wildest of fantasies.
The basin was sucked dry. At Citizen’s Dock, the large lumber barge was sucked down to the ocean bottom.... In the distance, a black wall of water was rapidly building up, evidenced by a flash of white as the edge of the boiling and seething sea-water reflected the moonlight. The Coast Guard cutter and small crafts, before riding the waves a safe two-miles offshore, now seemed to be riding high above the wall of seawater.
Then the mammoth wall of water came barreling towards us. It was a terrifying mass, stretching up from the ocean floor and looking much higher than the island. Roxey shouted, “Let’s head for the tower!”—but it was too late. “Look out!” he yelled and we both ducked as the water struck, split and swirled over both sides of the island. It struck with such force and speed that we felt like we were being carried along with the ocean. It took several minutes before we realized that the island hadn’t moved.
The wave crashed onto the shore, picking up driftwood logs along the beach and roadway. It looked as though it would push them onto the pavement at the end of A Street. Instead, it shoved them around the bank and over the end of the outer breakwater, through Dutton’s lumberyard. Big bundles of lumber were tossed around like matchsticks into the air, while others just floated gracefully away.
The ocean covered the outer breakwater as it rolled over Dutton Dock. The surges left the huge lumber barge resting on top of Citizen’s Dock. Once attached to a dock, the Citizen’s fish storage buildings were now dancing over the ocean. Moored fishing boats bobbed up and down, and one boat tore up Elk Creek as if it was motorized. This was Marty Holenbeck’s skiff.
Peggy Coons continued:
When the tsunami assaulted the shore, it was like a violent explosion. A thunderous roar mingled with all the confusion. Everywhere we looked, buildings, cars, lumber, and boats shifted around like crazy. The whole beachfront moved, changing before our very eyes. By this time, the fire had spread to the Texaco bulk tanks. They started exploding one after another, lighting up the sky. It was spectacular!
The tide turned, sucking everything back with it. Cars and buildings were now moving seaward again. The old covered bridge, from the Sause fish dock, that had floated high on the land, had come back to drop almost in its original place. Beds, furniture, televisions, mattresses, clothing, and other objects were moving by so fast that we could barely tell what they were. The next wave rushed past us into town but appeared to do no damage. The rest of the night, the water and debris kept surging in and out of the harbor.
Until that night, Roxey and Peggy Coons had never seen as many violent and monstrous changes in the tide as had then occurred—and they never would again.