I didn’t expect this book on the 1964 earthquake to help me weather the pandemic

Bill Ray / Life Photo Collection via

Scene showing the devastation caused by an earthquake in Anchorage.

John Mwalm writes in the opening pages of his 2020 book, This is an Opportunity! “There are moments when the world we take for granted changes, when reality suddenly turns and overwhelms real life. We don’t go around thinking about this instability, but we know it’s always there: randomly and without warning, some kind of terrible magic can transform He defends our lives. “

The teacher talks about the Great Alaska Earthquake – a 9.2 magnitude earthquake on March 27, 1964, killed more than 100 people, and remains the most powerful earthquake in US history – but when I first read the book in March, the scene sounded Uncomfortably familiar. At that time, I was beginning to doubt that we were on the verge of our own disaster. My husband and I have, luckily, just moved into a new apartment, so we no longer have to share our bedroom with our 6-month-old son, but only three days after discovering my new commute, we are told that we will likely be working from home. On hikes to explore our new neighborhood, neighbors started wearing masks; Shops were starting to close. And soon those daily tours were over, too. But it was so early that I believe in succinctly the effects of this newly named pandemic. We’ll all be home for two weeks, maybe a month or two, until we deal with the difference.

But then my husband’s salary was reduced. Soon after, it was mine, too. We said goodbye to our nanny. We tried to find toilet paper. She sat on the bathroom floor and cried. You know how this story goes. I was there too. We, like those who were in the epicenter of the 1964 earthquake, will soon find ourselves in a “mixed, ruthless and unpredictable world that they did not recognize.”

You are back to this opportunity! Several times since last March. I interviewed the teacher via text message, joked about the parallels between the book and our current puzzling reality, and I still didn’t realize the extent of the devastation. I wrote up the book for our list of the best spring and end of the year. For a while, I will not be silent about it in front of friends and acquaintances who, like me, have been slowly losing the ability and will to read. And now, all of a sudden, it’s March 2021. I’m listing the new paperbacks, and here it is. Remember what it was like when I read it for the first time, and I think, oh my God, were you young at all?

Courtesy of Jan Blankenship

This is an opportunity! The film revolves around Jenny Chance, a radio journalist and mother – a hardworking but often underrated mother, who is forced to pacify the ego of her male colleagues and subjects (and her husband) – who experienced what is now known as the Great Alaska Earthquake while driving with her son. She drove him home and ran away to investigate. Using her transistor radio, Chance started broadcasting from her car, then set up a station in the Public Safety Building, which became an improvised command center. It did not start until an hour after the first earthquake, and continued into the next thirty.

Everything that happens in Anchorage over the next three days passes through it; Her story is the story of her city. Anchorage, which was incorporated as a city only 44 years ago, was unprepared; “She didn’t have a protocol for that kind of emergency.” She saw the opportunity for chaos surrounding her – broken buildings, wrecked cars, split roads – and decided to claim responsibility for preventing “a potential breakdown of civil society”, in order to “stave off this mess.”

Others followed suit. A public works employee led a campaign to map the destruction and dangers of the city, recruiting a group of city employees and volunteers using DIY badges – strips of white bed sheets handwritten in lipstick. Amateur radio operators have become dedicated messengers, “cruising in their radio-equipped cars to act as a kind of alternative telephone system.” An assistant professor took the lead in “organizing an organized effort to search the city for the missing and collect the dead.” Not to mention the countless people digging through the rubble in the street, pulling neighbors out of trapped cars, and providing first aid. Recalling the reaction that immediately followed, one resident said, “Everyone tried to help […] Account clerks and accountants. Everyone was trying to do a little bit of everything for everyone. “

The city’s civil defense office was theoretically responsible for the emergency response, and the morning after the first earthquake of 9.2 magnitude, Douglas Clore, who had recently resigned as agency director, returned to the Public Safety Building to announce that he was in control. But the office was in a mess of “uncommon incompetence”. Those who had been doing the agency’s job for nearly an entire day “found it was faster, and less frustrating, to get past Clure [and] Just solve the problem by themselves. They have complained that the cliors move too slowly or in circles. Clore seemed bogged down by subtle protocol questions. “Who will give me this power?” One disaster worker recalled that he was constantly asking, whenever an unconventional emergency measure was suggested.

The earthquake revealed the fragility of the young city’s literal and metaphorical foundation. It also revealed the strength of its citizens. Faced with the “complete breakdown of all bureaucracy,” the community improvised its disaster management system, which consisted of “volunteers … ordinary citizens, many of whom seemed to be less qualified to deal with such a crisis than Jenny.” But deal with it they do.

The city’s Anchorage government largely failed because it was at the time a “woefully young place”. We don’t have any excuses. We’ve spent more than a year in failure – by state and federal politicians voting against subsidies, botched closures and vaccine distributions; By banks and landlords; By employers and yes, by some neighbors. But in the midst of neglecting ostensibly built systems to protect us, community has formed around those who aspire to the support and support of others. What was there to do? People turned to mutual aid funds, crowdfunding support for small businesses, fought evictions, and found and distributed PPE. If the pandemic teaches me anything, it is that many of us have survived not because of our governments, but in spite of them.

Courtesy of Jan Blankenship

Downtown Anchorage is seen minutes after a strong earthquake in this photo by Jenny Chance.

We cannot talk about this an opportunity! Without talking about our city. Thornton Wilder’s 1938 meta-play about small-town life, about the unusual disguise of being ordinary and vice versa, leads the guru’s narrative. When the earthquake struck Anchorage, its small local theater was preparing to produce the pilot work; Amidst the destruction, a sign reading “Our City” fell into the rubble. It is a detail that can be read very easily if this is a fiction.

The plot of our city is calm and almost next to the point – in a small town called Grover’s Corners, two little neighbors fall in love, get married, grow old and die. The star is the director of the theater, a narrator who has the knowledge of all things God-like and shoots in the future to describe the whole life and eventual death of each character, and zooms out to remind the audience how insignificant the city and life are when viewed from a distance. The teacher writes:

“The theater director says: Remember us. Get to know us. It is a simple community’s insistence that the matter matters, and it has become urgent due to the suspicion that it might ultimately not be important. In other words, the overwhelming disaster that everyone in our city faces is the irrelevance: A creepy realization that no matter how safe and focused each of us feels in our life stories, we are, in fact, mere patches of things, at the mercy of greater powers that can tarnish us with indifference or chance. “

At this opportunity! , The teacher acts as the theater director. By tracking those three days in Anchorage, hour by hour, he takes over the mantle of demanding recognition for these people, this city, despite the inevitability and inferiority of the disaster. In a year of universal sadness and loneliness – when, often and in many ways, we were told our lives were consumed – this was especially true.

What I realized now, by reviewing the book, was that he didn’t stick with me because of his visual depiction of disaster – it was his unemotional testament to cooperation, his rejection of nihilism in the face of disaster after disaster. When describing the Chance family’s refusal to separate after the earthquake, despite Jenny’s parents’ insistence that they send the children home in Texas, the teacher wrote: “Our strength to confront chaos is communication.” It feels really good going. There is nothing unique about the grand scheme of things: how bleak it is, how beautiful it is. ●

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