Postcards from the Rogue Valley

As I write this, a Red Flag Fire Warning hangs over the Rogue River Valley. Distant thunder and dark clouds, a rare presence in our resolutely blue summer skies, raise the specter of wildfires sparked by lightning strikes. Last summer, a rash of thunderstorms one weekend in July set in motion 163 wildfires across Oregon, with Southern Oregon bearing the brunt. Smoke buried the region and the fires burned until October. Local businesses and residents are still picking up the pieces from a summer that drove tourists away and made face masks daily wear.

This year, fire crews have been poised to act whenever and wherever lightning threatens worse things to come.

It’s human nature to pay attention to imminent risks and risks with which we have experience. On the natural disaster ledger this includes tornadoes in Oklahoma, hurricanes in Florida,  flooding in Houston, Nor’easters in New England, and forest fires in California.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, a risk no one wants to think about is The Really Big One: a magnitude 9 earthquake along a 700-mile stretch of coast—from Mendocino in Northern California to Vancouver Island in Canada—followed by waves reaching 100 feet high. Seismologists call it the Cascadia subduction zone, where the oceanic Juan de Fuca Plate moves to the east and slides below the much larger, mostly continental North American Plate. Kathryn Schulz’s astonishing article in The New Yorker in July 2015 about this geological timebomb quoted the FEMA director responsible for Oregon and Washington: “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 [which runs north and south roughly 50 miles east of the Pacific] will be toast.”

A century ago, Oswald West, Oregon’s governor, had the wisdom to preserve the entire 363-mile coastline for public use. Today, the rugged land remains uniquely unspoiled, with old-growth forests, churning surf, and small seaside towns flanked by lighthouses.

In mid-July, Tony and I set out for a road trip up the coast. Finding trailheads, not higher ground, topped our concerns. At Reedsport, we joined the two-lane, winding US 101 that hugs the entire Oregon coast. We hiked the other-worldly Oregon Dunes Recreational Area for an hour and a half, then resumed our travels. The road dipped and a sign that would become our constant companion appeared: “TSUNAMT HAZARD ZONE | IN CASE OF EARTHQUAKE, GO TO HIGH GROUND OR INLAND.” A picture of a stick figure fleeing a villainous wave helped make the point. A quarter mile later, the road crested inviting a new sign: “LEAVING TSUNAMI HAZARD ZONE.” The towering wave remained but the stick figure was gone.

We spent our first night in the coastal town of Yachats—pronounced Ya-hots, population 1,000, and considered the gem of the entire Oregon coast. Rock “haystacks” and parading waves filled our picture window at the Fireside Motel, reminding us of nature’s immensity. Instead of a Gideon Bible tucked in a drawer, though, literature about what to do when a tsunami strikes covered the desktop. (There was no “if,” only a “when.”) The message was clear: if the earth begins to rumble, run for your life, uphill.Ten to 20 minutes separate the earthquake and the tsunami.

My iPad soon led me to a new New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz (this one called “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea”), published just two weeks earlier, that laid bare the unfathomable.

Other than asteroid strikes and atomic bombs, there is no more destructive force on this planet than water. Six inches of it, flowing at a mere seven miles per hour, will knock a grown man off his feet. Two feet of it will sweep away most cars. Two cubic yards of it weighs well over a ton; if that much of it hits you at, say, twenty miles per hour, it will do as much damage to your body as a Subaru. In rough seas, a regular ocean wave can break with a force of two thousand pounds per square foot, more than enough to snap a human neck. A rogue wave—one that is more than twice the height of those around it—can sink a nine-hundred-foot ship.

Keep scaling up the water, and you keep scaling up the trouble. Eight years ago, a tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan. A tsunami is not like a regular wave, and it is not like a rogue wave; it is more like a rogue ocean. It forms, most often, when an earthquake shifts the seabed and displaces all of the water above it. That displaced water does not crest and fall; it simply rises, like an extremely high tide, until the entire water column is in motion, from seafloor to surface. Then it rolls inland, with ten or twenty or sixty miles of similar waves at its back, and demolishes everything in its path. The tsunami that struck Japan swept over eighteen-foot protective barriers, rushed through towns and cities, and tore them apart, so that those towns and cities became part of the wave, cars and trucks and warehouses and real houses swirling in the water. It reached a hundred and thirty feet high at its apex, travelled up to six miles inland, and killed almost twenty thousand people. Seven years earlier, a similar tsunami rose up out of the Indian Ocean on the day after Christmas, poured outward to India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Indonesia, and left more than two hundred and eighty thousand people dead.

The next morning, Tony and I tried plotting our tsunami escape. You must understand the geology here, where the mountains touch the ocean and higher ground is largely inaccessible. We checked out the five plus “evacuation” routes in Yachats: they ran about 150 feet uphill before they hit steep slopes, rocks, forest—and ended.  

If we did make it to higher ground, the prospect of surviving up to two weeks outdoors with little food or water seemed daunting. “Even under the best of circumstances, medical aid or fire and law enforcement officials may not be able to reach you for days,” the pamphlet “Living On Shaking Ground” warns.

We concluded there was no escape.

 “There aren’t many injuries in the tsunami zone,” one seismic expert with the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, or DOGAMI, told Schultz. “People just die.”

Tony and I continued our journey north. We hiked every day, through rain forests and along precipitous cliffs falling to the ocean. Deep coves, beaches covered with driftwood, tidepools, and waves lined up as far as we could see. One day, on our hike to Cape Lookout—a 300-foot high rock jutting 2.5 miles into the Pacific and one of the best whale-watching sites on the Pacific coast—the wind was so fierce we could barely stand and dense fog cloaked the view. It was exhilarating.

Lighthouses dot the coast and we hiked to all of them. These safety sentinels from an earlier time would be among the first structures to go in a tsunami.

Is the Really Big One an imminent threat? Seismologists, predictably, can’t  predict its arrival, but they say it is due. 

Meanwhile, the governor of Oregon recently signed a law that overturns a 1995 prohibition on constructing new public facilities within the tsunami-inundation zone. When the law, known as HB 3309, goes into effect, municipalities will be free to build schools, hospitals, prisons, other high-occupancy buildings, firehouses, and police stations in areas that will be destroyed when the tsunami strikes—that is, in one of the riskiest places on earth.

Our return trip to Ashland took us through the same mountain pass where snow and ice halted traffic on I-5 this February and aborted our trip to Portland for my eye surgery. This time, smoke from a wildfire started by an illegal campfire slowed our path. In Ashland, the smoke had caused serious health alerts all week.

Mother Nature aside—a big aside—it’s been a wrenching two weeks. I am reminded of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

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