jon Mooallem - This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held It Together

This book is called This Is Chance! It was written by Jon Mooallem, published by Random House, edited by Andy Ward.

It tells the story of a single catastrophic weekend in a faraway town, and of the people who lived through it: ordinary women and men whowhen the most powerful earthquake ever measured in North America struck, just before sundown on Good Friday, 1964found themselves thrown into a jumbled and ruthlessly unpredictable world they did not recognize. They would spend the next few days figuring out, together, how to make a home in it again.

The name of the town is Anchorage, Alaskaa blotch of Western civilization in the middle of emptiness. In those days, the state of Alaska was still brand-new and often disregarded as a kind of free-floating addendum to the rest of America. But Anchorage was Alaskas biggest and proudest city, a community whose essential spirit, one visitor wrote, reached aggressively and greedily to grasp the future, impatient with any suggestion that such things take time. It was a modern-day frontier town that imagined it was a metropolis, straining to make itself real.

That determination made it difficult for those living in Anchorage to recognize how indifferently the city they were building could be knocked downto imagine that, early one Friday evening, the very ground beneath them might rear up and shake their town like a dog shaking an animal hes killed, as one man later described it. Even while the earth was moving, the ferocious strangeness of what was happening to Anchorage was hard for people to internalize or accept. Buildings keeled off their foundations, slumped in on themselves, split in half, or sank. Four-foot-high ground waves rolled through the roads as though the pavement were liquid. A city of infallible right angles buckled and bent.

It wasnt as though, before the quake, people in Anchorage pictured these things happening and dismissed them as impossible; they just never pictured them. They couldnt. More to the point: Why would they? Like all of us, they looked around and registered what they saw as stable and permanent: a world that just was.

But there are moments when the world we take for granted instantaneously changes; when reality is abruptly upended and the unimaginable overwhelms real life. We dont walk around thinking about that instability, but we know its always there: at random, and without warning, a kind of terrible magic can switch on and scramble our lives.

As LIFE magazine would put it afterward, struggling to explain the hidden volatility that caused the quake, Somewhere, the earth is quivering all the time.

THIS FIRST CHAPTER OF the book shows an afternoon in town one month before the disasterby way of introduction. The date was Sunday, February 23, 1964; the time, just before one p.m.

All of Anchorage, it seemed, had gathered on Fourth Avenue for the last day of Fur Rendezvous, a weeklong winter carnival that enveloped downtown. Fur Rendezvous was one of the longest-running traditions in a community that didnt have many traditions yet, something for the burgeoning city to look forward to in the coldest, loneliest stretch of winter. Over the years, the expositions organizers had kept heaping on more activities and amusements until, by now, Fur Rendezvous had swelled into a kind of ramshackle Mardi Gras of the North. There were auctions, craft markets, concerts, carnival rides, pony rides, go-kart races, ski races, a beard-growing contest, and a homemade fur hat competition. There were beauty pageants and dances, and appearances by out-of-town celebrities like televisions first flying cowboy, the King of Organ Sounds, and a dog purported to be the actual Lassie, who had jetted into Anchorage in her own first-class seat. The Girl Scouts were selling cotton candy. The Boy Scouts were selling hot dogs. The Mormon Church was also selling hot dogs. And this year, Fur Rendezvous was proud to present its first-ever judo tournament.

That Sunday afternoon, everyone had come out for the races. The deciding heat of the World Championship Sled Dog Races was about to start, the finale of each years Fur Rendezvous week. Dog mushers would dart along a twenty-five-mile trail through the streets of Anchorage, then east into the foothills of the Chugach Mountains and back againstarting and finishing right here, on Fourth Avenue, in the heart of downtown.