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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jon Mooallem
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July 29 - August 14, 2020
It wasn’t as though, before the quake, people in Anchorage pictured these things happening and dismissed them as impossible; they just never pictured them. They couldn’t. 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.
It was one of the first major chain retailers to believe in Alaska enough to build in the state, and nothing, apparently, signaled a sophisticated civilization rising out of the wilderness like a five-story department store full of undergarments and blenders.
she was a woman who bore the conspicuous burden of always being fully and unflaggingly herself. But that unappeasable grit was often mistaken for pushiness or nastiness—a working mother wasn’t supposed to be so driven.
Genie tried to be gracious and stoic, to do what was expected of her without complaint; this, she believed, was the only way to defuse the discomfort of the men around her. At the end of the sled-dog races that afternoon, she would sign off by thanking not only all the KENI listeners and spectators, but Bram and Ty, too, “for allowing this little gal to be a part of the biggest broadcast crew ever assembled for a special events broadcast in Alaska!” She was also sure to thank her husband, Winston—“for his permission.” In retrospect, Genie was snared in a paradox a lot like the one in which the
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Whatever pride Genie took in their self-sufficiency was also undercut by guilt. She knew her kids were growing independent out of necessity, because she wasn’t around as much as other mothers were.
And so, though Genie recognized she wasn’t necessarily suited to her time, it didn’t yet occur to her that she might be ahead of it, either.
The earthquake overwhelmed people the way the strongest emotions do. It was pure sensation, coming on faster than the intellect’s ability to register it.
Its energy seemed to reverberate everywhere, disrupting or reshaping the surface of the planet as it went.
Genie was oblivious to the magnitude of destruction. None of the buildings in her line of sight, or even the utility poles, had toppled, and her mind, still reeling, could only absorb what was visible in front of her. The situation didn’t look that bad.
This, finally, was the moment of epiphany. It took all this for Genie to feel a certain irrevocable jolt, as you might feel aboard a train that’s jumped violently off its track: reality had derailed from her expectations, from her conception of what was even possible, onto some other, unmapped route.
Both assumptions provoked loneliness. Each generated a slightly different species of despair.
in the throes of such blindness, isolation, and disarray, every fact that Genie relayed had a stabilizing effect; each was a point around which reality could re-gather. “Information,” she said, “is a form of comfort.”
living in Alaska as similar to living on a ship at sea: official job descriptions were insignificant; each person had to pitch in wherever he could.
Eventually, people would start calling Taylor’s counter in the Public Safety Building “Disaster Control.” And the more the Disaster Control team accomplished, the more volunteers gravitated toward it, eager to contribute.
“All I remember is mass confusion but an awful lot being accomplished,”
A few minutes into the earthquake, there was a brief lull, when the shaking slowed but did not stop, as though the earth had momentarily gotten distracted or bored.
he’d already put in a full day of work that Friday, and though his voice still sounded soulful and warm, his mind was struggling to furnish it with any meaningful combinations of words.
As awful as this sounded, the same truth held: information was a form of comfort. Each stunned, eyewitness account on the radio that night appeared to help people in Anchorage find the contours of this sinister abstraction they were living through—and to locate their places in it. For nearly five minutes, the earthquake had overpowered everyone. But now so many stories, like von Imhof’s, described people switching back on and spontaneously helping one another—reclaiming their roles, collectively, as protagonists in the disaster.
Everywhere in Anchorage, a certain latent energy was being released, a force equal and opposite to that of the earthquake itself.
You could hear the potential death toll in the city gradually ticking down. And with each small declaration of survival that aired, you could imagine a constellation of affirming flames slowly lighting the emptiness outside.
As another woman put it, listening from the remote community of Clam Gulch, “It made us who were fortunate realize that no matter what powerful forces nature unleashes, it also releases similar forces in our men and women to cope with them.”
The hours went fuzzy, grew elastic and irrelevant.
The Broadfoots instilled in their children a commitment to being themselves—authentically and without compromise, but also without any trace of arrogance. “I had been reared to believe that each person is given talents by God,” Genie remembered. “Since those talents are a gift from God, you have no reason to be proud of them, but you do have the responsibility to use them for the benefit of mankind.” Pretending to be someone other than who you are, or conforming to someone else’s expectations, meant stifling those gifts and defaulting on your duty to the world.
She might have looked to her mother as another kind of cautionary tale as well. Den, a fiery and freethinking suffragette, had gone to Emerson College in Boston, then somehow gotten hemmed into a static, domestic life back in Bonham.
even the happy moments could be chewed through, without warning, by a kind of random unruliness that you sensed was always there.
It was shocking, Genie complained in a letter to her parents, how “one petty, jealous little man can really tear up an organization.”
disinterested diagonals.
Initially, the previous night, Genie had questioned whether she was supposed to be playing such a big role. But now she was irreplaceable. The pace and the pressure were unendurable. “I wasn’t equipped for it,” she would remember, “emotionally, physically, or anything else.” Her responsibilities, and the idiosyncratic systems she’d worked up to manage them, couldn’t be easily explained or handed off to Theda. And every time Genie started to explain them, the phone rang or the counter got mobbed. “Just start working with me,” Genie finally told her, “and you’ll find out.”
“The ethos of the frontier was, you looked after your neighbor,”
authorities had moved so quickly after the quake to guard the broken storefronts on Fourth Avenue. Arguably, the city was protecting its ruins from looters more conscientiously than it was looking for people trapped in them.
“I’ve always perceived that my role in life was to be a factotum,”
As a director, he had an almost despotic commitment to excellence. But in the end, the quality of the production was less important to him than the simple fact of people joining together to put it on. Eventually, on his résumé, Brink would start listing himself not just as “Theater Director,” but “Community Leader,” too.
over time, the rhythms of the community subsume individual lives.
The minutiae of daily life begins to look very different if you spiral forward in time and glance back: somehow, every scrap feels both precious and meaningless. “An archeologist’s eye combines the view of the telescope with the view of the microscope,” Wilder explained.
the overwhelming disaster everyone in Our Town is confronting is irrelevance: a creeping awareness that no matter how secure and central each of us feels within the stories of our own lives, we are, in reality, just specks of things, at the mercy of larger forces that can blot us out indifferently or by chance.
It would be hard, a half century later, for Americans living in an age of instantaneous information to appreciate how desperate the Outside world was for firsthand accounts of the disaster that night, and how long they were left in the dark. But keep in mind that they, too, saw themselves as living in an age of instantaneous information.
After taking two weeks off in August, she wrote: “I can feel my emotions again.” But one of those emotions was dread: she dreaded returning to work.
she seemed also to be privately wrestling with the conspicuous fact that she was outgrowing her husband.
“it is unfortunate that the very man who can grant me such freedom to continue to grow and to live has no interest in continuing to grow and live himself.”
Fifteen years had passed since Genie had reluctantly joined Winston in Anchorage, reassured by the hope that she might, at least, find opportunities on that dank frontier that were inaccessible to her in Texas. But before the earthquake, she’d seemed to only rediscover the same sexism and agonizing limitations—injustices society considered normal, or too shameful to discuss, much less resolve.
“She was giving younger women the opportunities she had missed. That’s the whole women’s movement, in a nutshell.”
For him, the story of the disaster would always feel slightly set back from reality—a piece of theater, playing out behind some impenetrable fourth wall.
As Mooallem moved through Genie’s boxes, time itself started to seem like a slow-moving natural disaster, imperceptibly shaking everything apart. Maybe nothing in our world is durable or stable. Maybe everything runs on pure chance. He wondered how we are supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness. What can we hold on to that’s fixed?
Armageddon proved to be a hard thing to practice for, however—or even to envision in detail.
In fact, even Bill Davis’s assumption that Anchorage was atypical would turn out to be typical. Eventually, it would be possible to look back on disaster after disaster and recognize that so many communities tended to interpret their own levelheaded and altruistic conduct as exceptional—New Orleanians being New Orleanians, or Puerto Ricans being Puerto Ricans—instead of wholly consistent with a half century of rigorous social science. It would be hard to accept that our goodness is ordinary.
All over town, she wrote, “organized groups consisting of teachers, bankers, lawyers, laborers, bookkeepers—from all occupations and all walks of life—first methodically searched the ruins for survivors and fatalities.”
In the end, this diffuse wave of unofficial first responders had reclaimed almost all of the city’s injured and dead before nightfall on Friday night—and most within the first hour after the quake. Everywhere in Anchorage, clusters of ordinary people had gone to work immediately, spontaneously, teaming up and switching on like a kind of civic immune response.
Anchorage’s recovery would sprawl far beyond the satisfying outlines of the drama that had unfolded in the city over the last three days.
What is safety, anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens.
What is safety, anyway? Genie seemed to be conceding how randomly our lives are jostled and spun around, that nothing is fixed, that even the ground we stand on is in motion. Underneath us, there is only instability. Beyond us, there’s only chance.
