A Crack in the Edge of the World (14 page)

Seven years later—rather more than two decades after this town was established—the wrath of God descended. It was to smite—as some locals imagined
*
—a place that was already suffering under the burdens of its strange history. It struck first in pitch dark, in the small
hours of the ice-cold morning of Monday, December 16. A letter written by some long-forgotten correspondent in the town to a distant friend is taken as a fairly accurate reflection of what happened:

About two o'clock this morning we were awakened by a most tremendous noise, while the house danced about and seemed as if it would fall on our heads. I soon conjectured the cause of our troubles, and cried out it was an Earthquake, and for the family to leave the house; which we found very difficult to do, owing to its rolling and jostling about. The shock was soon over and no injury was sustained, except the loss of the chimney, and the exposure of my family to the cold of the night. At the time of this shock the heavens were very clear and serene, not a breath of air stirring; but in five minutes it became very dark, and a vapor which seemed to impregnate the atmosphere, had a very disagreeable smell, and produced a difficult of respiration. I knew not how to account for this at the time, but when I saw, in the morning, the situation of my neighbors' houses, all of them more or less injured. I attributed it to the dust … the darkness continued until daybreak; during this time we had eight more shocks, none of them as violent as the first.

At half past six o'clock in the morning it cleared up, and believing the danger over I left home, to see what injury my neighbors had sustained. A few minutes after my departure there was another shock, extremely violent. I hurried home as fast as I could, but the agitation of the earth was so great that it was with much difficulty that I kept my balance—the motion of the earth was about twelve inches to and fro. I cannot give you an accurate description of this moment; the earth seemed convulsed—the houses shook very much—chimnies {
sic
} falling in every direction. The loud, hoarse roaring which attended the earthquake, together with the cries, screams and yells of the people, seems still ringing in my ears.

Fifteen minutes after seven o'clock we had another shock. This one was the most severe one we have yet had—the darkness returned, and the noise was remarkably loud. The first motions of the earth were similar to the preceding shocks, but before they ceased we rebounded up and down, and it was with difficulty we kept our seats. At this instant I expected a dreadful catastrophe….

The disturbance that night was the beginning of a five-month-long nightmare, a seemingly unending succession of sudden movements and severely destructive earthquakes to which seismologists still refer as the New Madrid Sequence. At times the earth just shook and shook intermittently, like “the flesh of a beef just killed,” as one local farmer put it; at other times it undulated, like a ship on the sea; or it shuddered so violently that horses were knocked to the ground and trees collapsed into rents torn in the soil. Crevasses opened with no warning, emitting strange hissing sounds as they did so. Curious lights danced in the branches of trees—like the static electricity of St. Elmo's Fire, seen on the masts of ships caught in powerful storms. Strange and generally foul smells oozed up from pores in the ground. What looked like putrefying boils suddenly bubbled out onto the surface of fields, and sand volcanoes or fountains of mud covered the meadows, briefly rendering them (had anyone been in the mood for farming) useless.

The turbulence in both the earth and the Mississippi River after the 1811 earthquake centered at New Madrid was formidable, the stuff of legend.

And the Mississippi, mighty as it was—in places more than half a mile across—began to behave in ways that defied credulity. After one particularly dramatic sequence of shaking, it developed violent overfalls and began to flow
backward
, its waters surging in borelike shudders up toward the mouth of the Ohio, and spuming as they battled against the furious downstream torrent. A Scotsman named John Bradbury, sent over from Liverpool to catalog the botanical life of the American West, happened to be on the river during one of these episodes. His boat, he later wrote, suddenly and for no obvious reason, lurched upward, so rudely that everyone imagined an imminent capsize. Bradbury was knocked off his feet, but, when he grabbed hold of the railing and tried to stand, he saw that the river was covered with foam, and thick with broken branches and whole trees, the entire surface whipped up into a lather as if during a fearful storm—and yet there was no wind, no lightning, no rain. “The noise was inconceivably loud and terrific,” he said, although he could “distinctly hear the crash of falling trees, and the screaming of the wild fowl on the river … all nature was in a state of dissolution.” The riverbanks were caving in with enormous crashes, jagged chasms were being torn in the low cliffs, and dozens of boats—all empty and forlorn—were drifting past in the frenzy, evidence, so Bradbury supposed, of the deaths of all those caught up in the terror.

The botanist, who was clearly well trained in scientific observation, was able to count twenty-seven distinct additional shocks as the night wore on, while his party's little cutter was hove to, waiting for an end to whatever was happening. In time he noticed a distinct pattern: First there was a sudden sound, usually from “a little northwards of east,” and then there was a shock; and once that was over, the sound disappeared, quietening itself to a whisper as it did so, in what seemed to Bradbury was a generally westerly direction. In time it diminished entirely, and Bradbury's party made its way downriver—eventually reaching Natchez in the new year, 1812. There he saw the arrival of the steam-driven stern-wheeler
New Orleans
, the first steam-powered
vessel to navigate the Mississippi: It had passed through New Madrid while the water was foaming and the surviving inhabitants were wailing in terror and, he supposed, demanding to be picked up. But, he reported, the captain had decided not to stop—partly because he was afraid of berthing while the earthquake was going on, and partly because he soon realized from the wailing of the town's inhabitants that they were as terrified by his mighty new vessel, belching smoke and making its fearsome engine noise, as they were by what was happening beneath their feet.

The number of events in the sequence was truly prodigious. Jared Brooks, of Louisville, Kentucky, counted no fewer than 1,874 separate earthshaking episodes in and around New Madrid over the next few weeks. Shocks like the first enormous one of December 16 occurred two more times—once on January 23 and again on February 7, this last being the mightiest of all. And then the world fell silent again. New Madrid rebuilt itself to the extent that it ever would, and quietly resumed its place as an otherwise forgettable little town in the middle of an otherwise most forgettable corner of the American Midwest.

Except that it remains a very seismically active place today, a place where the needles on seismographs mounted in the tiny city museum down by the levee wave furiously all the time, like antennae of some excitable insects. A number of faults have recently been identified, running deep and hidden below the alluvial soil that today nourishes the cotton, corn, and soybeans up above. Two of these faults trend from the northeast to the southwest, just as the Appalachian Mountains, now hundreds of miles away back east, do also; and the other two run at ninety degrees to them, appearing on the map as lines of cross-hatching.

A map that shows the estimated epicenters of the thousands of earthquakes that occurred in 1811, and of the tens of thousands that have caused the land here to chatter away noisily ever since, follows the traces exactly. A line of black dots and other symbols of varying size and shape runs from the hamlet of Marked Tree in Arkansas up to the tiny town of Vienna, Illinois, northeast to southwest, illustrating occurrences of one of the sets of quakes; and another line seems to
form a crosspiece over the first one, running as it does between Fisk, Missouri, and Trenton, Tennessee, and sporting another array of dots, triangles, and circles, revealing how the quakes followed that fault line, too.

The two lines intersect in New Madrid, at a place shown on the seismic map as a wildly confusing maze of dots, dashes, lines, stars, circles, and other coded markings. These indicate that this is perhaps the most active, and in time possibly the most potentially deadly, location in all of America. The relatively new science of paleoseismology—the looking for evidence of early earthquakes—tells us that this intersection has not only been plagued by small and occasional quakes in the past, but also suffered from sequences of truly enormous earthquakes. It seems to have experienced a major sequence around
A.D
. 900, and again around
A.D
. 1500. If these are taken into consideration with the 1811 event, it now looks as though New Madrid is being visited by chaos and lethality every three or four centuries—with the corollary that the end of the twenty-first century, perhaps, will be the time for the intersection of the fault lines to act up again.

If it does so, matters will probably be infinitely more terrible. Not so much because of New Madrid's future as a hub of commerce and population—such a thing will probably never happen. It will be terrible because the epicenter exists, poised to rupture, at the still center of a full one million square miles of American territory that has now within its borders cities, factories, waterways, military bases, suburbs, and slums that would all be seriously, devastatingly affected by a series of quakes of the same size as those that took place in 1811. It is likely that cities will be bigger, with populations more densely settled, roads and railway lines more important, factories more sophisticated, and—unless lessons are learned quickly—all settled and built with only a limited awareness of what the earth below may be readying itself to do.

When the faults ruptured in 1811, the western half of the earthquake's penumbra was to all intents and purposes uninhabited, with the other half peopled by pioneers and farmers and men and women who had made for themselves only modest dwellings in equally modest
and still-growing towns. Now, however, from Chicago to Memphis,
*
from Oklahoma City to Nashville, there are giant conurbations crammed with people and with valuable buildings and priceless businesses. Few of the inhabitants spend much of their time today remembering that they have chosen or chanced to be in a notoriously dangerous earthquake zone. And if they ever do, then they generally reassure themselves by saying, without any statistical justification for doing so, that the winter of 1811 was when the region got its pent-up seismicity out of its system, and all is likely to be peaceful from now on.

I HAD ONE MORE PLACE
to visit before I entered the American West proper, before I began to travel into that part of the country that came under the direct influence of the specific geological peculiarities that generated and triggered—or, as geology likes to put it, were the ultimate and proximate causes of—the San Francisco Earthquake. My next immediate destination lay just a few hundred miles farther on from Missouri, at a general store in a tiny Oklahoma village with the distinctly unmemorable name of Meers.

It had been named after a prospector, but nothing of substance had ever been found anywhere near it, by Mr. Meers or by anyone else. Back in the 1890s there had been all kinds of rumors of gold being found in the Wichita Mountains, including one tale of a housewife finding a nugget as big as a piece of buckshot in the craw of a fowl she was preparing for Christmas dinner. Such stories were often part of the western myth, tales circulated to encourage settlers to come out from back east. And some gullible, greedy or bored adventurers did indeed go there and build a clutch of shacks beside a creek. For a while their hopes were kept alive by town hucksters who had brought in some real gold miners from Colorado and salted a local shaft with imported
nuggets. There was something of an Oklahoma gold rush, but then the mines petered out, or were just abandoned as having been worthless all along.

Before long such townsfolk as remained closed the mines, bought longhorn cattle from dealers in Texas, and began to ranch. Cattle ranching remains the staple of Meers today, though there is a lake, and a wildlife reserve with herds of buffalo, elk, and deer. The place positively hums at weekends when artillerymen from the huge base nearby at Fort Sill stop by to play. The first man I met at the Meers general store was an army colonel just back from serving two years in Bosnia. He was training on a new kind of howitzer and was expecting to be sent off to Iraq any day. Remote though the town may be, it has managed to forge some kinds of links with the world beyond.
*

This was amply displayed in 1985, when Meers began to excite, if only in a modest way, a keen interest in the worldwide community of seismologists. Teams of surveyors suddenly became fixated upon a strange escarpment that had apparently popped out of nowhere close by the town, and that ran for fifteen miles or so to the north, then ended as abruptly as it had begun. They couldn't find any good reason for its existence—but once it was examined in detail, it was discovered that it marked the trace of a very distinct fault line. Moreover, it was a fault line that showed evidence of having moved, swiftly and violently, at least twice since it had been created. Two big earthquakes had apparently hit Meers—or rather, where Meers would eventually be, the more recent of the two quakes having taken place just over a thousand years ago. Exactly why this might be, no one at the time could tell.