Vicki Kluever's story

It was a pleasant spring afternoon that day in Kodiak. There was hardly any snow on the ground, no wind and the sun was shining. The ocean was calm, glistening as the last of the late afternoon sun’s rays bounced off the water. It was a day much like these past several days. My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Dinner that night was spaghetti with meatballs. My baby brother was 2 years old; he was sitting in his high chair playing with spaghetti noodles. My older brother was 9, and was watching cartoons on TV. My father had just arrived home from work a few minutes before and was in a rare good mood. I had worn a plaid skirt and a white blouse to school that day, and was still wearing my school clothes when my father arrived home. I hoped he would notice me and comment how nice I looked. I was 7 years old. I was excited because it was Easter weekend. That day was Good Friday, March 27, 1964

We had just sat down at the dinner table and started to serve up our dinner plates when the table started to shake. We waited, as we always did, for the shaking to stop. But it didn’t stop. It got worse-much worse. I looked up at the light hanging over the table. It was swaying wildly back and forth. I looked out the window and saw the trees whipping around. That was very odd to me, since I had not ever seen the trees whip like that before, and there was no wind that day. The water in my guppy fish bowl was sloshing out and spilling all over the floor. My father yelled for us to get under the tables and to stay away from the windows. Mom grabbed my baby brother from his high chair and she and my brother Brett crawled under the dining room table. I tried to stand up but was thrown to the floor. I crawled on my hands and knees toward the coffee table. About that time the guppy bowl slid off the table and fell to the floor. There was still some water left in the guppy bowl, so I stopped to scoop up the guppies from the floor and put them back in the bowl. My mother yelled at me to leave the guppies. There was a deafening roar all around us. I know now it was the sound of the earthquake….the noise of things banging on the walls and in cupboards, things crashing to the floor all over the house, the sound of an old wood frame house popping and groaning as it was twisted and contorted, but mostly it was the sounds of the violent movement of the earth. It seemed as though the earthquake lasted forever. When the shaking finally stopped, everything was eerily quiet. The power was out. The phone line was dead. My father worked as the lead foreman of the power generation plant on the Navy base, and he always responded when the power went out. He immediately left the house to go back to work.

About 40 minutes had passed from the time my father left the house. By this time, it was dusk, and the house was getting cold. It seemed like there as another earthquake every few minutes. My mother must have been in shock. She lit a candle, but she didn’t tell us to change into warmer clothes or to gather up emergency supplies. Our old dog Patches had disappeared; it would be days before he came home again. The guppies, however, seemed to be OK. I added some water to their bowl and fed them. It was the only normal thing I was able to do for a very long time. The air was heavy with a sense of dread.

Then the phone rang. It rang only one time. This seemed odd, because we already knew the phone lines were down. Even the ring sounded different. We all stared at the phone, and then mom picked up the receiver and put it to her ear. She listened without saying anything, hung up the phone and told us we had to get out of the house right away. A tidal wave was coming. I was only 7 years old and didn’t know what a tidal wave was, but I was old enough to know the tone of her voice frightened me. My brother and I grabbed our winter coats, Mom grabbed my baby brother and a blanket and what she thought was a flashlight, and out the door we went. We followed mom up the trail behind our house, deep into the woods and to higher ground. We finally sat down under a large, knarly spruce tree on the side of the trail. I spent most of my free time exploring those woods so I knew all the trails and which were the best climbing trees. This tree was one I had climbed, and I knew it well. I leaned into it, and it felt like an old friend. By this time it was around 7:30 p.m. It was dark; the moonlight was barely filtering through the thick canopy of spruce trees. The woods were quiet and still, but there were a few songbirds singing. Their chirping was comforting. Mom didn’t say much until she realized she had grabbed a baby bottle instead of the flashlight. She started chain-smoking-- one cigarette after another. We sat in the dark, silent, listening, scared. Cold. Wondering. We waited, not knowing what we were waiting for. Then I realized the birds had stopped singing….and the silence was deafening.

Growing up on Kodiak and in my native culture I was taught to listen to and respect the earth. As such, even at the age of 7 I was aware of the sounds of nature around me. Many of the ocean bouys around Kodiak island had their own distinct sound, so growing up there I could often tell which bouy was singing its song of the ocean current. That night I first heard Bouy 4, which sits way out off the eastern end of Kodiak Island and marks 2 strong deep cross currents. Bouy 4 was clanging louder and more wildly than I’ve ever heard it in the worst of storms. Then we started to hear all the bouys clanging wildly. That noise was accompanied with something I can’t really describe — it sounded or felt like a surge of some powerful force of energy. This pattern of silence, followed by the noise of the bouys and that surge happened three times over the next several hours. I know now those three noise patterns were the three largest tsunami waves that hit Kodiak Island that night. Finally, after a long period of silence, the birds started to sing again. Mom stood up and said, let’s go home. It was around 1 AM. We walked slowly through the woods toward home, not knowing what we would find. Thankfully the old house was still there. My father wasn’t there, and he didn’t come home that night.

The next day was Saturday. There were near constant aftershocks all day. The news coming over the shortwave radio was mostly about how Hilo, Carsen City and Anchorage had been hit. We didn’t yet know what had happened to Kodiak, or at least my mother wasn’t saying. I wanted to walk across the road and down to the beach but Mom wouldn’t allow us to leave the house. From our home, we could see the ocean and lots of debris floating in the current. We still had no word from my father.

Sunday was Easter. There were no Easter eggs or church services. It was another day riddled with near continuous very strong aftershocks. We later learned 2 of those aftershocks measured in the 7 range on the Richter scale. Each one seemed to eat away at the frayed edges of what little bit of sanity was left in our world. We learned Kodiak had been hit hard with at least 3 tsunami waves of around 40 feet in height. Early that afternoon my cousin drove into the driveway and burst through the front door of our home. He had my grandma, 3 of my mother’s sisters and all the cousins piled in his truck. My cousin said we had to get to higher ground immediately because a 90 foot tsunami was coming!!! The fear I had heard in mom’s voice Friday night was nothing compared to the fear I saw right then in my grandma’s face. Mom and 1 of her sisters were in the front cab of the truck with my cousin driving, both of them clutching their babies, neither knowing if their husbands were alive or dead. We made our way up Pillar Mountain with dozens of other people, and sat, silent and afraid. Watching the ocean. Our town lay in ruins below. Our grandma’s house was destroyed. We saw the hulls of boats and the remainder of buildings floating in what used to be the boat harbor. The water was strewn with debris. The shoreline and downtown was nothing but debris, the canneries and most buildings along the waterfront gone or damaged beyond recognition. There was total devastation spread before us, and the earth continued to shake. Mom asked around but no one knew anything of the fate of the men from the power plant on the Navy base. We still knew nothing of my father. After several hours of sitting and watching the ocean and expecting our world to end, my mother snapped. She stood up and said, I need a cigarette. She turned and walked away, leaving me and my brothers there.

There was a tsunami wave that afternoon, but it was around 9 feet — not the 90 feet my cousin had heard. Somewhere along the way the predicted size was lost in translation. We went to bed that Easter night still not knowing if my father was alive.

It was in the early hours of Monday morning that we learned of my father’s fate. I awoke to hear strange voices outside. After listening but unable to hear what they were saying I recognized my father’s voice. Mom tried to stop me from seeing him…but I pushed past her. My father and two other men were standing at our back porch, each covered with a black, smelly, oily residue slick up to their necks. I later learned they had all been trapped in the generator room of the power generation plant when the tsunamis hit. They were alive only because they climbed on top of equipment and held on while the tsunami waves filled that room again and again.

Among those who died March 27 was my great uncle Sut Larsen and his fishing crew. Sut was trying to get his fishing boat to open water before the tsunami hit. All 4 men were lost. The matchstick wreckage of his boat was later found on the rocks of the area called Spruce Cape. A bronze commemorative plaque sits at the entrance of the subdivision there, and four streets in that subdivision have been named after each of the 4 men on that boat.

It was some time before Mom would talk about that phone call. It was from my father. He told Mom to immediately get us out of the house and to higher ground because tsunami waves were coming.

All phone service on Kodiak had gone down immediately with that first earthquake and it was weeks before it was restored to our house.

No one — no one — has ever been able to explain how my father made that Good Friday phone call. My father was not a religious man, but I would like to believe he prayed a prayer that day for his phone call to go through….he was 15 miles away from us and a phone call was the only way he could have warned my mother to get us to higher ground. God answered his prayer.