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                        THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA

                            By ALLAN DANZIG

                          Illustrated by WOOD

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                     Galaxy Magazine August 1963.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

          It has happened a hundred times in the long history
          of Earth--and, sooner or later, will happen again!

Everyone--all the geologists, at any rate--had known about the Kiowa
Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting
to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north
and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east
of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about
all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never
so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the
general public.

It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s
geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and
the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the
Pecos as far south as Texas.

Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was
suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to
the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa.
By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults
were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching
almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line.

It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the
connection. The population of the states affected was in places as
low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed
impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming.

It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave
concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.

       *       *       *       *       *

The even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of
1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry
Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could
expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited
area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.

The report was--no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but
dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer
air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service
had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.

But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles
away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was
going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in
the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as
this.

Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front
page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became
interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,
tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,
a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault--could
be.

Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer
lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of
the possible volcano. "Only Active Volcano in U. S.?" demanded the
headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.

It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not
mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department
of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling
of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten
of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York _Times_). The idea
was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you
couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.

To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault
had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,
never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in
California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or
some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more
plausible theory.

Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew
bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including
Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and
plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting
for their university and government department to approve budgets.

They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.

       *       *       *       *       *

They found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the
most violent and widespread earthquake North America--probably the
world--has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest
terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.

Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of
chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces
of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any
relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.
East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued
buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new
cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry
earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,
into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.

There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.
Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and
rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles
themselves. "It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve," said the
normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the
scene of disaster. "No one here has ever seen anything like it." And
the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.

"Get out while you can," Schwartzberg urged the population of the
affected area. "When it's over you can come back and pick up the
pieces." But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership
privately wondered if there would be any pieces.

The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly
backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,
there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo
Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.

By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past
Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.
Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded
several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty
miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent
several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.

All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of
the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home
to wait.

There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte
River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard
had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs
to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day
as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps.

As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome
life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,
down. They danced "like sand in a sieve"; dry, they boiled into rubble.
Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.
Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the
President declared a national emergency.

       *       *       *       *       *

By 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,
and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.
Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all
death toll had risen above 1,000.

Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.
Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general
subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.
The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and
Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.

On the actual scene of the disaster (or the _scenes_; it is impossible
to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying
confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as
the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the
surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.

The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,
just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. "We must remain calm,"
declared the Governor of Nebraska. "We must sit this thing out. Be
assured that everything possible is being done." But what could be
done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a
day?

The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its
way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New
Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of
the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of
Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.

Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly
churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across
farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new
cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to
sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no
floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself
with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water
and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now
streaming east.

Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.
193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had
to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.
Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced
with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were
jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd
eastward.

All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,
Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center
for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and
dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the
demand for gas, but once inside the "zone of terror," as the newspapers
now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the
wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted
by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked
by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and
State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to
be done in an orderly way.

And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the
autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its
inexorable descent.

On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described
as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church
bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The
second phase of the national disaster was beginning.

       *       *       *       *       *

The noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its
wake the earth to the north "just seemed to collapse on itself like
a punctured balloon," read one newspaper report. "Like a cake that's
failed," said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block
_south_ of Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There
was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the
astounding rate of about six feet per hour.

At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all
day. "Not tremors, exactly," said the captain of a fishing boat which
was somehow to ride out the coming flood, "but like as if the land
wanted to be somewhere else."

Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere
else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered,
seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a
draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at
about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center
from the U. S. marched on the land.

From the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River
in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi,
Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with
over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water
had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the
Louisiana-Mississippi border.

"We must keep panic from our minds," said the Governor of Alabama in a
radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. "We
of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before."
Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the
approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour
before the town disappeared forever.

One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in
the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest
land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of
Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map.

The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute
by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling
north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine,
Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered
through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping
2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The "Memphis Tilt" is today one of
the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but
during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed.

       *       *       *       *       *

South and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma.
By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves
advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests
forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the
thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge.

Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the
wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land
rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the
water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,
deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.

Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually
stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the
desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the
land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from
the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in
evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to
North Dakota.

Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted
out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one
great swirl.

Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was
sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on
the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be
rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos
River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as
the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most
terrible sound they had ever heard.

"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all
the noise," said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. "But we knew there
were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a
collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,
because of the spray."

_Salt spray._ The ocean had come to New Mexico.

       *       *       *       *       *

The cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward
march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and
tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of
granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,
Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.

The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north
along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on
Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.
The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its
eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the
new sea.

Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed
precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of
Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville
were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went
down with his State.

Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove
of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished
Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on
radio and television.

Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,
South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy
Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn
on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the
younger children and what provisions they could find--"Mostly a ham
and about half a ton of vanilla cookies," he explained to his eventual
rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves
bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.

"We must of played cards for four days straight," recalled genial
Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television
spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can
ever have been called on to face, she added, "We sure wondered why
flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts
behind, in the rush!"

But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means
typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north
under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring,
into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what
had been dusty farmland, cities and towns.

Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions
just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of
western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest
along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was
estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives.

No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety
of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished
from the heart of the North American continent forever.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea
came to America.

Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented--and happily
unrepeated--disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of
those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think
of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential
curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean,
it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the
equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and
greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark
Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of
Dakota.

What would the United States have become without the 5600-mile
coastline of our inland sea? It is only within the last twenty years
that any but the topmost layer of water has cleared sufficiently
to permit a really extensive fishing industry. Mud still held in
suspension by the restless waves will not precipitate fully even in our
lifetimes. Even so, the commercial fisheries of Missouri and Wyoming
contribute no small part to the nation's economy.

Who can imagine what the middle west must have been like before the
amelioration of climate brought about by the proximity of a warm sea?
The now-temperate state of Minnesota (to say nothing of the submerged
Dakotas) must have been Siberian. From contemporary accounts Missouri,
our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable
during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North
Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana,
is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent.

Who today could imagine the United States without the majestic
sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches
of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the
water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the
afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks
with the glistening white beaches?

Of course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong
gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of
the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it
vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges.
Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from
the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was.
And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of
shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of
river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon
the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi.

And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks
and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the
Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with
its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private
cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of
driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been
like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent
U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through
the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat
of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation.

       *       *       *       *       *

The political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered
remnants of the eight submerged states remained after the flood, but
none of them wanted to surrender its autonomy. The tiny fringe of
Kansas seemed, for a time, ready to merge with contiguous Missouri,
but following the lead of the Arkansas Forever faction, the remaining
population decided to retain political integrity. This has resulted
in the continuing anomaly of the seven "fringe States" represented
in Congress by the usual two Senators each, though the largest of
them is barely the size of Connecticut and all are economically
indistinguishable from their neighboring states.

Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of
the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be
considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there
are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the
Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real
estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political
scene.

But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile
when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even
the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea--fourteen million
dead, untold property destroyed--really offsets the asset we enjoy
today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the
world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade
and the ferment of world culture.

It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last
century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation
walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen
miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as
world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken
would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri,
and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have
developed on the new harbors of the inland sea.

Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population
in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and
manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created
axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of
which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to
be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American
west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing
industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and
fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made
its laborious and dusty way west!

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Nebraska Sea, by Allan Danzig
{'title': 'The Great Nebraska Sea by Allan Danzig', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}