When Disaster Strikes: On Jon Mooallem's "This is Chance!"

Jon Mooallem | This is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, The Voice that Held it Together | Penguin Random House | March 26 | 336 Pages

Everything is different now, and isn't it always? March turns to April in 2020. Disaster is preying on major U.S. cities, on public spaces and health care systems. We speak of “before,” we speak of what's to come. And in the middle of it all, we find our lives changing, upended, perhaps forever.

If the coronavirus outbreak is a variation on a theme in how we humans build and rebuild our society, its long-term implications are already becoming clear. We can look to other pandemics and other natural disasters for clues as to what we can do to get through it all. That's what we do, as humans: come together to get through it all.

 So, what comes next?

 Let's rewind the tape.

On Good Friday, in 1964, the Great Alaskan earthquake lasted for four minutes and thirty-nine seconds, and its impact has been felt ever since. In the moment that disaster struck, Anchorage residents reported feeling fear, a series of tremors lasting “long enough for some people to question if it would ever stop, or even start to give up hope that it would,” author Jon Mooallem writes in This Is Chance! The book was published March 24, right in the middle of a global crisis. Whether the current 2020 disaster is an auspicious conclusion to Mooallem's six years of work on this book remains open to your interpretation.

It's an interesting time to read something like This Is Chance! The world is gripped by the rapidly accelerating COVID-19 pandemic, a sort of natural disaster splayed across months of uncertainty and horror. Mooallem's second book (his first was a close look at how we, as humans, interact with animals and our own conservation efforts) is an invigorating retelling of three days in March 1964. There was the day the earthquake struck, the immediate aftermath on Saturday, and then the dawning of what would follow on Sunday.

In the middle of it all, like anyone else might have found themselves, was KENI broadcaster Genie Chance, a savvy, empathetic and motivated reporter who tumbled into the very epicenter of the disaster response in downtown Anchorage. For 59 hours straight after the earthquake, Chance worked the airwaves and shared the emotions of her city's residents. She broadcast messages between family members and relayed important bulletins from the public safety officials scampering around her makeshift desk. (“Mr. and Mrs. Fisher have lost their children. They can't find them. They said they will be waiting at the home of Charles Ball.” “All electricians and plumbers at Ford Richardson, please go to Building 700 immediately.”)

Mooallem writes about a special person here, a truly empathetic character who has the chance, then and now, to tell us more about ourselves. With finely wrought detail, thanks to Chance’s journal entries and broadcast recordings, we can experience the disaster through the same jarring, slowed-down lens that colored her life.

Intertwined in this narrative is local theater director Frank Brink's production of Our Town, due to open only hours after the earthquake gripped the state. (It opened the following weekend instead.) Brink plays a fascinating role in this story, appearing occasionally to remind the reader that there are larger frames around the immediate response at hand. In art, we can find a way to describe things outside of ourselves:

“Even in those moments while the earthquake was still shaking the earth,” Brink said, “watching the road sandwich and scissor itself and break open, I kept thinking: 'What will Alaskans do now?'” Mooallem underscores the point, writing that Brink had been aware of himself “passing fitfully through some severe inflection point in history. Normal life was disintegrating around him.”

To add to that dysphoria, Mooallem borrows literary devices from Thornton Wilder's well known American play. He opens the book in the same wry voice: “This book is called This Is Chance! It was written by Jon Mooallem...” As the narrative stretches across that unsettled weekend, the author frequently zooms out to recount individual characters' impending deaths—often years and sometimes only weeks later. In these movements, we're given a chance to place the transience of disaster in a broader context. No matter what happens, life moves on—until it doesn't. The ontological drift is relevant to anyone who happens these days to open the New York Times app or flip through the dwindling pages of a daily newspaper. If this is what's happening now, what are we to make of the future?

At one point, Mooallem directly addresses that characteristic of the play, the Stage Director's penchant for describing future and untimely deaths: “It's startling, morbid, eerie—and it happens again and again.” And so too does he reach for this opportunity to show what life had in store for these tiny characters in a tiny corner of American history. It’s alarming to think about this right now—that which awaits all of us.

Midway through the book, Mooallem assumes Our Town's Stage Director character outright, describing his own curiosity and reporting process that led him to unearth this story 50 years after it happened. His work began in earnest with phone calls to Genie's daughter, Jan, who appears throughout the book as a child. He explains the distressing reporting process involved in piecing together an event from the past. He explains the enchanting draw of painting a slim portrait of a massive, sprawling event. “It was enough to say—as Mooallem said to Jan on the phone—that he had discovered the earthquake, and Genie, by chance,” Mooallem writes.

Not only is Mooallem an apt writer with this sort of gripping journalistic material (he's been writing for the New York Times Magazine for more than 10 years now), but moreover he has an eye for the gaps in our shared reality, for the gaps that emerge between daily life and history. His recent features include magazine pieces on the wildfire that destroyed Paradise, Calif., and an accident that he and two friends lived through in the Alaskan wilderness years ago—events that seem to warp the past and future around them, dislocating the present altogether. With deft touches to everything from chapter pacing and paragraph structure, he draws that fuzzy dislocation into the room with us as we read.

This book is as much about an earthquake as it is about how we communicate those ideas to ourselves. It's a book about how we reckon with a present that can't seem to stay in one place, ever, no matter how much we'd like to find stable footing. It's a book about journalism, too, and placing the work of reporters in some larger, shifting context. No doubt, much of what differentiates the coronavirus outbreak from past pandemics and disasters is the role of social media and digital publishing. Who's telling us what's happening?

In 1964, Alaska may as well have been in outer space, as far as the Lower 48 were concerned. (Alaska formally became a state five years earlier, and Mooallem does a great job of illustrating the frontier ethos of Anchorage—a city incubated in isolation.)

“But keep in mind that they, too, saw themselves as living in an age of instantaneous information,” he writes of Americans as far away as Nebraska, all glued to their radios. We yearn for details of pain that our fellow humans are enduring. And we yearn for ways to reach out and help. Chance, stationed at the Anchorage Public Safety Building, surrounded by citizens eager to pitch and help scout wreckage for their neighbors, was providing that information. She was narrating it. She was moving the present into history for us.

“It was a weird feeling,” she later said. “State officials arrived from Juneau with tears in their eyes, embraced me, and thanked me for keeping them informed.”

And later still: “Information is a form of comfort,” she said.

We can see the same communal effects of news in today's coronavirus pandemic. Here in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine has used public broadcast channels to address the state. Alongside Health Director Dr. Amy Acton and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, DeWine has clearly communicated the encroaching problem and the sudden, willful solution. He's asked for help from all residents and laid out the reasons why certain actions and requests are necessary. He's provided timelines to place us somewhere between an unknowable future and a rapidly receding past.

Ohio reporters, like Ginger Christ of The Plain Dealer, Amanda Garrett of The Akron Beacon Journal and Andy Chow of Ohio Public Radio's Statehouse News Bureau (and many others) have helped relay this information to their own concentrated followings around the state.

The link between this work and Chance's experience in the midst of disaster is an imperfect one, but maybe only because the coronavirus pandemic and the Great Alaskan earthquake are on two different temporal scales. There's an immediacy in our present moment, yes, but there's also the grim realization that we're not going anywhere anytime soon. The tremors haven’t stopped for weeks. DeWine's 2 p.m. press conferences will continue apace, as far as we can tell. This is life as we know it now. News reporters, then, help us set our clocks and keep our feet planted in the quicksand of the present.

However you want to dissect it, information is indeed a comfort in times of crisis. We rally around these sources of comfort.

In the back half of his book, Mooallem gets into some hopeful sociological research and introduces us to the founders of the Disaster Research Center at the Ohio State University (which has since moved to Delaware—the center, that is). The conclusions of not only their research in Anchorage but of countless observations of disasters across the world was that human nature redounded to its own sense of optimism and faith in times of crisis.

You might think that cataclysmic events bring out the savage in ourselves, but that's rarely the case. Notably, that is what people in positions of power often brace for—some rising tide of violence and looting. Total chaos. But the chaos is already there. Humans, more often than not, tend to face down these moments with a shared sense of cooperation. Here is where the equation flips backward for people ensnared in the crisis: History falls back, briefly, to shine a greater light on the present moment. Daily life expands.

Even in the wake of a 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, psychologist and philosopher William James wrote that “the rapidity of the improvisation of order out of chaos” was a defining hallmark of the city's residents' disaster response. In fact, often in these situations, people seem happy, according to the Disaster Research Center's work. There's a sort of glee, Mooallem tells us, that takes over in the rush of our collective response.

We suffer, yes, often alone and quietly. But it's in these all-encompassing disasters that we find ourselves grounded in something greater. Williams wrote that each person's “private miseries were merged in the vast general sum of privation.”

Unless we're really looking, there aren't many opportunities to experience the altruism that blossoms in real instances of communion. The modern world simply zips by too quickly. Communities are atomized. Communication is fractured infinitely. In the face of disaster, however, the borders crumble quickly. We become one. If you're unlucky enough to be caught in something like an earthquake or a tornado, the reverberations must really be something.

As governments in 2020 have worked up stimulus packages and raced to remove economic barriers for the working class, it's immediately clear how flimsy our social and political pretenses really are. The awesome inequality of our capitalist structure is revealed, naked and hostile and, especially, vulnerable. We can see a new way of living, even as it's forcing us to feel pain. The pandemic rages on, but, if we remain together in the present, we can see our daily lives in greater clarity—before history comes crashing back to swallow us all.

In Mooallem's telling, this borderline ecstasy in Anchorage seemed to last only a day or two after the first tremors. The cumbersome and bureaucratic reconstruction soon dawned on the residents of Alaska, and old patterns fell once again into place. Later, records were boxed up and memories glazed over with time. A writer named Jon Mooallem came along and started rooting through the past to bring all it back to us—the story of an earthquake and the amazing things that happened as the ground shook beneath people like Genie Chance, who'd only been driving to the bookstore with her son before everything changed. That's how fast it can happen.

It's hard to avoid a natural question, then: What happens when the disaster stretches across weeks or months? What have we learned from what happened in Anchorage—and what can we apply to what we're doing hour by hour, at home, today?

There’s hope. And there’s chance.

To state the obvious, this book isn't answering that question. But it tees up a comforting, if slightly head-rattling thought: Nothing is fixed. Everything is impermanent. We all play a role in the history to come.