* * *

From the Tolowa people in northern California: One autumn, the earth shook and the water began rising. People began running and when the water reached them, they turned into snakes. But a girl and a boy from the village, both adolescents, outran the water by running to the top of a mountain where they built a fire to keep themselves warm. After 10 days, they went back down and the houses they lived in were gone, all that was left was sand, and all the people and animals were lying on the ground dead. The boy found food for the girl and then set out to look for people and a place to live. But the only people he found were dead ones. The boy came back and said he could find no one else for either of them to marry, so they’d better marry each other. They built a house and after a time, had babies. And many years and many generations later, there were many people who were “scattered everywhere and in every place there was a man living with his wife.”

* * *

Many scientific papers say that the indigenous stories are reasonable records, covering an unknowable amount of time, of earthquakes and tsunamis along the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone. They also add that so much destruction repeated for so long must have had a terrific impact on the indigenous groups’ worlds—that given their history, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest would have taken catastrophe to heart. You might expect that they’d arranged their culture and lives around disaster. And further, you might hope that the impact on them would have some message, some advice, for us in the 21st century, waiting for our own disaster. But here’s where this storyline goes cold. Any such impact ought to show up in archaeological and anthropological evidence and it just doesn’t.

The people must have lost their houses and villages and livelihoods, they must have been ruined, but afterward they went back to living in the ruined places. McMillan went looking in the archaeological record for evidence of habitation and abandonment over the past 3,000 years in 30 excavated villages along the Washington and Vancouver Island coasts. “The seismic events were catastrophic but short term,” McMillan says. “The evidence is all that the sites were reoccupied afterward.”

Nor did the people ultimately change the ways they lived. Robert Losey, an anthropologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, looked for evidence that after the 1700 earthquake the Tillamook people of Oregon changed what they hunted, what they ate, how their houses were built, and where they lived. “In the short term, the earthquake must have been horribly traumatic,” Losey says. But in the long term, “I don’t think it made a difference.”

Anthropologists and archaeologists seem to agree that not only was it normal to return to the life you already know how to live, but, as Losey says, it was also reasonable. The catastrophes came generations apart. The food that was gathered and hunted apparently rebounded quickly. And the architecture designed for seasonal mobility was generally single-story, made of flexible wood tied with cord, and might as well have been built to modern earthquake codes. “The First Nations did an entirely human thing,” Losey says. “They went right back and settled in harm’s way.” The Pacific Northwest turns out to be, in the long run, a place conducive to resilience.