Chapter 1

Hi, I'm Joe Hillcrest, just an average All-American boy going on 17. Bill Peters, same age and description, and I were on a camping trip through Missouri along the Mississippi River. We weren't hiking but were traveling by boat and stopping at likely camping places as each night fell. We are both going to be Seniors in high school when it starts up in the fall, and we were getting in a last fling before finishing high school and going on to college.

My main interest was in geology and Bill's was in forestry, so you might call this a "working" vacation as we were especially interested in looking at our fields of interest as we moved down the river. The Mississippi River is well studied, so we were not going to find anything new, but we were interested in simply comparing our observation with the findings reported by experts over the years.

This was a vacation trip, so we were mostly having fun. We fed ourselves by fishing and hunting small game, and we got our vegetables from cans. We still had two weeks to run on our vacation when it happened the first time. We were on the river and it was mid-afternoon when we felt the water suddenly get quite rough. There was no change in the wind to cause this, and the river had been running at a pretty steady quarter-mile width, so it could not be a change in the current to cause the rough water.

The phenomenon lasted only about half a minute and then was gone. My first thought was of an earthquake, but that was ridiculous! There had not been an earthquake in this region since the New Madrid 7.2 earthquake of 1811, over 200 years ago. Not only that, the land around here had been so quiet that many geologists were saying that there would never be another such quake. Well, I may not be a pro geologist yet, but I know the symptoms of shaking ground.

The first thing Bill said was, "Turn on some news, Joe. That felt like an earthquake to me."

We had been listening to an all-music station and who knew how long it would be before they would notice that anything had happened, so I tuned the radio for a news report. It took a few minutes, but I finally found a voice somewhat hysterically talking about a 4.6 earthquake along the river. I said, "Bill, that's almost unbelievable. This is supposed to be a quiet zone from all of the measurements that anybody has been able to make. We all know about the New Madrid quake of 1811, but there has been nothing since. This is a freak occurrence, no matter how you look at it."

"Maybe, but I hope that is the last tremor we encounter."

Nothing else happened, so we went back to our music station and our viewing of the scenery. About an hour later, there was a massive shaking that no sane person could ignore. Dammit, suddenly the radio went dead. The water got so rough that we were shaken about and decided to head for the shore. We had hardly gotten there when the water level dropped about 15 feet. Shit, we both knew what that meant!

Our boat was suddenly resting on the mud of the river bottom, and Bill had the motor shut off before the shear-pin on the prop could break. Just moments of conversation had us dragging the boat to dry land. Fortunately, the river bottom along here was a thin layer of mud over sand so that we had decent footing as we walked as fast as we could pulling the boat over the slippery mud.

We didn't stop when we got to shore, but pulled the boat up a hill to get as much elevation as we could before the tsunami hit. We had nearly 40 feet of elevation when we ran out of hill: hopefully that was going to be enough to save us and our boat. We tied the boat to the sturdiest tree that we could find and then climbed that tree as high as we thought the branches would support us. Now, there was nothing to do but wait.

We spent 20 minutes in that tree before we heard the roar of the approaching tsunami. We could see it from our vantage point high in the tree. There was a wall of water close to 35 feet high rushing at us at what looked like 100 MPH or more. Dammit, we had forgotten to tie ourselves to the tree, but we grabbed hold of the trunk and held on for dear life.

My God! We were too lucky to believe it! The water swept past us about 20 feet away. It was uprooting trees as it tore past, and we could see several animal carcasses in the water as it went by. Our hill was barely high enough to preserve our boat, but the aluminum hull never got wet except for a few drops splashed on it as the wall of water rushed by. We had no way of knowing how long the tsunami was going to last or if there would be any after effects. It was getting dark when we finally figured that it was safe to leave the tree.

The river had returned to more or less normal by the time we climbed down from the tree. We looked over our boat and found that nothing had been disturbed. That was a big relief for both of us, and we considered what to do. In the end, we decided to stay where we were. Supper consisted of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) and instant coffee. We pitched our tent and were ready for bed by the time the sun went down. Dammit, there were two aftershocks that night that woke us up, but nothing serious.

The next morning after breakfast, we dragged our boat back to the river and started down it. My God! That tsunami had played hell with the land on both sides of the river. Not only that, it had played hell with a tug and its load of barges. The tug and the barges had gone down and stuck in the mud. Apparently, the workers on board did not make an effort to escape because we found them gathered in the wheelhouse of the tug. They were battered to the point that I wondered if there was an unbroken bone in any of the bodies.

None of the barges were visible on the surface, but we could see ripples that suggested that they were still on the bottom of the river. Parts of the barges that projected toward the surface were making ripples from the flowing current, but we doubted if any of those barges would ever see the light of day again.

The tug was down by the bow as if it were jammed against one or more barges, but the stern was poking in the air. The wheelhouse barely cleared the waterline, and we had no idea how long it would stay that way. Bill and I got away as soon as we realized that, and didn't want to go back to the tug after that. We had no way to report what we had found, so we had to sit on the information until we could find some authorities to report the sinking to. Any time, I expected to see a helicopter fly over the river looking for wrecks just such as this. The Mississippi River was such an important link in the nation's infrastructure that I could not imagine the devastation being ignored for very long.

There was absolutely nothing useful we could do at the tug, so we cast off and continued down the river. I was acting as navigator, so I marked the site of the wreck on my map. At least, I could now report the wreck's location when the time came.

According to the map, we had spent the night in the Columbia Bottom Conservation Area a few miles north of St. Louis. Well, we had not gone far down river when we saw a pall of smoke virtually covering the horizon. Shit, were we looking at the fate of St. Louis? It certainly looked like there was enough smoke to justify the assumption, but we were wondering how such a large city could be so completely destroyed.

We had gone about four more miles when we heard a cry for help come from the west bank of the river. We steered for the source of the cry and found a teenage girl standing on the bank of the river and frantically waving for us to hurry to her. Bill put on a pulse of speed and took us to the girl as fast as our little boat could move.

Chapter 2 »