Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (42 page)

“Are these people all flu victims?” I ask.

“It’s against Kansas law to list the cause of death on a headstone, but it’s a good possibility.”

He keeps walking and then stops a few feet ahead of me in the middle of a large rectangle of grass, about fifteen by forty feet.

“Under here,” he tells me, “are the remains of thirteen people who were definitely killed by the influenza. They all worked at the local sugar beet factory, and nine of them died in a single day.”

“And there’s no marker or anything for them?”

“Nothing. That’s a lot of folks for a small community to lose so quickly, and the townsfolk were probably overwhelmed and buried them as fast as they could.”

I stand there for a moment taking it all in, and he asks me if I want a ride back to Miner’s plot.

“I think I’m going to stay and linger,” I say, “but I really appreciate your bringing me here. I’d never have known about this if you hadn’t pointed it out.”

“Few people do,” he says, heading back to his truck. “It’s like it never happened.”

This is what’s so bewildering to me. No war or disaster has killed as many Americans, and yet the pandemic’s imprint on our national psyche is so faint as to be nearly imperceptible. College and high school history textbooks give it short shrift, at best tacking on a sentence or two about it at the end of their chapters on World War I, and relatively few works of literature have focused on it either. This is especially remarkable considering how many extraordinary writers—William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams (the doctor/poet who treated flu victims), F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few—lived through it. Katherine Anne Porter’s own bout with the virus inspired her novella
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
(Porter came so close to dying that the local newspaper had already typeset her obituary); Thomas Wolfe fictionalized his brother’s death from influenza in
Look Homeward, Angel;
and William Maxwell described surviving the flu as an eight-year-old boy in
They Came Like Swallows
. But these authors,
along with Mary McCarthy, are the notable exceptions, and they all touched on it only briefly.

One reason the plague has mostly been forgotten, I assume, is—despite claiming more lives than the Civil War (and in considerably less time)—there wasn’t a larger cause at stake. Societies understandably glorify their wartime dead, even on the losing side, by memorializing their courage and sacrifice in context of a greater struggle. Tragically, but to be perfectly blunt, victims of the Spanish flu died for nothing.

And while diseases such as smallpox and polio scarred or crippled their victims, Spanish influenza didn’t leave behind any marks or disabilities as lasting reminders of its existence. The dead were buried and the survivors went on with their lives, physically unscathed by their brush with mortality.

Nor was there any great medical breakthrough that would lend the story a climactic moment of triumph. Doctors frantically tried to produce a vaccine, but their efforts were doomed from the start because they mistakenly believed that Spanish flu was caused by a bacterium. In actuality the culprit was a virus, which is much smaller and attacks the body differently, and scientists weren’t able to examine and categorize different viruses until the invention of the electron microscope in the 1930s. Even then, the precise nature of Spanish influenza remained elusive because nobody could find a live sample of it to analyze. Viruses, unlike bacteria, can’t survive for long outside of their human (or animal) hosts, and Spanish influenza had burned itself out more than a decade earlier. Any chance of unlocking its secrets seemed futile.

Virologists nevertheless persisted in searching for some remnant of the disease, and a Swedish-born University of Iowa graduate student named Johan Hultin was particularly tenacious in attempting to track it down. After hearing an impromptu remark by a visiting professor in 1950 about where the virus might still possibly be found, Hultin was inspired to travel three thousand miles from the Midwest to a remote Eskimo village in Alaska. After reading about what he eventually discovered there, so was I.

“I WOULDN’T BE
alive today if it weren’t for the Spanish flu,” Lisa Fallgren, my seatmate on Flight 870 from Nome to Brevig Mission, Alaska, says to me after I mention the reason for my traveling to Kansas and then here.

That’s certainly a different take on the pandemic, I think to myself.

“My grandfather’s first wife died from the flu in 1918,” she explains, “and if he hadn’t gone on to marry my grandmother, my mother never would have been born, and then, of course, I wouldn’t have either.”

A U.S. Census Bureau representative based out of Seattle, Lisa has visited Brevig Mission multiple times to conduct one-on-one interviews with residents who don’t have easy access to phones or e-mail. And because no roads lead to the isolated village on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, flying is her—and my—most reliable way to go. Once we touch down, we’ll have only five hours until our afternoon departure,
and I was strongly advised by the Bering Air reservations agent not to miss the 4:35 flight back to Nome. There’s no lodging in town, and if a storm blows in this evening, I could be stranded indefinitely. “The plane might come early,” the representative also instructed me, “so be there by four o’clock.”

Our nine-seat puddle jumper begins its descent over a narrow Bering Strait inlet and lands in Brevig Mission on a short runway by the water’s edge. After we deplane, I ask Lisa where we’re supposed to wait later today, since there doesn’t seem to be a building or any type of shelter close by except for a small hangar that’s locked up.

“You just stand outside,” she says.

“Really? What do you do when it rains or snows?”

She shrugs. “I guess you get used to it.”

Before Lisa starts down a dirt road leading into town, I ask her if she knows where the cemetery is. She points off to the left and tells me it’s less than ten minutes from here.

“It’s hard to get lost,” she says.

This I can understand. From the “airport,” I can make out most of the village about three-quarters of a mile away. Roughly four hundred Inupiat Eskimos live in Brevig Mission, but except for two men zipping along the main road in all-terrain vehicles, there doesn’t appear to be much human activity. Whale-hunting Eskimos were the first to settle here almost two centuries ago, followed in 1900 by a rather hardy and determined group of Lutheran missionaries from Norway. A post office was named after one of their pastors, Reverend T. L. Brevig, and it’s been Brevig Mission ever since.

Instead of setting out directly for the cemetery, I decide to meander a bit. There’s no town center, just clusters of gray single-story wooden houses topped by blue or red corrugated metal roofs. I walk down to the shoreline and see half a dozen kids splashing around in the ocean. For Alaskans, the 40-something degree temperature is practically a heat wave, but I’m shivering in my thin windbreaker and can’t imagine how frigid the water must be.

Not far from the young bathers, I notice hanging from an exposed wooden framework rows of bright red chili peppers, a striking burst of color that contrasts vividly with the overcast sky and dark gray sea. I approach to within about twenty-five feet and realize that they’re not peppers but plump red strips of salmon meat turned inside out, drying in the crisp air. As I move closer, several dogs suddenly rise up out of nowhere and charge toward me, barking like crazy. Chains tighten with a hard
thunk
, and the huskies, stopped midlunge, whine and growl, infuriated at the unfairness of it all. Instinctively I step backward with my hands raised and, in a hushed tone, say, “Sorry, guys, sorry.” Apology not accepted; they continue to snarl, whimper, and circle about. I have no desire to add to their torment or, frankly, be anywhere near them if a restraint breaks, so I make a beeline for the main road.

Brevig Mission’s cemetery is about an acre in size, and as I walk up to the graves, it appears that all of the markers are wooden crosses. Names, dates, and an occasional Bible verse have been hand carved into the painted slats, and only the more recent additions are legible. Many are splintered and weather-beaten. Some are nothing more than short gray stubs jutting out of the ground.

Bordering the southwest perimeter of the cemetery and demarcated by two large white crosses is a patch of land about thirty feet long. Buried under here are the seventy-two Brevig Mission residents killed in late November 1918 by Spanish influenza. Despite quarantines and travel restrictions into Alaska, somehow the virus reached this secluded outpost and wiped out 90 percent of the local population within five days, leaving alive only eight children and teenagers.

In the summer of 1951, Johan Hultin traveled to this exact spot next to the cemetery in search of long-dead victims of the Spanish flu. And their bodies still needed to be relatively intact; bones would not suffice. Hultin wanted lung tissue, in particular, and he hoped that the frozen tundra had prevented the corpses from deteriorating entirely over the previous thirty-three years. Village elders were persuaded
by Hultin’s argument that his research might lead to lifesaving vaccines and permitted the excavation. Three of the council members who granted their approval were among the eight survivors from 1918.

Hultin got the idea to come here after the eminent virologist William Hale had made an offhand comment during a brief visit in January 1950 to the University of Iowa, where Hultin was studying microbiology. “Everything has been done to elucidate the cause of [the Spanish influenza] epidemic,” Hale remarked at an informal luncheon with half a dozen students and faculty members. “But we just don’t know what caused that flu. The only thing that remains is for someone to go to the northern part of the world and find bodies in the permafrost that are well preserved and that just might contain the influenza virus.”

After obtaining a government map that identified areas in North America covered with permafrost, Hultin marked three Alaskan towns that he knew had been devastated by the pandemic: Nome, Wales, and Brevig Mission. When the National Institutes of Health rejected his funding appeal, Hultin was able to secure a $10,000 grant from the University of Iowa. (Hultin later learned that the NIH had decided to organize its own search, a $300,000 expedition to Nome led by scientists and doctors from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A principal participant in the classified and ultimately unsuccessful venture was a young Dr. Maurice Hilleman.)

Hultin spent more than a year and a half planning his trip and flew to Alaska in the summer of 1951. He was joined by his faculty advisor, Albert McKee, and two other professors, Jack Layton and Otto Geist. The three senior scientists all waited in Fairbanks until Hultin sent word that he had uncovered something promising in one of his targeted towns.

Nome and Wales were both a bust, leaving Brevig Mission as the last chance. Hultin slept on an air mattress at the local school and toiled up to eighteen hours a day struggling to break through the concrete-hard earth covering the mass grave. On the fourth day he came across his first body—a small girl, about six to ten years old, with red ribbons in
her hair. Hultin contacted McKee, Layton, and Geist in Fairbanks and told them to head over.

Aided by warmer weather, the four men were able to clear a hole seven feet deep and ten yards long within two days. They exhumed four well-insulated adult bodies, cracked through their sternums, and extracted chunks of soft tissue from each lung, which were then put in sterilized screw-cap jars and placed, for further protection, inside large thermoses.

Mission halfway accomplished.

Back in Iowa, and under conditions that would be considered shockingly unsafe today, Hultin attempted to find and revive a hibernating specimen of Spanish influenza by injecting cultures made from the infected lung tissue into live mice, ferrets, and other lab animals normally susceptible to the virus. Every test came up negative, and after almost two months of experimenting, Hultin ran out of tissue. The disease appeared, indeed, to be dead, with little hope of ever being regrown.

Hope emerged four decades later in the form of a self-described LSD enthusiast and California surfer dude named Kary Mullis, who also happened to be (and still is) a brilliant biochemist. In 1993, Mullis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that enables scientists to replicate DNA sequences ad infinitum and with perfect consistency. This means that even if they have only a single droplet of blood, strand of hair, or cell to work with, they can make limitless copies of an individual gene. And since virtually all DNA research and advances—from tracing family genealogy to finding cures for cancer and other diseases—now depend on PCR, the procedure is considered one of the most revolutionary scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century. (In his autobiography,
Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
, Mullis describes exactly how and where his brainstorm occurred: While driving to dinner with his girlfriend on California’s Highway 128, the basic idea came to him in a flash, so he pulled over at mile marker 46.58, reached into his glove compartment, and scribbled down PCR’s essential framework on the
back of an envelope.) Hultin eagerly followed Mullis’s progress, recognizing that PCR might one day help solve the Spanish influenza riddle.

Hultin wasn’t alone. In 1996 a team of scientists led by Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C., had begun analyzing bits of lung tissue taken from American servicemen killed by Spanish influenza in 1918. The Institute had grown out of the Army Medical Museum, established during the Civil War by President Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Army’s surgeon general, William Hammond. Military doctors were instructed to remove pathological samples from patients afflicted with life-threatening ailments and send them to the museum, and the repository—which has become sort of a national archive of death and disease—now holds more than 7.2 million tumors, lesions, growths, and skin graphs. Later moved to an annex of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the gruesome inventory was warehoused for twenty-one years at Ford’s Theatre after the playhouse was shut down following President Lincoln’s assassination.