Montana earthquakes

I did not feel last night's earthquake, but I think my cats did. For once, Festus and Lonesome Love came rushing into the house---on the first call. I was amazed, but it makes sense now that I've read my daughter-in-law Debbie's account of her sensations in her Spokane apartment during the few seconds that the earth shifted 400 miles away near Dillon, Mont.

Our family on North Boyer did feel the huge Montana earthquake of 1959. As a 12-year-old, I remember the bed seemingly moving back and forth. My parents were in their bedroom and started wondering out loud what was going on. By the time the Yellowstone Earthquake had ended---or maybe even before---my brothers had raced to the house from their tent outside---just like my cats last night.

Our sensations of that famous earthquake, which tore a mountain apart and formed a new lake, however paled compared to those of my retired teaching friend Irene Bennett Dunn.

I wrote a story for the Spokesman-Review in 1995 about Irene's emotional reflections on her return to the site where the earthquake stole most of her family. I'll share her thoughts with you this morning after last night's less tragic Montana earthquake.

Irene Bennett Dunn visited Montana’s Madison Valley last week to close the final chapter of the tragic story she’s been reliving daily and planning to write for 36 years.

Clutching kleenexes and seated in her house near Hope this week, the 75-year-old retired Clark Fork Elementary teacher said her first trip back to the scene where three of her four children and her first husband died went according to plan.

“I kept saying we’ll do the emotional part. Then we’ll have fun,” she said. “It helped a lot to prepare.”

Irene and husband Jack accompanied her only living son Phil and his wife to the Earthquake Area and Interpretive Center near Ennis to visit monuments to 28 people who, on Aug. 17, 1959, died in one of the most severe earthquakes (7.8 on the Richter Scale) ever recorded in North America.

The catastrophe sent giant waves rushing down the narrow Madison Canyon where Irene’s family were sleeping. It also unloaded 80 million tons of rock from a 7,600-foot mountain into the river, hurling campers against trees, cars, trailers or the canyon wall.

Purley and Irene Bennett, along with Carole (17), Philip (16), Tom (11) and Susan (6) had set off from Dalton Gardens on a camping vacation. After visiting relatives in Hope, the family headed east in their green Ford stationwagon, undecided on whether to go to Canada or Yellowstone.

“I want to see the animals,’” Irene remembers her youngest saying. “Everybody then agreed to go to Yellowstone.” The trip included a day in Virginia City.

“We did all the fun things and pulled into camp late,” she said. The whole family slept on top of a rented tent.

“At 11:37, I heard a loud bang. The earth began to shake,” Irene recalled. “My husband got up. . . I saw him grab a tree. . . that’s all I remember.”

Later, vague sensations of being under water and pinned beneath a tree on a sandy bank prompted the lifelong Protestant to pray.

“I saw the moon was out. It was a brilliant moon,” she explained. “I recited the ‘121st Psalm,’ my favorite: Lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. . . .”

The night of horror was just beginning. Calling in vain for her family, Irene dug her way free only to discover she couldn’t stand up. Her leg was broken. She crawled back and covered herself with branches.

“I just stayed there until morning; then I called and called until I heard an answer,” she explained. The welcome response came from Phil, badly hurt with head and leg injuries, but crawling toward the crumpled station wagon when he heard his mother.

The only two survivors in the area were eventually taken to Ennis Community Hospital, but not before Irene learned of her husband’s fate.

“I prayed that the children would be alive, but they would slowly find a body,” she recalled. “. . . Carole, then Tom. It was a long time before they found Susan. I prayed for her to be alive, yet I worried about her being out there by her little self.”

Relatives held a memorial service while Irene and Phil recuperated. The two eventually returned to Coeur d’Alene where Phil finished high school and Irene earned a provisional teaching certificate. In 1961, she married her high school sweetheart Jack Dunn, a dairy farmer from Hope. Phil now works for Boeing Computer Systems.

Last week’s journey back provided a bittersweet ending to the book Irene intends to write for herself and others suffering tragedy.

"We'll never forget them, but we'll go on with our lives with the family we've acquired," she said. "We ARE a family again."