So that article in the New Yorker has gotten everyone around here counting their jugs of expired water and half-dead batteries. Well, guess what, people? It’s not like you didn’t know all that stuff in the first place! Haven’t we all been hearing about the Big One since grade school? We’re all going to die, Seattle, and guess who’s fault it is? Not science’s, that’s for sure. Nope, it’s this bad piece of schist: A’yahos!
This fellow is a nasty customer. A double-headed serpent with blazing eyes and horns, he often appears with the head of a deer and body of a snake. While not strictly a water-creature, a’yahos usually lives beneath the land near the shore, or under the sea bed. And when angry, he caused earthquakes and landslides and great rushing torrents of water. In fact, a’yahos is often named as the cause of a Puget Sound tsunami in the year 900, generating landslides up and down the Sound and on Mercer Island.
The most famous a’yahos site is just to south of the Fauntleroy Ferry Dock in West Seattle. A certain boulder upon the beach is said to contain him, and evidence of massive landslides in the area are obvious even to the naked eye. Several other a’yahos sites in the Sound and along Lake Washington are accompanied by such evidence.
Other tribes credit him with the creation of Agate Passage, which separates Bainbridge Island from the Kitsap Peninsula. Tribal elders would often warn children not to look directly at an a’yahos, as this would trigger his shakings and thrashings. Among his nemeses were a double-headed eagle and a large killer whale, and often their battles would re-sculpt the landscape.
Early settlers, including members of the Denny family, report hearing from tribal elders of a’yahos and his wrath in the years just before the arrival of the Europeans, including a terrible earthquake and tidal wave that tore off the southern tip of Mercer Island, creating the “forest of dead men” that the tribes avoided for decades after.
It has been a very long time since a’yahos was seen or reported in the area, since around the time of the city’s first decade. But the area has been rumbling and shaking for just as long, and as science keeps telling us, the Sound is due for a big quake any time. So who’s to say a’yahos hasn’t just been biding his time?
Richter Scale? Plate tectonics? Continental drift? Sounds like a bunch of Gondwana to us!
