Chenega's little bay faced south, partly enclosed by tiny rock and spruce islands and backed by the steep, wooded slope of Chenega Island. For hundreds of years it was a perfect spot for a village, until the earthquake in 1964.

A waterfall splashed down bedrock to the crescent-shaped beach, and at its far end an island hugged the shore, creating a pond-smooth passage just big enough for paddling. In that southwestern part of Prince William Sound mountain peaks stand as if freshly extruded from the earth, solid and uncompromising. In some places billows of stone remain barren, immune to redemption by the rainforest.

Few valleys divide the mountains; instead, the ocean steals into the narrowest cracks between their walls, branching and connecting beyond all probability into bays and channels, some of them miles long but only as wide as a river, navigable corridors into the heart of the forest. Seals and humpbacks and killer whales traveled these water labyrinths, as did Chenegans, in their handmade skiffs and kayaks.

The people were poor, but they were survivors. In the mid-twentieth century, after invaders left behind salteries empty of herring and gold or copper mines to rot, after so many towns and villages withered, becoming merely stains on the map, this ancient community of Chugach Natives spoke its traditional dialect of Alutiiq and slowly repopulated. They had the southwestern Sound to themselves.

In the summer, families rode north on fishing boats all named for the cannery at Port Nellie Juan to fish salmon and buy the year's supplies on credit from the company store. After commercial fishing, they put up their own fish for the winter in riverside camps.

They'd go to Cordova, too, on the eastern end of the Sound, to dig razor clams for the industry there, competing to see who could gather the most. In spring the men hunted seal together. They caught herring with dipnets to eat pan-fried and families gathered kelp covered with glistening berries of herring roe.

They would picnic on sunny spring beaches and collect goose eggs from the winter-dried grass behind the storm berm, children cooking their own seal meat morsels on the ends of sharpened sticks over the campfire. The mail boat occasionally brought news from the outside world, and a few cash-bought foods, mainly flour, sugar, tea and coffee, and candy for the children.

As in old times, entertainment for boys and girls mainly came from adventures on the beach, throwing rocks and catching animals; for adults, stories and jokes, visiting. They called on neighbors and family in their little houses -- weathered shacks, tin-roofed, connected by boardwalks at the top of the beach like something deposited by the tide, each house facing a different direction, a collection as beautifully disordered as any nature could arrange.

Fewer than twenty buildings in all for around seventy-five people. In a wonderful and stirring book edited by John Smelcer, "The Day That Cries Forever," Andy Selanoff recalled his childhood there, his grandparents welcoming guests for breakfast, each bringing his or her own tea cup, and seating them around a bleached flour sack on the floor to share bread and smoked salmon.

The tea pot and sugar bowl were empty fruit cans. When supplies ran short mothers dispatched their sons and daughters to borrow from a neighbor, but in those days the word borrow did not imply repayment. "I recall the years we lived together as a village were full of joy," Andy wrote in Smelcer's book. "People lived close to nature, they traveled, hunted and camped together, and no one was left out in village life."

He went on:

When I was younger, elders respected everything around them and what they believed in. Nothing was taken from the land without genuine respect, because it meant survival. Back then a hunter would never butcher a seal in the same place it was shot. It would be taken to a different place and butchered. This was done so the next seal that came along could use the same spot because it was clean. The same method was done in the bear den, so that another bear could use it to hibernate. These locations were marked in memory, year after year and time after time. The need to survive formed a family, and a family formed a community, and a village was born.

A human community can fit into its place in the world. Chenega did. But communities all differ. Like other living things, communities take forms shaped by their environments and the ways their parts connect. The social DNA of a community is written in its laws and political traditions -- how people relate to each other and what they believe they own or share. These characteristics can predict whether a community harmonizes with the land and sea, like Chenega, or consumes them like a cancer.

As Easter approached in Chenega, the men hauled loads of clean pebbles from the beach to spread around the Russian Orthodox church. Women decorated inside, making bright crepe paper flowers to surround the gilded icons. The church had no priest, but each religious holiday was carefully observed. On Good Friday all the village dogs were gathered and taken by skiff to a little island in front of the village to wait until Easter festivities were over so they wouldn't disrupt the observances.

The sun shone warmly on a Friday evening in late March, 1964, shrinking deep banks of crusty snow that remained on the steep slope dividing the boardwalks from the school, high above the village. (That night was Good Friday elsewhere, but still Lent in the village, as Russian Orthodox Easter came weeks after western Easter that year.)

Children were chasing birds and throwing rocks on the beach, waiting for a movie to start in the school, a corny old Vincent Price feature called "House on Haunted Hill." Families were eating dinner or finishing steam baths. Smelcer's book collects the memories of what happened next.

Little Carol Ann Kompkoff was walking out on the dock to the outhouse with her older sisters.

Avis Kompkoff had finished her bath and was dressing herself and her baby.

Margaret Borodkin, 35 at the time, was at her mother's house, having just finished dinner. The house began violently shaking, walls cracking, furniture crashing down, and something fell from the ceiling and pinned her to the floor, hurting her leg and hip. The earthquake lasted more than four minutes, long enough that many people believed it never would stop.

The dock where Carol Ann stood waved like a ribbon. Boulders on the beach bounced like rubber balls and boys jumped to stay atop them.

Avis left the house in her slippers carrying her baby. The bay seemed to boil.

Margaret saw her mother, Anna Vlasoff, outside the door, frantically running around and calling for someone to help release her daughter from the fallen debris. There was a roaring that seemed like jet planes and the house exploded with the impact of water and Margaret swirled, rolled -- and passed out.

Avis heard someone yell, "Run." She carried the baby up the hill, sinking into the deep snow, losing her slippers. Steve Eleshansky carried his baby daughter right behind her. The wave roared in. When Avis looked back, Steve and his daughter were gone.

Carol Ann, age 3, and her two sisters, Julia and Norma, were still on the dock when the bay emptied of water. Their father, Nicholas Kompkoff, came for them. He carried the two younger girls and told Julia to run with him, but the wave came like a fast-rising tide and knocked Julia down, pushing her ahead and then pulling her back toward the bay. Nicholas reached out to catch her as she passed but instead lost Norma into the water as well. The ocean sucked both girls away from him.

Some of the children playing on the beach froze in terror during the shaking and didn't run for safety when adults shouted to them. Men in the village ran toward the danger, some of them never to return. The fog of fear cleared from Kenny Selanoff, 12, only when he saw a respected man running away like a rabbit -- if that man was running, Kenny would run, too, holding onto his brother, George. They saw their aunt Dora Jackson rush back into her house with her daughter, Arvella, and then saw the wave take the house away.

The second wave broke with crushing force on the village, not like the first that had risen like a tide. Kenny and George held tight to a clothes line pole while water washed over them. Kenny saw Daria and Willie Kompkoff and Phillip Totemoff caught running for safety when the wave hit. It smashed them against their house with a horrendous impact and demolished the house; he saw Willie and Sally Evanoff and their granddaughter swept away. He saw Richard Kompkoff give his life trying to save Anna Vlasoff, who wouldn't leave her daughter, Margaret Borodkin, trapped under the debris in her house. Kenny never was able to forget what he saw.

The wave lifted a father carrying two sons up the hill and set him down, standing, on a ridge, where the water receded and left them safe. It caught a woman and rolled and battered her before leaving her ashore, unharmed but stripped naked except for one anklet.

The wave tossed Carol Ann and her father, Nicholas, who had already lost two daughters, across a creek and into a snow bank. A light pole fell on Nicholas and he dropped Carol Ann in the water. An uncle managed to grab her by the hood of her jacket, which had a stuck zipper; the zipper held fast, Carol Ann stayed in the jacket, and survived.

The second wave had destroyed everything but the school on the hill, washing high enough to flood its cellar, seventy vertical feet above the bay. The third wave cleaned up what was left. The bay filled with debris, lumber from sheds and houses, pieces of the church, furniture -- everything that had made the village -- floating calmly in the dimming evening. Dazed survivors gathered at the school, then an aftershock alarmed them, pushing them to move even higher, into the woods. Men built a bonfire to warm wet, ill-dressed people.

In the morning those sheltered around the fire on the hill looked down and saw nothing of their village -- even the water of the bay was glassy smooth and empty. The wreckage and bodies had disappeared, drifting away with the tide.

A Coast Guard plane flew over and they waved for help, but the village had been wiped away so cleanly that the pilot didn't realize anything was wrong -- the place looked normal, with friendly people waving. But the pilot of the regular mail plane came out to check on Chenega and gave the world the news that it no longer existed. Twenty-six members of the community were dead -- more than a third.

Margaret Borodkin survived. The earthquake had trapped her and swept away her home and family, but somehow, when she regained consciousness, she was floating on boards in front of where the village used to be. Those on the hill that night recognized her voice crying from somewhere out in the bay. She heard their cries, too, children and parents looking for one another, families absorbing their losses, the injured calling for help. No one could help her.

She tried to paddle with one hand while holding on to her floating island with the other, but it was no use. She grew so cold she thought she wouldn't make it. Finally, a boat of hunters returning to the village from the Sound approached her, its bow nosing through the debris. On board, wrapped in three sleeping bags, she faded in and out of consciousness, but ultimately recovered.

But Margaret could not tell the story of what had happened. Many could not; some still haven't. Only when her people's leaders decided to record the history in the book Smelcer edited, a solemn memorial, did she set down her memories on paper. Even then, in her mid-70s, she couldn't escape the vision of her mother crying out for someone to help her, refusing to leave while the wave approached.

She wrote, "It's been forty years since that tragic night, and in all that time, I've never gone back to Chenega. I just don't think I could stand to see where my home used to be, where my mother last stood, where my entire village was swept off the face of the earth."

I've been there with my family on a sunny June day on one of our Prince William Sound camping trips. We've felt the cool waterfall, still splashing down the bedrock, climbed up to the white school house, which is collapsing now, and found bits of broken plates amid the gravel on the beach. The old women from Chenega can still recognize those china fragments and know to whom each belonged.

Like any living thing, even a healthy community can be killed. The earthquake broke Chenega's link to its place, and the village barely survived as a cohesive cultural group. In some ways, the crisis of the earthquake has never ended for them. Restoring a connection between a people and the land and ocean is hard, uncertain work. But the Chenegans tried, heroically.

TOMORROW: Chenega reborn.