The Nightmare Is a Relentless Killer

When I was a boy, my parents bought me several history books disguised as large-format children's books — with such titles as The Invaders and How They Lived in Cities Long Ago. To confess, they generally went untouched.

However, there was one such book (which I can't find in any of my still-packed boxes) that made an impression. One part of it was about an ancient city by the water whose inhabitants had been eradicated by a tidal wave. As I recall, there was a photograph of the site, now at the top of a cliff with water markings all down its face, and an artist's rendering of the disaster in process.

Tidal waves and tsunamis always held a place in my imagination. I pictured a wall of water hundreds of feet high that didn't actually break until it hit the shoreline and then came crashing down. And I was — it is now irksome to admit — disappointed years later when I saw video footage in one of those spectacularized documentaries about natural disasters. Looking back, the first word of the term "tidal wave" should have made it clear that at issue was a very rapid and high change in the tide — not a breaking, crashing, tubing wave.

Watching videos of the tsunami in Southeastern Asia, however, makes the category of disaster quite a bit more terrifying than even my false conception. The water is relentless. It just keeps coming, and rising — like the water in a sinking ship, only as if the land itself is sinking. There is no stark line against the skyline, sickly thrilling in its way, to watch approach and then pass. Instead there's just the water and the terror of wondering whether it will stop rising before people run out of secure things on which to climb. The step, the desk, the windowsill.

Being near the shoreline becomes no different than being in a raft capsizing in a fast-moving river. Passing objects, rocks, hands come so close that it seems implausible that they cannot be reached. But like the nightmare of a panicked run in place, progress cannot be made.

I've been too long in making the time to write this, but my prayers have already been going out to everybody who lived that nightmare and the thousands of others who survived only to find countless nightmares of differing terror.