Runnin’ for Me Life: Tsunami! Part II

Gobsmacked continues, maties with the tale of a writer's retreat interrupted by tsunami warning. Now you scallywags know that writing, as is pirating, is a dangerous profession. My pirate pal, Grace Castle and I are fleeing up the hillside from the impending tsunami.

__________________________

             A man with a bottle of wine walked past, joking how he’d been pulled from the bar and was missing a pool tournament and the Detroit game. Someone yelled, “Save some of that wine for me.” I was surprised it wasn’t a bottle of rum.

            Grace and I stopped a fireman and asked how high we were. “Maybe Seventy-five feet,” he said. “We’re okay here.” I looked back at the water. I wasn’t reassured.

            I was, however, happy the earthquake hadn’t happened at the Oregon coast or there'd be no time to escape. Recently, a PBS program focused on the Northwest being overdue for an earthquake. Our fault line, the Cascadia subduction zone, causes a devastating earthquake every three- to six-hundred years. Indian lore agrees with the science. I remember when I first arrived in Oregon how lucky I felt; at that time there was confusion about the plates, and as explained to me at that time, the plates moved away from each other, so there was no possibility of a major earthquake in the Northwest. That, of course, was wrong.

           Grace and I stopped and looked back. The ocean appeared to be far enough away, but I didn’t trust myself with measurements. Grace and I talked. No reason not to head up higher.

            Near the top of the road we finally stopped at a newly graveled, vacant house lot. Not only did this look high enough from the ocean but it looked like the perfect place to set up camp. I checked my watch. Eight thirty.

            The man next to us had his hands stuffed in his jean pockets and his suntanned face was tight with misery.

            “Are you from Rockaway?” I asked.

            “Yes.”

            “Are you okay?”

            “My house is about one-hundred feet from the ocean.”

            I didn’t have a house at the ocean, but I did have a car. More important to me as a writer, that car held my laptop and all my writing, including my novel. I’d left my external hard drive at Colonyhouse, so my laptop was my only hope. Even leaving my wedding ring behind didn’t matter at the moment. (I take my rings off when I work.) Truth is, I could replace a wedding ring, but I’d never be able to rewrite the novel.

            Was my car high enough to survive the tsunami? Plus, I wondered why no one else was driving up to this vacant lot or the driveway behind it. I asked the man next to me how high we were.

            “We’re okay here, maybe fifty feet above sea level.”

            Okay, I wasn’t the only height-challenged one among us.

            I turned to Grace. “I think I’m going to move my car up here.”

            She nodded.

            No one tried to stop me. No one even copied my move. I pulled my Honda into the gravel-filled lot and felt relieved. We would not only have our laptops, we’d have water and shelter.

            As I slid out of the car, a young couple walked out of the woods with backpacks. Where the heck did they come from? They knew nothing about what was happening. We told them. Nearby, a young couple and their children were struggling, the mom pushing a stroller with a year-old boy, the dad carrying a three-year-old girl. They said they never heard the siren, the kids were asleep, and they were watching a movie. Someone called them. The mom couldn’t keep the blanket wrapped around her little boy. Neither she nor her husband had a jacket or blanket. Nearby, a woman who had seen better days was trying to hold onto five leashed dogs. When the young woman said, “What if we have to sleep here tonight?” to her husband, I told them they could crowd into my back seat. That started me thinking: Do we share our water? With whom? How much? How do we dole it out? Will we give the children our blankets and jackets? How long will we be here? Days? Weeks? How will we be evacuated?

            Just as I was mentally preparing for the worst, a firefighter walked by and shouted, “The warning has been cancelled. There will be no tsunami. Everyone can go home.”

            Grace and I looked at each other. What?

            No one moved. Everyone had kept an eye on the ocean and now were suspicious of what it would and could deliver. Sure it looked serene, but how did they know there was no tsunami?

            When people began to leave, Grace and I headed to the car, saying nothing. My mind switched gears. Should we go back to Colonyhouse right away? What if they’re wrong? What if there’s another quake? How will we find out if we have no television or radio? What do we do when we get back to the house? Do we stay? Can we sleep now? Should we go home? What do we tell our families? What’s the smartest thing to do? Is that the cautious thing to do?

            At Colonyhouse, the questions changed. How are we going to feel if we stay? There was a quake in San Diego on Friday, now this one on Tuesday. Is this a series of quakes working its way up the coast? Are we next? Is this a prelude to the big one? We’ve spent money coming over here to hold up and write. Are we going to just throw that away?

            Inside, Grace and I talked, but we had no answers. She told me about the time she was in San Francisco at a conference and a quake hit. Not being a drinker, she wasn’t in the bar that night and had no idea what to do during a quake, so she burrowed into her bed and fell asleep. Fell asleep? How did she do that?

            Grace and I went back and forth—go or stay, go or stay? I called Dan. He said, “If you have to, go inland and get a hotel. Take your laptop and leave the rest. Then you can go back and pack up if you want to come home.” I hated to tell him there was no “inland,” that inland here is a hike up a mountain. I promised to call him when we figured it out.

            I made a cup of tea. By now I knew I was staying. I just couldn’t live in fear.

            Grace finished the salad she left and then changed into her pajamas. She brought down pages of her novel to edit. I called Dan back to tell him about the woman fire department chief I met on the way down after the warning was cancelled.

            The fire chief had said, “Rockaway Beach is the only fully tsunami-prepared community on the entire Northwest coast.”

            I believed it.

            After we hung up, I lay down on the couch and was reading a New Yorker article by Edmund White about the women he’d loved when Grace said, “I think maybe I should sleep in my clothes.”

            I can’t sleep in pajamas or clothes, so when I went to bed at eleven-thirty, as I undressed, I laid my clothes on the other bed in the order they came off. If there was another evacuation, my clothes would at least be easy to jump into.

            The next morning, we learned that the earthquake in Northern California didn’t produce a tsunami because the plates moved back and forth, not up and down like pistons. In the reports to come, I would learn about police having to block entrances to the beach of those who wanted to watch the tsunami in Coos Bay. Cannon Beach right up the road from Rockaway Beach experienced traffic jams and people had to abandon their cars.

            The day after the tsunami warning, I wrote about the evacuation. I couldn't let the fear of a tsunami make me scared of the ocean. I just couldn't. An earthquake wasn't the ocean's fault. I had to do something that gave the ocean back to me, its life force, not its destructive force. I had to love the ocean again without condition because the ocean meant too much to me. 

             That afternoon, I walked down to the beach and the water's edge, and I danced. I let myself go, choreographing a modern dance with a few jazz steps. I leaped, circled, and swept across the sand.  And I didn’t care if anyone saw me. I danced and thanked the life force of the ocean, for giving us food, for giving us the tides, for giving us more than it took away.

* * * * *

            Ai, me love of the ocean is still in me heart. 'Tis the life blood of a pirate and I ne'er dismiss the pleasure it gives. Fear can only taint the well. Here's to the sea!

            Yours,

            Captain Val

 

COMING UP!

More News & Confirmed Gossip from the Writing World
Fashionable Writer-Pirates: What They're Wearing This Season

What it Takes to be a Writer

And … an unusual interview with cartoonist Jan Eliot of “Stone Soup”

Runnin’ for Me Life: Tsunami! Part 1

Me alter-ego, Writer Val, tells this true tale:

           The June day was what the Brits call brilliant. Blue sky with powder puff clouds, sparkling ripples of ocean waves, an almost-deserted long stretch of beach. My face had that just-right sun-kissed pink from sitting against a driftwood log for a half hour, reading John Daniel’s Rogue River Journal, after finishing a day of writing. Once again, I was luxuriating in a writers’ week at Colonyhouse, the Oregon Writers Colony house at Rockaway Beach, Oregon.

            After the beach, I ate a simple dinner and then decided to call home. Fellow writer Grace Castle was fixing a salad as I walked outside to call my husband. At eight o’clock, the June evening was still sunny and warm, and I faced a tranquil ocean. Dan and I were talking about our son’s job when a siren sounded, one that made my arm hairs stand up.

            “Can you hear that?”

            Dan said, “Yeah. Maybe there’s a tsunami coming.” He was half joking.

            When the siren shut off, I said, “Whew. That must have been a test.”

            We picked up the conversation where we left off, but half a minute later, the siren sounded again and this time stayed on.

            “I need to hang up. This is serious.”

            Inside, Grace was about to eat her salad.

            “The siren. What do you think?” I asked.

            Outside, nothing had changed. No cars. No people fleeing. Grace said, “If it’s an emergency, we’ll find out soon enough.”

            The sharp wail continued and sent me scurrying to the coffee table and the new tsunami brochures. Nowhere did the brochure say, “When you hear an ear-splitting alarm, run for the hills.” My reptilian brain said “Flee!” but my rational side said, “Don’t be wimp. It’s just a drill.”

            I called three numbers listed on the pamphlet and reached, “If you know your party’s extension. …”

            Grace calmly ate her salad. “If it’s not a drill, someone will come by and tell us over a loud speaker.”

            At that exact moment, an emergency vehicle drove by, lights flashing, speaker system on. “Evacuate your homes! Tsunami warning! This is not a drill!”

            Evacuate? Tsunami? Television images of the Asian tsunami flipped across my brain.

            Grace and I grabbed laptops, tennis shoes, purses, blankets, and jackets. “We’ll take my car,” I said as we ran down to the road where the cars were parked. I had water in my trunk.

            As I pulled away, I tried to remember where I saw evacuation signs. Which road would take us up the mountain? Before we turned onto Rt. 101, the emergency vehicle made another sweep of the area, and I flagged it down. “What road do we take?”

            “Turn left onto Sixth.”

            We did. Cars were leaving Sixth. It was a dead end. From a car passing us going in the opposite direction, someone yelled, “Third Street.” We turned around.

            The siren continued to shriek. When we reached Third Street, the town seemed to be funneling up the road.

            Up ahead, people left their vehicles in a church parking lot to walk up the hill. No one was giving directions on what to do. I wanted to go higher, but we came to a crawl as people walked in front of us. I decided to park along the road between the church and the fire station as no one seemed to be driving to the top of the hill. Grace and I put on our sneakers, grabbed coats, blankets and shoes. We decided to leave our laptops in the car. But what about the water? The family in the car in front of us was making similar decisions on what to take while one of their girls sobbed uncontrollably in her father’s arms.

            Grace and I couldn’t lug the water, so we locked up, and joined the fleeing townspeople. One man had a cat wrapped inside his jacket. An elderly couple, both frail and white of hair, trudged silently beside us, the woman following the man. Neither carried anything. Someone had a radio handset so I asked what he was hearing. “We can’t hear anything. The frequencies are jammed, overloaded.” A man behind us said a Northern California earthquake was expected to cause a tsunami forty to forty-five feet high. I noticed a uniformed woman speaking on a radio and walked over. “How high are we right here?”

            “About forty feet.”

            I looked back at the ocean. Not high enough. I began tallying up everything we needed and didn’t have: water, flashlights, protein bars, warm enough clothes, waterproof matches, water purification tablets, first aid kit, candles, everything I keep at home.

            My cell phone rang. “Where are you?” It was Dan. “I can’t believe I … … … Kristy just called from Portland … … … was being evacuated.” I told him what was happening and tried to reassure him we’d be okay, but the reception died. Grace tried to call out on her cell, but no signal. I thought of loved ones speaking to people in the Twin Towers before they were cut off forever. Grace and I put our phones away and kept walking.

            We continued our climb and learned from others that the whole coast from California to Vancouver, B.C. was being evacuated. “Where was the quake?” I asked. Northern California, someone said, Eureka, no Yreka, no Brookings. On the border of California and Oregon. The tsunami was supposed to hit our coast around 9:26 p.m. I checked my watch. Only 8:23.

            “This is what you could call an adventure,” Grace said.

            “If we survive, it’s an adventure,” I said. “If we die, it’s a disaster.”

* * * * *

            Ai, me beauties, it’s not over. The tale continues next week. And even then, it's not the end. There's another story that raises the arm hairs.

          Until then, me maties, stay strong and bless the sea,

          Captain Val

COMING UP!

Runnin’ for Me Life:  Tsunami! Part II

More News & Confirmed Gossip from the Writing World

A Fast Getaway in the Middle of the Night

And … an unusual interview with cartoonist Jan Eliot of “Stone Soup”

Dangerous Territory: the Mind of a Writer

Ahoy, hearties, y’are about to enter the swampy mind of a writer. I’ll gi’ ye no further warnin’ other than to say this is an experiment and you the guinea pig. Good luck on ya!

June Joint, 11:43 a.m.

No place to plug in. drink my tea, Irish tea. Not very strong. Damn did I bring my notes from yesterday’s LitChix? Yes, oh, crap, forgot to wish Dan a Happy St. Patty’s but he’ll be okay, I’ll call … I wish the guys next to me would be quieter. Loud. Okay, what to do now. Need to write my … who’s that? Someone said hello, but don’t recognize him. What about notes. Again. Go through them, order lunch, call Dan, drink tea, notes that Chris and Patsy made seem to contradict but complement, but doesn’t matter, I know the direction I’m taking with the new chapters and think I gave them clear direction on where I’m heading, funny that yesterday at the kids’ I talked about my characters in this novel, my excitement from the morning critique and nothing but blank looks, I know, don’t have to tell myself that why wouldn’t that happen when … switch gears, back to the chapters from yesterday and my excitement, shoot need to call Randy Sue back, we were having such a great conversation about our novels before the power went out, interesting that we’re both loving the writing at the moment, not very often this happens in the joy department and a reprieve from all the bad news out there and whoops need to take my adrenal pill to get me on track and stop thinking about the tsunami, the nuclear plants melting down, the stock market tanking … monkey mind again, always freakin’ monkey mind throwing me off from the novel, focus, the beginning, the slower pace, the … oh, should have told Patsy that this is a way to engage, almost hypnotize the reader and not the same artificial … no, that’s not what Lois Jean called the last version, the one … did she say contrived? Or did she say … crap, can’t remember, but … oh ya! Forced was her her word, and that’s what stopped me, not her, but reaching a later chapter and … she felt as I did too as I’ve gone back to the way I began writing years ago with the lyrical tone and the capture of the reader through what seems to be normal but is far from it, the

(Had to drink tea and say hi to a friend.)

Where was I? this isn’t—and I’m just now understanding this—this isn’t the way my mind works say for example in the car when I’m working something in my head … the act of typing this doesn’t convey the actual real work of a writer’s mind when fully immersed because when recording the mind, the mind works closer to the surface, the act of typing taking away spontaneity and run on thinking and close scrutiny of a problem and what is the problem? Where to go with suggestions from C&P, where I really need to tweak and I think that is just at the beginning, giving it a good first sentence, some ordering changes, putting some of it up front, fleshing out a few emotional points letting it breathe … no it is breathing, that’s no longer the problem, letting the reader be there in their shoes and giving them an inside look at the day to day laced with the betrayals that have plagued both sisters and kept them locked together and chained to their pact … that’s not a problem now opening the window and instead of … what? Shit, what was I thinking? Okay maybe it’s just as well I don’t think about this too much and just get some lunch and read the notes and forget that this jumble of whatever is going to get posted because I believe in experimenting as a writer and the forgiveness of readers and damn, if we didn’t work in tandem, we’d have nothing, no love of telling a story or creating a world, and … if I could only make you happy, kind of a love affair where if I didn’t have the reader, I’d be doing nothing but … this isn’t exactly where I wanted to go but after escaping the coast and having two days without electricity this seems tranquil and healing to just let go and be … be what is a big question, but oh, hell, this is just what it is and once I read the notes, I’ll be back at it and loving it and then I have to go to Florida and that’s fine because god knows I need a break and new scenery, good weather and being away from the norm will have to rejuvenate … better rejuvenate or at least … oh, never mind. I’m hungry.

So now, maties, we know the writer’s mind is neither lovely nor interesting nor dangerous--except to me--and that’s a fact. But we sailed together, sank this post, and snorted at the attempt. But here’s the truth dating back to Chaucer (c. 1374):

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Next week, I’ll tell ye a tale of my writer’s week at Rockaway Beach, one that began with a spring day full of sun and calm crystal ocean, ending in the middle o’ the night with the fear of dying. A small brave crew “wrote up a storm,” giving meanin’ to that old sayin’.

I may even give you more about the novel-in-progress in a later post.

Here’s to ye Irish out thar! Tip a pint and pray for better weather.

Your gobsmacked captain,

Val

Coming Up! 

"Wild Week at the Coast: my Latest Writer's Retreat"

"Key West Adventures"

"The Fountain of Creative Ideas, or Why My Resume Wouldn't Land Me a Normal Job"

"Platform, Flatform"

... and an interview with Jessica Maxwell of Roll Around Heaven