(being the first of a series of ten)
We were sitting for breakfast beside the river—a blooming frangipani overhead, the hill across the way waking up purple and full of birds—when Mark Cork said, “An earthquake may strike within the hour. I must plan my escape.” Peering over the river, he chose two rickety docks, a path between boats. He’d have an estimated fifteen minutes then to climb the hill before the wave arrived.
Of course an earthquake might necessitate a new plan entirely. Probably would. But path-making was a habit of the place, as disaster was standard breakfast conversation. We enjoyed it also for lunch and dinner, with beer. We lived in anticipation of the wave. Every place we went, we thought, “Now how would I get out of here?”
In the hotel where the foreigners gathered, a converted Dutch bank from a hundred years back, the wave appeared in nearly every conversation.
“Did you see the article in Time?”
“No--I heard about it.”
The fault had slipped on one end and it slipped on the other. Inevitably now, it must slip in the middle. The wave that would hit this city could be a 100 feet tall.
“Really a hundred feet?”
“Something like that.”
The expats had come here to work in the surf industry but the money was in disaster relief. Would they be safe on the second floor? Should they sign another three year lease?
The hotel proprietress, elegant in cat’s eye glasses, explained, “The thing about this place is: there’s an awful lot of Factor X.”
I appreciated this, the moment to moment nodding to Chance. A secular ‘God willing’: the tsunami clause.
The islands of Indonesia permit no final count; the number changes hour to hour. The earth is not forever; we do not stand on stable ground.
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