Tsunami

By Don Mitchell

My mother calls me every May 23rd, the anniversary of the tsunami which devastated our town. The call is a reminder of my own mortality, because encoded in it are my first brushes with death: when I was nearly killed through my own foolishness, and then, not an hour later, when I began rescuing people who were already dead.

May twenty-third, 1960, was a Monday. My friend Curt and I had spent the weekend doing archaeology at a cave of refuge out in the Ka’u Desert, making maps, living out of the back of an old GMC delivery van I borrowed from my father’s business. I was still in high school, but had gone out to work with some college students. Curt didn’t know anything about archaeology, but he came along to see what it was all about, and help. We camped out together, but decorously, girls on one side of the van, boys on the other. No one seemed to care that boys and girls, un-chaperoned, were going into the Ka’u Desert to map a cave. It made me feel very adult, though I was only sixteen.

On the way back we’d been listening to the radio and heard about an earthquake in Chile. Everybody knew that might mean trouble. In one of the little towns we drove through, the warning sirens were already sounding. We all understood how dangerous it was, being surrounded by an enormous ocean, flanked east and west by continents where things happened that could kill you.

Same to the north, where the icicles on the old man’s beard had sent shock waves our way before. The last killer tsunami had arrived from there in 1946, in the morning about seven, on April Fool’s Day, of all dates. Our family had friends, the Slaters, who were lost. The mother and her kids were killed while she was on the phone with her husband, who had gone to work early, and when the warning sirens went off he called to tell her to run. Our family legend is that when Mrs. Slater said April Fool yourself! Mr. Slater heard the wave hit, heard it briefly on the telephone before the lines went down, the instrument and his family both dead. The reality was uglier than the legend. The kids were never found; Mr. Slater was briefly unbalanced and then quit his job and went back to the mainland.

After I got back from the Ka’u Desert, Curt and I dropped off our college friends and joined up with our high school ones. Some of us were Civil Defense workers. I was a  radio operator; this was long before communications satellites, when even our telephone connections with the Mainland were by radio. Curt got his car and met me at Civil Defense; it was casual, and they were glad to have more workers. No one knew what Chile was sending our way; there had been no destructive tsunami since 1946 – just a little one in 1957, that tossed a few fishing boats up on the shore – so I suppose we were all complacent. There might be nothing at all beyond an unusually high tide.

We warmed up the old Hallicrafters receiver, lit up the war-surplus transmitter, and got crackling reassuring reports from elsewhere in the Pacific: Tahiti, nothing; Christmas Island (now Kiribati), only six inches. There was nothing between us and Chile, but we thought that the South Pacific would give us clues, since the shock, spreading in a great arc, would pass through there first.

That’s what we thought, but we were wrong. We didn’t know what the seismologists up at the volcano observatory knew, which was that even a six inch rise at Christmas was ominous, and they didn’t know what we knew, which was that there had been that six inch rise. Collectively all we knew was that if anything was coming, it would arrive around one in the morning. I called my mother on the Civil Defense phone to tell her I was with Curt, that we’d be staying downtown until the wave came, and that we thought it would be small. “Stick with Curt,” she said, “he knows the ocean better than you do,” which was true. Curt was a surfer and diver, and I was neither.

Curt and I left the radios and went down to the shore to watch for the tsunami. Nobody told us not to. We were apprehensive but not scared, because of Christmas Island. We picked up some long sticks that had washed up on the rocks so we could mark the wave heights by shoving them into the embankment. We thought that later on somebody might want to know. We should have known that government monitoring stations were in operation – had been for years. But it seemed exciting to be getting ready to collect data. I think we got started with the sticks to avoid thinking about how we had no genuine reason to be down on the shore at all.  

The first wave was small, nothing more than a rapid high tide, not even as frightening as a tidal bore. It wasn’t recognizable as a wave at all, but it triggered the automatic warning sirens, which began low moaning and then wailing. We didn’t need a warning; we already knew what was happening. A few minutes later we marked the second, which washed a foot or two higher.

By then it was after one AM, and when instead of moving water we realized we were looking at the deep lumpy black of the bay’s floor, we were transfixed. The ocean was being sucked out. We stood and watched. We scrambled a little higher on the embankment so we could see better out into the bay. We waited.

Even now I can’t really figure out what kept us from running. All I can remember from that time – it must have been less than a minute – is the feeling that I had to stay there and see what was going to happen. Later, when my mother asked why I had done such a foolish thing, I could only say that I didn’t know, and that was the truth. I didn’t. I still don’t, not really. So I stood there at what had been the high water mark, now land, waiting for something to happen.

The next thing I could see was a wall of water that seemed to jump up from nowhere, coming at us faster than I had ever imagined. I knew, I had read, I had had it drilled into me, that tsunami would do fifty or sixty miles per hour near shore, but I had never thought about what that meant, about how much time I’d have to react. It was barely enough.

We looked each other and started running up the embankment, away from our bravely planted sticks, heading inland. But I realized it would take us from the rear if we did, and even though I think Curt did too, I was the one who shouted “bridge, bridge” and we turned and ran along the embankment and out over the Wailuku River, onto a metal landing-mat bridge that had replaced the concrete one destroyed on April Fool’s Day, 1946. We ran towards the high ground on the other end of the bridge and we didn’t make it. I doubt we had more than fifteen seconds to do what we did – decide, run – and the wave hit when we were half way across, surging under and through the bridge, coming up around our knees, and Curt and I grabbed the metal railing and screamed the way you would on a roller coaster. I screamed because I believed I was about to die. Curt screamed too.

We held on to the railing facing the bay, and to our right we saw the wave hump up, we saw this from the back, and because our town was built in a crescent and we were at one of the tips, we saw the wave slam into it. The noise was tremendous. The power plant blew up and the lights went out.

The bridge bucked and heaved but it held. Even now I can hear the metal creaking and groaning, and I can feel salt water splashing my face. That was a surprise:  the slap of cold, fully salty water which should have been brackish, warm, and thirty feet below me.

After maybe twenty seconds, maybe less, the rushing sea dropped below the bridge deck, and we let go and ran to the other side. Some men who had been watching cursed us for crazy kids. “You real stupid, play with da wave like dat,” one yelled angrily, and the others hugged us, slapped us on the back, kept asking us if we were all right. An old Japanese man pointed his finger at us and then out towards the bay, and said, “Lucky you folks no die, you know?  No can forget dis. Lucky you no die.”

We crossed another bridge upstream to our cars, and drove away. I went out along the coast to wake up an amateur radio operator I knew, have him start calling Honolulu for help. I felt important and adult, honking my horn to wake Sam Kamakau and telling him to get his generator and his radio going. He didn’t even bother asking whether the inter-island telephones still worked.

Then I drove home and said to my parents, who were on the porch looking, wondering what had happened, “It’s bad, it’s bad. I think it’s all gone. I’m gonna try to rescue people.”  I didn’t tell them about the bridge until much later.

“Be careful,” my mother said, “another one might come.”

I went into my father’s shop, got an axe and a crow bar, and drove back downtown to meet Curt and the others at Civil Defense.  Somebody passed out red hard hats.  We put them on, drove to where the worst destruction was, and began.

In the early-hours bravado we called ourselves the Rescue Squad. By dawn we knew there was no hope, there could be no one left for us to rescue. Everybody we found was dead. We kept at it for four days anyway, but never found anybody alive.

It’s only after earthquakes and building collapses that survivors last for days. A tsunami either mangles and crushes you in your house or pins you down just long enough to drown you. It’s in and out in a couple of minutes at most, but that’s enough time to kill you if you can’t get free. If you’re swept cleanly away, if you’re sucked back out to sea on flotsam or jetsam, you might survive to be found later, maybe clinging to a door, or hanging over a dresser drawer. The shock waves will have rushed on, the sea will have calmed itself, and you’re likely to be rescued from gentle swells.

We found our friend Ken Nakamoto’s mother in the first couple of hours, in a collapsed house. We wouldn’t have seen her at all except that her leg was sticking out from what had been her porch. When we heaved the porch up and got her out she was pale, even peaceful, in her nightgown. There was a little blood on her leg but she was otherwise unmarked. She had almost gotten out into the street, where maybe she could have caught something and survived.

Where’s Kenzo? we asked each other, even though we’d already poked under the house enough to be sure nobody else was there. We said this looking around as if any minute he’d come out from his room and help us with his mom. His room was smashed and his mother dead and we had her body, and we didn’t know where he was, but we were said this thing to each other anyway, as if we had dropped by and were waiting for him to come home from school.

She had been drowned, not crushed; so strange to realize it: drowned, but here, inland. The sea was back where it belonged, two hundred yards away. Mrs. Nakamoto’s was the first dead body I had ever seen that hadn’t been embalmed, painted, dressed and put in a casket. Hers was the first newly-dead one I’d ever seen. It was the first one I’d ever touched, and she was cold the way everybody said bodies were, but she was smooth, too. The cool smoothness of her arms and legs has stayed with me. The sudden movement of her foot in my grasp as her body sagged when we lifted her has never left me, nor has the feeling of fear that it would slip from my hand and I would drop her, and she would be hurt.

Somebody, the police or maybe Civil Defense, had organized the little open-air buses and their drivers, pressing them into service as ambulances and hearses. I don’t know how they did it so quickly. The buses were called sampans and even then I caught the irony. Sampan was the name for fishing boats that left the Wailoa River every night,  motored past the end of the breakwater, where the tiger sharks were, and on to open sea.  Sampans stayed out all night, returning at dawn with their catch.  At the early morning auctions the fish were laid out in rows and the bidders walked among them, choosing. Some fish would still be alive, flopping on the concrete floor, but most would be dead. The iridescent blue-green mahimahi faded as they drowned, but the others stayed the same colors.

We lifted Mrs. Nakamoto’s body into a sampan that a policeman called for us. We laid her out on the floor on her back, because it seemed wrong to put her in face-down. But that meant we had to look at her. The driver, an old Filipino man, headed for the morgue at the hospital. All of us had been born at that hospital, which was a couple of miles out of town, up on the bank of the Wailuku near Rainbow Falls. I can’t remember who started it, but suddenly we were making fun of the driver, who was shaking with fear of Mrs. Nakamoto’s dead body. We must have known he didn’t deserve this from us, but then we didn’t deserve to be sitting on leatherette bus seats around the body of our friend’s mother in her nightgown. We were in an open bus before dawn with a dead body we’d found, and we didn’t know how to behave properly.

We looked at each other, grinned, and teased him. “Shake-shake,” we called to him,  “Hey, Shake-shake, baim’bai we go back downtown for get moah dead folks.”  He laughed a high-pitched old man Filipino laugh, and kept on driving, shaking. I was trembling myself. I think we all were. We agreed it was from the cold.

When we were about halfway to the hospital Curt shook his head and said we should let Shake-Shake alone. We fell silent. I was a little ashamed that I hadn’t been the one to make us stop. I felt around under my seat and found a rolled-up mat somebody must have forgotten, and tried to cover Mrs. Nakamoto with it. Opened the long way it wouldn’t sit properly on her, so I turned it and covered her chest and face with it. I think we all felt better after that.

At the morgue one of the orderlies looked at us, shook his head, and said, “You folks only kids. No good you do dis.” 

That gave us some strength, and with it pride, which is probably what he meant it to do. We were a Rescue Squad, and had to get back to it. We’d taken our catch up the hill, and unloaded it. Experienced, blooded, we got in Shake-Shake’s sampan and went out for more.

Our high school graduation had to be postponed because there were students who were dead, there were students whose parents were dead, and the Hilo Civic Auditorium where the graduation was to be had been seriously damaged, though not destroyed. We had our graduation two weeks late in the high school gym, the site of proms, of fast and slow dancing, the site of the Big Island Interscholastic Federation basketball championships. It became the site of a graduation where not all the seniors were available to attend. I sat on the gym floor in my crepe gown and tasseled hat and my fragrant maile lei, along with all the other seniors who were still alive. Curt and some of the other Rescue Squad kids were there. Kenzo was too. We had found ourselves avoiding him when school resumed, which was easy because he avoided us too. I told myself this was probably the best thing, and let it go.

The Guidance Counselor wrote a letter to the paper praising us, and criticizing Civil Defense for having made boys do the work of men. But we had no complaint. We wanted to sit together at graduation, but the Guidance Counselor couldn’t arrange that. It had to be alphabetic. Even so, I felt a sense of completion afterwards, a feeling that today I’d call closure. It was important to have that graduation. I think the town saw it as a sign of recovery, of hope perhaps, maybe even an affirmation: our seniors graduate no matter what.

In our town there’s a memorial for the 1960 tsunami. It’s the town’s pedestal clock, green metal pillar and a big white face, which was ripped from its base and washed half a mile up the Wailoa River. It stopped at one-oh-three, hands almost together, and it’s been left that way, cracked glass and all. They put it back on its stand, near the sampan landing, about half a mile from where we found Mrs. Nakamoto.

Every time I go home I take my mother’s car and I drive down to that clock, and I stand with it there for a few minutes. I know the passers-by think I’m just another Mainland tourist, because that’s what I look like now. They see a middle aged bald white guy looking at their clock. Just standing, looking. It doesn’t bother me that they can’t know what I’m thinking about.

I never go out on the bridge where I screamed and almost got killed.