Last year, Clint Eastwood put out another gigantic piece of shit movie. This one, entitled Hereafter, starred Matt Damon and some dead people and while I spent a significant portion of the film rolling my eyes and yawning, I thought the movie did succeed at getting one thing right: portraying a tsunami wave crashing down over a city with disturbing reality. Wall-sized waves chased people through the narrow streets of a village, sucking them in and spitting them out like the catching and releasing of unwanted fish. Cars charged right behind the flailing human bodies, half-submerged in water. The people who managed to stay above ground watched the scene in horror. It was a CGI rendering of total devastation.
Yesterday, when I tuned into to CNN.com, what I saw was worse.
In a tiny, 3’’x 2’’ box on my computer, I watched video after video of water surging, cars flipping, trains crushing, smoke billowing, buildings shaking. Telephone wires whipped in the air like elongated jump ropes. Plastic and metal and wood screamed in chorus as houses tore away from their foundations. An ocean wave, blackened and littered with accumulated debris, forced its way over farmland, swallowing the surface of the earth whole. This same wave was stopped in its tracks only by a raised hillside with a road perched above. On the other side of that were more low-lying roads, still dotted with moving cars filled with people who likely had no idea that if it weren’t for that hill, they would probably be dead.
Though I had no experience with the devastation wrought by a tsunami, I was familiar enough with that of a large earthquake, though I by no means equate the gravity of my experience with that of Japan’s.
In 1994, a 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck Northridge, California, just five miles away from my own home. Houses crumpled and freeway overpasses fell to the ground. The earthquake flattened parking structures and shook off the faces of buildings like they were icing on a hot cake. In the aftermath, chain link fences went up around countless houses and commercial buildings. Pieces of red paper denoted condemned houses too dangerous to enter. Aftershocks followed, rolling through the ground underfoot like big ripples on a very big pond. Our house not yet inspected by FEMA authorities, my family lived in an RV parked in our driveway.
Our house looked as though it had been picked up by its sides and shaken for five minutes. Shelves sat emptied, a display of broken glass and porcelain laid down at their feet. Our refrigerator door had swung open, spitting all of its contents onto the peg-and-groove floor of our kitchen. Gigantic cracks shot through the drywall like lightening bolts. Even at rest, it did not seem safe anymore. After it was deemed safe enough to enter, I remember stepping into the front door of our house and refusing to leave its threshold.
Aside from the sheer terror that the building housing you might crumble around you, knowing that you living are at the mercy of Mother Nature has a more pervasive, unsettling effect. You have been shaken, quite literally.
Though, by comparison, my experience pales in comparison to that of Japan’s, I do understand what it feels like to be robbed of your sense of safety, to feel completely at the whim of a great and uncontrollable thing. It is this, in addition to roads and houses, that will take a massive undertaking to rebuild.
There are surely lessons to be learned here. I’m not just talking about earthquake preparedness or building better infrastructure for future disasters. I’m talking about how humans view their place within this world. The immediate and drastic effects of a tsunami wave are just as important as the polar ice caps melting or the killing off of entire species of animals, but it seems that we only acknowledge the power of nature when massive, apocalyptic things befall our cities. When it comes to what we are doing to the earth, altering it drastically and feeling the ramifications of these changes incrementally, we are willing to ignore the signs.
Humans have the hubristic tendency to forget that nature is not this static thing that we have conquered, though it may seem that way, given our collective complacency when it comes to global warming, toxifying our water sources, poisoning our air, and wreaking general havoc against the earth. In this, we are powerful. We can put up skyscrapers and dam up rivers and, literally, move mountains, and we think we are smart and clever because of this. But then, something undeniably powerful happens – an earthquake, a tsunami, a tornado – with the ability to wipe it out with one fell swoop. And we stand in its wake and bemoan our fate, wailing into the wind, “Why? Why? Why?”
The answer to this question is simple: because we, in the grand scheme of things, are nothing – rag dolls at the whim of something much greater.
*****
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