Thinking about the Tsunami

Pearl Buck wrote a short story 50-60 years ago entitled "The Big Wave." It was in the old lit books we used when I first started teaching middle school back in the early 1970s. I assigned it each year as part of a collateral reading list for kids, not because it was a compelling story (which it was) but because it was written by a great writer, Pearl Buck who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. The Big Wave was written about a "tidal wave" or tunami that struck Japan. It is, however, a children's story with some mythology wrapped up in it.

I think I was wrapped up in The Big Wave because Pearl Buck (her first husband's name) died in 1973...the year I began teaching in Fennville. She was 80. I was wrapped up in Pearl Buck because she was also a mythical character, do gooder, and lived one of those story book lives (not necessarily good, but one not easily duplicated.) Her parents were Presbyterian missionaries to China where she was born. She learned to speak Chinese before she spoke English, she came back to the US to take a degree in psychology, married a agricultural missionary to China with a PhD (Buck) and finally divorced him to marry her publisher (Walsh). She had a mentally retarded daughter and ultimately was forced out of China by the revolution, but was a prolific writer (80 titles) and political activist, (civil rights and women's issues) and coined the name Amerasian for the childern born in Asian countries of Asian mothers and American fathers (courtesy of WWII). The kids were rejected by their local cultures and she and others tried to get them either adopted or linked up with their fathers. Whew! See why I liked her? The other part is that she was introduced to my aunt, Phyllis Beal (who worked for the International YWCA in the Orient), at some function in NYC during the fifties. So, somehow I thought I knew her...get my drift?

Anyway, the concept of The Big Wave has been with me for about 35 years, but never thought much about it in real terms. When we first went to the Oregon coast about seven years ago, Bren and Amy took us to a town called Mancinita (sp) and right at the edge of this ruggedly beautiful beach is a huge sign warning about tsunami. The Coast and Geodedic Survey had calculated that the effect of The Big Wave would envelope the city of Mancinita, which was buit on a hill about ten or more blocks off the beach which had to be almost 200 feet above the water. That was a shock. A wave that big could come out of the Pacific and wipe out towns up and down the west coast. Remember the last time this happened was in 1700, but it did happen.

I was in the Navy during the 1964 Amchitka, Alaska quake and tsunami that hit that state and we showed movies of it at the NDCTC where I taught the last two years I was in the service for what we called Disaster Control (which was primarily focused on nuclear bomb blasts)...and I saw the huge surge and wave that hit Alaska (by proxy). I don't think the Amchitka quake caused tsunami in any other area but Alaska...but it was big...close to 9.0 Reichter.

So when this thing hit the Indian Ocean the day after Christmas, I had a frame of reference (if ever so slight) about the effect of tsunami (which is Japanese for The Big Wave). What we have witnessed has been just unbelievable. I hope our country never gives up in the battle to help rebuild the countries affected. That is what we do best...we build things. Someone said this will take a Marshall Plan for each country (named after Secretary of State George Marshall which rebuilt Europe following WWII). We need to help our Asian brothers and sisters today like we did the Europeans sixty years ago.