To Sea Inside

The brassy clamoring of car horns creates a cacophony, pierced only by drivers shouting and a wailing alarm siren. Simon realizes the traffic will not budge. Amid all the noise, his body registers and isolates a deep, low vibration, and for a moment he feels inside a giant dynamo. The can of Cola on his dashboard rattles and falls. The rumble becomes a sound.

As the sonic boom grows louder, he hears grinding, scraping metal; the sound of snapping wood. He looks around from within the car but cannot locate the source. Some drivers start running in different directions. Women pick up shrieking children in a frenzy before dashing off. Others scream and point behind him as they back off. When he sticks his head out the window, it takes him a few seconds to process what he sees.

Moving towards him is a brown-black, frothy, reflective mass, and as he blinks, Simon thinks it a trick of the mind, because thrashing along with this undulating, shapeless thing are a splintered assortment of wooden houses, other cars, containers and small boats from the harbor. Seeming to lodge in his throat, his heart beats so hard he can feel the thud in his neck and head, and he becomes certain of only one thing: that if he stays in his car, he will be crushed by all the debris in the tsunami's tow.

While men leap over car hoods in flight and run up the motorway, Simon throws open his door and instead of running forward, darts down a side street, hoping that the water will take longer around corners than it will down the freeway. As he briefly glances back, the three or four visible cars on the freeway begin to surge and scrape against each other as they are lifted by the rampant wave.

Reaching the first intersection, he is approached by a seething torrent of water from the left, freezing in his tracks. He starts and stops in a couple of different directions. The cascade from both streets is nearly upon him when he notices the high-rise Vodafone building, the tallest in the block. He locates an alleyway which appears to lead there, and sprints for it. It is a dead end, with a brick wall too tall to climb, and no fire escapes he can clamber up on. There is no turning back. He is trapped. The water begins to gush in from the main street.

One of the cars brought by the tsunami slams its rear into the alley and becomes temporarily wedged between the two buildings because of the flowing pressure, its windows closed and miraculously intact. With water around his ankles, Simon sloshes through it and clambers on, holding on to the roof rack. The force of the rising water dislodges the car and floats it up fast to roof level.

The wild currents pummel a wooden beam against the car's back window, coming straight out the front and shattering the windscreen. The car tilts as it starts sinking. Readying himself, with one hand on the rack, he notices a floating door, but just before he flexes his knees to jump for it, the car sinks further, and as the rack catches his foot, he barely manages a deep breath before being pulled under.

His eyes on the blue, watery sky, he wonders if drowning hurts or if one just loses consciousness, and a spiral of air bubbles escape his lungs. Resolved to not die, he kicks himself free, and his mouth fills with water that tastes of everything but the sea; instead, it is oily, woody, and charred; the rancid taste of sewage and garbage mixed with rust and a gluey, asphalt tang.

As his hands flail about underwater, groping for something to hold, they brush past scraps and deadwood in the undertow, and briefly tug on something which seems to him like long human hair.

The next moment, he is spun over himself, so he no longer knows which way is up. A torrent of loose dreck slams against his body and he is slashed by something, his body shocked by a jolt of shooting pain from what feels like torn flesh along his thigh.

The displacement of so much silt and tarmac, mixed with spilled oil has made the water impenetrably black, and amid the whooshing sounds around him are an arrhythmic cacophony of muted thuds, grinds and snaps. No sooner does he glimpse the faintest patch of blue, than he starts kicking his legs and lunging his arms in powerful strokes towards what he hopes is the surface.

He emerges, lungs as if burning, gasping for air and disoriented. He looks around to get a bearing, and his stomach drops as he takes in the devastation. Gushing and thrashing about him are cars, entire floating houses, furniture, fishing boats, and an infinity of wood, screeching Styrofoam boxes and bobbing containers.

There is so much wreckage, in fact, it is as if he is surrounded by an oversized and lethal beaver dam. In the seconds it takes him to get his bearing, he realizes that unless he climbs up onto something - anything at all, and fast - the pressure of the onslaught will close the tiny gap where he is floating. He hears someone shouting out to him nearby.

"Here! Over here, grab my hand!" which he does instantly and is hoisted up on to what is left of a shingle roof by a man. He too is drenched, and his eyes are wild with panic, darting about for an escape, as he too pants and repeatedly shouts "fuck!"

Simon steadies himself by holding on to the side of a half-capsized freezer van and breathes deeply several times, gasping, adrenaline coursing through his entire body. Everything around them is packed together so tightly, it gives the illusion that they could almost walk to safety.

"I'm Ronan! Are you hurt!? Can you walk!?" the man shouts, barely audible over the incessant, rumbling groan of chaos.

"Simon! I think so!" he shouts back, still panting. Checking his legs, he is relieved he can move them both, but there is a deep, vertical gash running the length of his outer thigh. The man tears up his own shirt and helps Simon tie a tourniquet.

As Simon looks about them wincing from the pain, he notices they are hurtling fast on a compacted, crushed mass of wood and Styrofoam refuse, but because of all the dust, neither can see far ahead through the haze, except for the barely recognizable tops of stone buildings strong enough to resist. The air around them is dense with the acrid clouds of burning plastic, rubber, and flaming petrol spills on the water's surface.

Ronan points ahead as they flail about to keep their balance, and they squint to make out the low suspension bridge over what was once the river estuary. That alone will be a springboard to eventual safety on either of the hills flanking the valley.

The water is close to the bridge level, but it is still too far to climb unassisted. They look around them to assess if there is any deadwood they can pile together to raise themselves up to the bridge's ledge, but everything is so compacted it cannot be moved. With the sheer amount of matter piled up behind them, if they do not manage to clamber up to the overpass, they will be pulverized in the pile up, as there is no space for anything to pass underneath.

From somewhere about them they hear a quick succession of what sound like whips being cracked, and something whooshes inches away from Simon's ear, making him flinch and lose his balance. He almost plunges through an opening in the debris, down into the brackish water, but is pulled back by Ronan.

It is then they see the source of the whipping sound. The quake half an hour before the tsunami hit had loosened some of the bridge's steel cables, which had now snapped under the mounting water pressure pushing against it, lying across the riffraff within their reach.

Taking a moment to hug each other and cheer loudly, they tear up Simon's shirt and wrap pieces of it around their hands for grip. Each holding a cable end, they lunge forward, clambering over houses and planks, reaching the bridge only moments before all the junk behind them. They shimmy up, helped by unexpected hands over the ledge and onto the ground where, surprisingly, a group of people are still standing, some filming with their phones.

Both men start shouting at everyone to run, as coming up fast are a medium sized cargo vessel and a tonnage of junk which starts to slam-bang into the bridge, beginning to split the concrete as they sprint and hobble for the easternmost hill as the rest of the seaside town is engulfed.

&&&

In loving memory of all those who lost their lives in the 2011 tsunami which devastated the coast of Japan, just over ten years ago, and a celebration of those who made it out.

© Pedro B. Gorman 

10.5.2021