Excerpts From The Life Of A Logging Camp Kid

Disclaimer: Not the tsunami. This was the only picture of a wave that I had.

Episode Twelve: The Tsunami

"Kat!" my brother bellowed, "Do you want some toast?"

Before I could respond to my brother's uncharacteristic benevolence our vinyl trailer door swung open to reveal a harried apparition.

"WE"RE GOING TO DIE!" the disheveled creature wailed.

The only sound that proceeded the silence following that proclamation was the the clattering of a jelly covered butter knife that my startled brother dropped into the sink.

"Where's your mom?" the screeching form barked at me, and I realized that it was Kathy, the camp superintendent's wife.

"Uh, Mom's in the shower." I replied with caution, for I had never seen Kathy so unkempt. Her light brown hair was flying about as she paced wildly back and forth across the cracked linoleum in our kitchen.

"Well, I don't have time to wait!" She hurled this exclamation at me in a most accusing way; like it was my fault that my mother needed to bathe at this moment in time, "There's a tsunami coming! You have 45 minutes, grab a bag of stuff and as much food as you can carry! Meet at the cookhouse, and we will not wait for you!"

Bro and I looked at each other, and I saw the panic start to form on his face. This wasn't good. Before I could query Kathy further, she was out the door and speeding away in the blue suburban that she drove around camp.

At some point in your life, disaster will strike while you are trying to spend a few blissful moments here. Don't believe me? Just ask my mom to explain the phenomenon.

Mom chose that moment to come out of the bathroom, "What in the world was all that noise? Were you two fighting over the butt cut [1]again?" She hurled these questions at us with all the accusing tone that a mother can command.

"MOM! There's a tsunami coming! We are going to DIE!!!!" my brother delivered our imminent doom sentence with a classic, dissolving-into-tears performance.

All of these years later, and as a mother myself, I can now appreciate all of the bits of data that simultaneously hit my mother's brain when that bit of intel hit her cortex. She didn't just have to think about herself, but her offspring and spouse as well.

"Go get your backpack and put what you need in it!" she ordered Bro and I.

I was back in a couple of minutes with my pack full of toiletries and clothing. I remember carefully wrapping my Bible in my purple flannel shirt; because it seemed like a good idea.

Bro was still a panic-driven, blubbering mess, and Mom, to be honest, looked completely overwhelmed. I remember telling her to go get her stuff and I would take care of the food. By the time mom emerged from the back of the trailer with a bag full of her personal effects, Bro and I had most of our non perishable food stuffs in a couple of boxes.

"Let's go!" I pronounced.

We slung our packs over our shoulders, slipped on our Xtra-tuf boots, and helped each other lug the food laden boxes to the Cookhouse. All of the remaining camp vehicles were lined up in front of the old building. This was not a pretty site, for the loggers had all of the good vehicles. We were left with Kathy's blue Suburban, the Green Flamer, Honu-san's F150, and an old Ford Bronco.

All of the wives looked traumatized, and the first thing that I remember noticing was that Honu-san was not his jovial self. Rather, he looked pale and withdrawn, and I cast my listening ears toward the direction of Kathy and her acolytes in order to get a better grasp of what exactly was going on.

"I just over heard it on the Coast Guard band." Kathy was gushing as they stuffed backpacks and boxes of dried food into the back of the suburban, "We don't even know how long we have til it hits!"

What hits? The Tsunami? I thought and murmured, "What is going on?"

Big Boxcar Becky interrupted that train of thought by plopping 4 cases of candy bars into my arms.

"Kat, we gotta get the commissary into the back of that Bronco, you savvy?" She always had a way of ordering you with inflection.

I spent the next ten minutes stuffing the contents of our closet-sized commissary into the back of the Ford, most of which was candy bars. By the time I was done, I had heard enough gossip to figure out what was happening

There was a massive earthquake in Kobe, Japan . This in and of itself was a devastating thing. We were located on the same latitude as the island nation, and all that separated us was thousands of miles of open ocean. At that moment a tsunami was racing towards us, and no one had let us know about it. Kathy had just happened to overhear a warning on the Coast Guard's radio channel, and that was the reason for the panic.

As soon as everything and body was loaded we burned out of camp toward Tsunami Hill, our emergency place of height so to speak. It was twelve miles away, and I remember feeling this surreal feeling of imminent death as we bumped and bounced down the sandstone road toward the hill. Was this to be my final day on Earth?

Bro and I were with the other teenagers in the Bronco, driven by Honu-san. It was as we were tearing down the coast that I remembered suddenly that Honu's family was all in Kobe. I had somehow ended up in the front passenger seat, and I turned and studied him for a minute.

"Can't reach family." was all he said in response to my intense scrutiny. His eyes had never left the road; I swear the man was psychic.

"I'm sure that they are okay Honu." was all I said in return, as I am terrible at "there, thereisms".

Source
Images like this were running rampant through my imagination. This one was snapped during the last big quake and tsunami in Japan.

Our convoy had reached the turnoff to Tsunami Hill, and we all flew up the side of the mountain. I'm pretty sure that the surrounding wildlife thought we were a dragon, as the beleaguered Green Flamer was belching smoke and flame from her carburetor as she led the column up the hill. The efficiency and skill of people under life-threatening stress is an amazing thing to behold.

We reached the landing at the top of the hill. I did some mental math as we unloaded rubber totes full of meat from the cookhouse to set in the spring that ran along the side of the landing. If the wave was of any significant size we were probably doomed, but as in any emergency situation, I soon found myself distracted with camp setting-up tasks.

We had parked the vehicles in a line facing the ocean, and before long the little kids began emitting sounds of joy, for we were getting to skip school to go play in the woods. My friends and I were hanging out around the Bronco, for we found out that the adults would let us eat all of the candy that we wanted since we were probably going to die.

How I thought we were going to live until we were rescued. If and only if we survived the wave.

As I was munching contentedly on a Snickers bar, I was seized with a sudden worry for my father. Did he know about the giant wave heading our direction? I clutched my milk chocolate covered balm of peanuty goodness to my breast and jumped into the front seat of the truck. I grasped the VHF radio hand mic and started calling out to my dad's call sign. The other teens gathered around me with looks of worry on their chocolate smeared faces, as their dad's were 20 miles down the road from us too.

"Got a copy." my dad's voice filled the interior of that old Bronco, and my chest filled with a relived joy! All of the workers were high up on the side of mountain, chilling on a landing and awaiting the same life-crushing wave that we were.

The next couple hours were spent in a strange sort of companionable anticipation. I can't really describe it. To know that you could possibly die, but not really know exactly how or when is kind of the state that we all exist in right now. The state was just amplified a bit in intensity.

The wave came. It was all of six feet high they figure. Basically, we all got the equivalent of a Tsunami snow-day. The city of Kobe was not so lucky. 4,571 people died that day in 1995, and although I was thankful that Honu-san's family was all okay; it was still a sad time for all of those that lost their loved ones, homes, and livelihoods. The still-alive gratitude flowed forth quite heavily from me that day.

That theme continued from us kids into the next day, for the camp generator went down, along with the backup unit. NO SCHOOL!!!

[1] The "butt cut" is logger speak for hacking off a log from widest end of the tree. In our family, the butt cut of anything is the edges. Like the butt cut of a prime rib or a loaf of bread. The outside edge. Our mother usually got this piece, and my brother probably thought he was being clever hacking the butt cut off of the homemade loaf of bread for toast that morning. The joke was on him, for I think that piece was left uneaten on the kitchen counter as we fled!

And as always, unless otherwise cited, the images in this post were taken by the author on her shower dew covered iPhone.