We were just little guys in October of 1954 when the strong winds and rains of Hurricane Hazel clobbered North Carolina. Over the years we would weather one storm after another, most of them doing their damage east of us along the beaches.  But then there was Hugo which hit Charlotte hard, and Fran which tore giant oak trees up by their roots in Raleigh, crushing many houses (including my parents' in Coley Forest) and leaving many of us without electricity and city water for as much as several weeks.  The tornado in ' 88 was devastating and frightening and roared across northwest Raleigh with obliterating force, flattening nearly everything in its path, even brick and concrete buildings, Raleigh debris strewn as far north as Henderson. Terrifying.

 

 

 

 

One evening In March of 2011, I sat along Mui Ne beach in Vietnam looking out across the South China Sea from an open-air eatery.  I had just heard the news of the Japanese earthquake and the resulting massive tsunami, and was listening to a Vietnamese man speaking with a small group at a table beside me about the possibilities of the big waves hitting Mui Ne (which apparently lay in a direct path from the epicenter of the big quake).  My motorbike was parked out back and the high dunes of Mui Ne, six kilometers away, seemed the only safe ground.  I quickly finished my noodle soup and Bia Saigon and went for a ride. The Thai tsunami of December 26, 2004 was fresh on my mind.

Khao Lak...  (From my 2006 files)

Earlier, I toured the South of Thailand on a motorbike along the Andaman Sea following the tsunami path, visiting Krabi, the Phi Phi Islands, Phuket, and Khao Lak.

At Khao Lak, where a mountain of rushing water consumed over 8,000 unsuspecting tourists and locals, I spoke with a Norwegian man who I found relaxing on a beige rattan beach chair in front of his modest home.  His newly-rebuilt cottage, with deep-brown teak timbers and a dark blue terra cotta roof, replaced the orignial dwelling which was washed away by the tidal wave in December of 2004.  A few feet away from us, a rising tide was pushing onto the brown stones and broken shells of an elevated seawall.

He told me how he had been inland at a market shopping while his wife remained back at the house preparing breakfast, when the five-story wall of water struck with such force that she "never knew what hit her."

Attached to a thick truncated palm rooted in his small grassy lawn are three sun-bleached photographs of a lovely blond woman, her angelic face as vivid to him today as the taste of salt in the moist sea air, the soft undulating sound of slurping waves along the shoreline, the fecund scent of decaying seaweed strewn and matted on his rocky beach, the green film of patina caked and grainy to the touch from rusting copper nails mired and bleeding within the folds of the curling corners of her fading images.

Later I rode up onto the high bluffs of Khao Lak, stopping along a granite ridge to look back down the winding shoreline to where my Norwegian friend was still seated in his beach chair. I followed his steady gaze out over the Andaman Sea towards the horizon, to where a setting sun was melting into a radiant, golden pool-- to the end of day.

Tranquil, ethereal, sensual, on gossamer wings....