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Talking Story |
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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #40 (October 2, 2007), page 7.
Searching for something true
I am walking too fast on a long night-black beach. I’m looking for something. Something I should already know, but cannot remember.
Good men: Settled husbands and sated fathers are all deep asleep next to their warm wives, near their tender anak-anak. Only men searching and searching and searching walk dark beaches.
I am troubled by bad dreams. Twisted by too many bad days.
I should know it, I should know what I’m looking for, I mutter to me. Our heaving ocean, rumbling then sighing, rumbling then sighing, is saying so too. Probably to me. But I understand little of it. Little of her. So little of what I should already know this long into living. So I walk faster. I try and try remembering what I’m looking for.
So, what do you know? What do you really know? I ask myself. I ask it like our Papa used to ask us, when he was younger and abler to guide his guys through times as dark as these. Like every smart man everywhere has always asked himself and those boys depending on him. On him and his knowledge.
What do you really know? — is important. It is a question different from: What do you assume. Totally. Knowing this big difference is necessary for separating rice from husk, for knowing nonsense from true. And without committing to what’s true, you will not find courage during uncertainty, you cannot grab your next moment away from death. This kind of alertness is exactly what’s kept me out of hungry layaks’ awful jaws, on four continents, in one furious lifetime.
What do I know? I ask myself as I walk blinder than a bat down this endless strand. What?
I know for sure that here is La’ie, a little north of Hau’ula. Windward O’ahu.
I know for certain that there is one long-long hour until another precious sunrise aches off of our endless ocean. Another day.
But that’s all I can confidently say. So that’s what I’m telling myself, walking, searching this moonless, cloud-muffled night for something. For something I know I should already know.
I stop. I stop talking to no one, pacing to nowhere.
Silence stops me.
Silence where once was thundering surf. Silence like between breaths. Like that unnatural tension when you’re not breathing. Anticipation.
I look south, look to where Kaipapau Point pokes prominent into our ocean, where porch lights and street lamps are oddly gone from sight, gone behind our rising sea — and suddenly I understand everything. Everything that used to take explaining. All that matters.
Tsunami.
I know running inland will mean nothing. That ocean is a roused mountain. These little crabs, sprinting with their elbows held high, retreating for our treeline, are nothing. We are all just little fires, inexplicably lit, easily extinguished. That sea is everything.
I know our edgy earth shifted a mile-thick iron plate slightly, somewhere, deep-deep on our sea’s coldest bottom. I know such sudden spasms heave up thick black water, astonishing our sea’s surface, sending waves taller than a Chevron super tanker, roiling outward in perfect circles; waves tumbling forward with angry momentum, wasting not a thought about silent seaside towns or sleeping husbands or searching men like me walking along dark curved beaches not knowing what we’re supposed to know.
I know running now won’t matter. I know how little I am. How little I matter — our deep and black and endless ocean is rising. Her silence is humbling.
My little crab buds buried themselves shallow, their thousand pairs of blinking eyeballs atop tiny periscopes stick out of O’ahu’s grainy sand. We all look out to sea. Our sea.
She owns me. That ocean. This life.
But today, this windward day still not begun, she does not take my life. My small armored friends’ lives are spared too. She tumbles over herself on the steep incline of La’ie’s shore. Her rumble blows back my hair. My crab buds duck. But she leaves us here, alive on our night-black beach.
She leaves me knowing my searching is senseless. I know now that I understand as little as my hard-shelled buds, just now peeking out again. And about not-knowing they don’t anguish. Maybe they never have.
Lucky, I know exactly where I parked Uncle Henry’s old green truck an hour ago. Lucky too that windward IHOP opens early. Lucky you can have either rice or hash browns with your eggs, any style. I hope I remember where I put that car key.
* * *
Nota: On September 12, an 8.2 earthquake centered 50 miles southwest of Sumatra sent high seas in all directions and set me wondering whether one or two lives swallowed up by our overwhelming ocean would be different from one or two thousand lives suddenly swept away. If a tsunami takes one hundred thousand souls, but not mine, is that better or worse? Lucky, no need to answer. No monster wave materialized. Pacific islanders sighed relief. Me too.
Anak-anak: children.
Layak: hungry demons.