Catastrophes ... Clarity ... and Joss....

Chiara Smith, Amber Johnston, Zheng Mei and Yahn Smith, Forbidden City, Beijing, China June 1986

This week has been a microcosm of life itself ... up, down, good, bad ... fortunately nothing personally catastrophic for me ... and yet news from around the world leads me to reflect on the nature of fortune ... luck ... in a world where good planning and good intentions don't always ensure success. The terrible cyclone in Myanmar, the (literal) upheaval and unsparing destruction of thousands of lives in the earthquake in China, the tornadoes in the mid-section of the United States ... swift, dreadful things that suddenly end time and hope, brutally truncating what might once have been "the remainder of days" for people who imagined and planned for a future that didn't exist. I cannot help but think of how quickly, how irrevocably things can change ... not only in such huge calamities, but within the slender space of a heart-stopping moment, in the proverbial blink of an eye ... outside our power to change or ameliorate. Again, I find myself feeling grateful to the universe for the time and the times I have been given, for all the "good days" and for so much luck in my life....

I have felt the eerie, frightening power of an earthquake. The first time was in Denver, before I married Yahn. I woke up one morning, stretching slowly and sleepily, contemplating the day ahead ... and then without warning my bed (and the house around it) began to sway, then rock.... My first thought was an approximation of "What'na hell?" ... followed almost immediately by the certain, sobering knowledge of what was in fact happening. As I sat there, somewhat desperately and uselessly gripping the sides of my bed, I had a vivid mental picture of the house splitting in two, with me and the bed plunging from the second story to the concrete floor of the basement. Almost as quickly as they had begun, the temblors ceased ... but those were among the longest seconds of my life, still vividly recalled more than 40 years later.

I was in another earthquake, along with Yahn and our daughter Chiara and our niece Amber, at Lake Hakone in Japan in 1986, on our first trip to Asia. We had earlier seen the Great Buddha at Kamakura (a dream of mine since the age of nine) and had stopped for lunch at a little inn with a breathtaking view of serene Japanese gardens and the lake and Mt. Fujiyama in the distance. We had just been served when a large group of tourists was ushered into the dining room ... and the floor began to undulate nauseatingly. My first, confused notion was that there were so many "tourists" (not us! ... grin) in the group that they were causing the floor to buckle ... then again, on the heels of the first thought, I recognized the shaking for what it was ... an earthquake ... and we all looked at each other, flashing silent questions of "What do we do?" "Where do we go?" Yahn told me later that he was on the verge of picking up a chair and throwing it through a window to try to get us outside before the building collapsed, but just then ... the quake stopped, almost perfunctorily. It started, then it stopped. It was over.

After lunch, we continued our sightseeing in the area as if nothing untoward had happened ... still, when we caught the bullet train to return to Tokyo, I could not avoid some grim speculation about what might happen if there were another earthquake, or severe aftershocks, while we were on the high-speed train. I wasn't particularly frightened by the prospect ... my thoughts were more just curious ruminations about the possibility of having to escape (if we could escape) from twisted, smoldering metal if the train derailed. But then I was distracted by a group of Japanese schoolboys who were absolutely fascinated by Chiara's blond hair. They massed around her, pointing their cameras, wanting to take her photo. She looked at us uncertainly and said "What should I do?" I told her to strike a pose, grinning as I said, "They think you're Christie Brinkley." We got, and still get, a laugh out of that ... with Chiara's children loving the story of their mother's 15 minutes of "fame". And life went on....



Yahn, Chiara and Amber visiting the Great Buddha at Kamakura, Japan June 1986

For some reason, I've never been prone to panic in potentially hazardous situations. I remember a particularly bad car wreck in 1973, when I had to be cut out of the car, and being perfectly cognizant and calm ... albeit somehow detached, like I was floating above the scene ... while observing everything that transpired. Perhaps I've been fortunate that none of the "close calls" I've experienced actually rose to the level of "catastrophe". Or perhaps I have a fatalistic bent ... or at the very least, some innate sense that in some situations, I have little or no control over what will happen ... and panic is likely counter-productive.

Perhaps growing up in Tornado Alley, watching dark, black-bordered green clouds for signs of "wispy tails" stoked a respect for the power of Nature and other uncontrollable occurrences. I've been near (very near) where tornadoes touched down ... in Childress County and in Dallas and Houston certainly, once in Denver where I watched from a high rise office building as a tornado connected with earth and tore up Colorado Boulevard, only a few blocks away ... and once in Vernon, in 1983, traveling from Houston back to Denver. On that occasion, Yahn and I had just cleared Wichita Falls when we saw the dark, roiling skies ahead and knew we were in for something violent and potentially dangerous. As we were coming into Vernon, rain and wind and hail hit with a vengeance, buffeting our little car and rocking it from side to side. We talked briefly about whether we should forge ahead to Childress, but decided it might be prudent to stop and eat dinner there and wait out the storm indoors, so we selected a pizza place just off the highway ... a little A-frame building that we had passed many times when it had been home to various other restaurants.

Just as we entered the small haven, to use an old but totally descriptive line, all hell broke loose. The wind began furiously whipping the rain and hail against the windows, sending electrical lines into collision and throwing showers of sparks into the parking lot ... an amazing, literally electrifying sight ... so close. We sat down at a table and just after the waitress took our order, the owner came to tell us that he had heard on the radio that there was a tornado on the ground close by, and that we should watch him carefully over the next minutes. If a tornado was indeed headed for us, he would wave and we should then run to the back of the restaurant and go with him and his employees into the large freezer at the back, which he felt would protect us.

And so we watched him, but there was no signal. Just as the waitress delivered our pizza, we heard a tremendous roaring and a rumble ... followed immediately by the half of the A-frame roof on the other side of us peeling back and flying away in huge pieces. Within two feet of us, the rain was now pouring into what had been the other half of the restaurant, while we sat open-mouthed but dry in our booth. After sitting in stunned silence for what seemed like several minutes, we got up and walked toward the front of the restaurant ... where we saw the owner shaking his head, looking absolutely stricken and apparently incapable of speech. He motioned with his hand ... and then we saw that the freezer he had thought to use as refuge had been totally ripped from the restaurant, our putative safe haven utterly destroyed ... as we would have been, had we sought shelter there. And then quickly ... so quickly, like turning off a faucet ... the rain and hail and wind stopped, the setting sun cast a rosy, benevolent glow over everything ... and we saw our little car, sitting there in the parking lot as we had left it, totally undisturbed, not even pocked by the hailstones.

We sat down again to collect ourselves in the dry half of the restaurant, and ate some of the pizza mechanically (our appetites were pretty much gone by then) ... although I recall that it seemed at the time to be the best pizza I had ever eaten ... and then we left to try to make Childress before dark. All along the road from Vernon to Quanah, there were semi-trucks and cars overturned, and people standing around looking dazed. We would have stopped to see if we could help anyone, but the police and emergency workers were waving everyone through, not wanting those who were clearly all right to add to the confusion by stopping and milling about. We could not help but note that had we not stopped when we did, we would have been on that stretch of road when the storm hit. From Quanah on into Childress, there was no indication that there had been a storm of any kind ... no melting swaths of hail along the roadside, no rain puddles, no trees or limbs or trucks down ... just the peaceful, flat red-dirt countryside of that part of the Texas Panhandle.



Yahn, Chiara and Amber at Beijing Airport, June 1986


During the 20 years we lived in Houston, we experienced several tropical storms, and a couple of minor hurricanes, but nothing like the "big one" that climatologists and meteorologists have said is long overdue for the Houston area. I shudder to think what will happen when that occurs. The neighborhood we lived in, Montrose, close to downtown and higher in elevation than some parts of the city, had never flooded during storms as did many other parts of Harris County ... until Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001, which parked itself over Houston for days, causing terrible flooding, floating semis like toy trucks on the interstates, leaving 30,000 homeless and killing some 23 people in Texas ... including one woman who bizarrely drowned in an elevator as she attempted to enter the underground parking lot of her downtown office building to reach her car and get home to safety. On the worst night of the storm, when we did get about 3-4 inches of water in our living room, Yahn looked out the front windows and saw two guys going down the street in a canoe. But we were lucky ... a lot of people weren't.

I've never entertained the theory that I've been spared catastrophe for any reason other than luck ... "joss" as it's sometimes called in Asia. I have never thought that I am somehow more worthy of saving grace than that poor woman in the elevator, or the family just down the street whose house collapsed in the heavy rain and flooding.... "Stuff" happens ... without reason, without preamble, without appeal. Sometimes we are given warning ... sometimes not.

In the face of such uncertainties, we continue to dream our dreams, and construct our realities. If we are inclined to introspection and metaphysics, we often silently acknowledge that realities are frequently born ... and borne ... in dreams. If we seek to know and understand, we question the dream within the dream, examine the wheels within wheels, and contemplate the meaning and the trajectory of our lives in this world and the next. We comprehend that luck is a gift ... or karma ... but not a judgment....

This week has added light and shadow to the larger mosaic of my life; its chiaroscuro brings clarity to my mind, peace to my soul and serenity to my heart. And life is good....




Chiara and Amber at Jumbo floating restaurant, Aberdeen Harbor, Hong Kong, June 1986

May you have long life ... a questing mind ... and good joss....

)O(