There were three voicemails waiting for me when I stirred in the darkness. The cell phone beeps slowly, every minute or so, like the dripping of a faucet. I looked at the dim red light of the alarm clock. I was screwed. It was 0248, and sleep would not come again. I stumbled around, and willed myself to relax, listening to the all-night classical music station.

How had this happened, I wondered groggily, that the rock ‘n’ roll had changed over the years in to the later works of Hayden?

I was nodding off after I hammered the alarm into submission, totally unconscious, till I heard Carl Castle murmuring about the great Tsunami.

I think I recalled hearing about it the night before, but I was too agitated about the last second loss in the Redskins Game, and the excitement of having my sons with me, and then cleaning up the little apartment after they left with the dog.

I had been on edge all day. The Holidays are no good in the wake of a divorce, though I had tried my best to act jolly. The visit with the Boys went pleasantly enough, and I love them desperately. I crashed in short order once the dishes were washed and the place cleaned up. That probably accounted for early rising. That and some simmering holiday feelings.

The older boy is leaving this morning at nine, from Dulles, to attend the Rose Bowl game on new years. His brother will presumably drive him there in the newest of the vehicles. I gave him two crisp twenties to help through the airport, and he said he had six hundred dollars in his bank account that he can access through the ATM.

I slipped Eric a twenty as well, just for folding cash. I told him the checks I gave them for Christmas would probably be good later in the week, though that was anyone’s guess after the new Federal policy on automated check clearing came into effect.

My friends from Michigan arrived in town at some point. The beeping of the phone notified me of two new voice mails from the Hampton Inn on King Street. I may try to have breakfast with them before heading down to the office to sort out my schedule for this week.

I would prefer, of course, to go back to bed, but that is folly, and I think I will have to settle for a nap later. I think the morning meeting has been cancelled, and I think there are two or three lunches and the monthly office bulletin to draft. Those things went through my mind, as Carl finished his world round-up for this morning after the holiday, and cut back to the BBC broadcasting live from Ukraine. The enormity of the tragedy began to penetrate as I stumbled to the kitchen to brew the coffee that would help me lurch into the week between the Holidays.

Dan Damon in Kiev started with the grim total. 14,500 dead counted thus far, and more swept away, unaccounted. He said the Tsunamis were spawned by a earthquake 33 miles under the earth’s crust, off the coast of Sumatra. A shift of the globes tectonic plates, he said in his smooth voice, a perfect quake that caused the water to shudder and begin to move above the epicenter.

In deep water it would not have been a remarkable thing. We have examined the physics of the water column in detail. When I hunted submarines we investigated technology that could, theoretically, detect the minute hump in the water displaced by a boat moving silently beneath the waves. But nothing is in place to detect the birth of a tidal wave, and spread the warning to the coastal regions in its path.

The great wave raced outward in a circle across the vastness of the pale-blue Indian Ocean. The skies were clear, the temperature balmy. There was no indication of the anger imposed upon the water. Children played at the beach, puffy little clouds in the tropical sky.

The great wave arrived at different times around the ocean, impacting eight nations. As the ominous hump in the water column sped toward land it suck the water back from the shore, and mounted to ten meters in height in some places, a vast body-slam of a wave that hissed as it crashed against the shore, under the sunny skies.

Ten thousand dead in coastal India. Nearly five thousand killed in Sri Lanka. Thousands more gone and not counted in Indonesia and Thailand and Somalia and Kenya. Some places so remote that they were nearly inaccessible before the great wave.

The Maldives are peaceful low-lying atolls south of India. We used the 5 Degree channel south of them when we transited to the Northern India Ocean. The British had an airbase there, at Gan. The World Economic Agency just graduated the islands from the Least Developed category of nation.

The government there is saying that some of the islands might be gone altogether. There is no word from the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia, and the big American base there. The island is only eight or ten feet high.

Some of the places where the great wave hit were grounds for local insurgencies, like Aceh on Sumatra. Now completely cut off, the people fleeing to the high ground or swept away. They cannot accurately count the dead, since some are still lodged in the trees.

Only last week the insurgency was news. Abdullah Syafei of the Free Aceh Movement was gunned down in a fierce gun battle at his jungle headquarters. It was news when he and his wife and five others were killed. But this morning we are shown in grim detail that the affairs of men are quite small. There are a million people dislocated around the Indian Ocean, and cholera, dengue fever and malaria will come in the next few days.

It was only a year ago that over thirty thousand died in a moment in the ancient Persian city of Bam. When the earth moves….

In Kiev, Dan is reporting that Victor Yushchenko was elected overwhelmingly. The fierce election struggle after the nullification of the fraudulent election should have been the biggest story of the say, but it barely made the end of the news. The Orange Revolution is triumphant, but this is not the same as the elections in Poland, when Lech Valesa galvanized a nation unified in its desire for freedom. The eastern provinces speak Russian, and some still think it.

Yushchenko addressed a festive crowd in Kiev’s central Independence Square, the center of weeks of protests after the bogus November election. I heard no word form Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who has been banished from the stage and abandoned by his patron Leonid Kuchma, who had ruled with an iron hand for a decade. Vladimir Putin seemed to withdraw as well, but Russia still looms in this.

The factories in the east are old and inefficient, and wresting them into a Western-facing Ukraine will not come easily. I could reach for a metaphor, but I am still grasping to understand the magnitude of the wave.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra

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