After the Waves: Not a Straight Line

My attempt to tame a timeline.

May 31, 2024

One of the first posts I made here was about our itinerary and the detailed list of travel and accommodations we had set up for this trip. I love itineraries and lists. I find the to be very helpful when trying to get your arms around something unwieldy, or just when you are trying to keep yourself on track. I am struggling - and honestly, have always struggled - with how to tell this story, and the itinerary felt like a good place to start.

But it feels boring to me to go through city by city, activity by activity. It feels weird to me to just talk about the scary and unbelievable stuff, and it feels weird to me to keep rambling on here without talking about scary and unbelievable stuff. I’m not trying to bury the ledes here. Yes, we were on the front lines of the disaster. Yes, we had to make calculated decisions to try and find safety. Yes, we took risks to find that safety. Yes, we were scared shitless and were on our own in a foreign country where neither of spoke the language with only the clothes on our backs. Yes, we still think that if we hadn’t made that one decision to stop for a last minute bathroom pitstop, it would have changed the whole outcome for us. Yes, to all of that, and more.

I am trying to paint a picture of this not only as story of survival, but as a story of two friends off on an adventure. I am trying to balance the who, what, where, when, and why of the disaster itself, with snapshots of the places we visited, the new culture we learned about, the sights we saw, and what happened and what we learned when we came home. And then balance all of that with the fact that it happened almost twenty years ago and who really cares anymore, anyway?

That’s why this story isn’t a straight line.

It bounces back and forth between what I’ve documented on Open Salon and Wordpress blogs in the past, what I never documented back then but always wanted to, and thoughts I have about it now, nearly twenty years later.

Is that boring to whomever might be reading this? I hope not, but I am not sure. For those of you looking for a nuts and bolts account of the tsunami experience itself and that only, I hope you stick with me. For those of you who don’t mind the non-linear path I am on to tell this story, thank you for understanding my choices.

The following text is a post I made on Wordpress on May 6, 2009. It hopefully explains in a little more detail what I tried to convey in the paragraphs above. There are three sentences in particular that stand out to me as I re-read this post that I wrote fifteen years ago. I’ve noted them below in parentheses ( ).

Before I wrote this post (the one you are reading right now), I had planned to post something else titled: “Surviving the 2004 Tsunami: NYC, the Beginning”. It was the very first post I wrote on Open Salon back in December 2008. I thought going back to the beginning might be a good place to revisit, and now might be a good time to do that. But first I felt a need to address the criss-cross aspects to this story with the hope the rest of what I post here might make better sense. Sometimes the beginning of a story takes nine other posts to get there.

+++

Not a Straight Line
Posted to Wordpress on May 6, 2009.

I’ve been trying to tell this story so that it makes some kind of sense to whoever may be out there reading it. It’s hard because once I start down one path, stories inside of stories come popping out.

I’ve never been a huge fan of having a “moral to the story” feeling like it’s been force-fed to me. If there is one, that’s great. If not, and I am entertained, just for the sake of being entertained that’s great too.

As I’ve been talking to people here and there about putting some defined structure to this story, the more I am getting confused about whether or not I am simply trying to tell a tale, or if it needs to have a central message attached. I feel like it should land somewhere in the middle. I had someone comment to me that maybe the timing of the “story” isn’t so relevant anymore because so much time has already passed, and that maybe an idea would be to build fictional story around trip itself.

I’m pretty sure that is not the way I want to go. I feel like there still may be some value to people just by telling the story itself. I really think, at the almost five year mark, that I am just beginning to see the value that I have taken away from it.

Aside from the obvious.

But maybe the important messages live in the not-so-obvious places. (1)

Maybe the messages that I am now learning just by putting the story out there are the important ones. (2)

The more I seem to be able to get on paper, the more I seem to see. It’s never been an easy thing for me to put personal things like this on display for all to see. But the more I do it, the more I feel I am getting out of this process. Even if no one is reading it.

Maybe the message is that trying to be open and honest, even when it’s not an easy thing to do, is really the right thing to do. Maybe it’s the only thing to do. (3)

And maybe being open and honest means that you can’t go in a straight line. There is no easy beginning and end to the story because the story itself is still unfolding. The messages still unfolding.

Life is not a straight line.

It’s certainly a thin line.

But it’s not a straight line.

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