We had a different sort of weekend. Friday night, as we were finishing preparations for my son’s Scout troop rummage sale, someone came in and announced there had been a huge quake in Chile. When I got home late that night, I looked online and saw the first tsunami advisory for the Hawaiian islands. Since the first potential wave wasn’t forecasted to arrive until after 11am, I went to bed.
My son called about 4:45am from the site of the sale where the boys had camped out in the courtyard. The sale was off and he needed me to come pick him up. (At that time of the morning, it took an awful lot of repeating for him to get that message through the fog in my head.) I got up, threw on some clothes, and headed out the door.
I couldn’t believe all the cars on the road. Drivers were lined up outside service stations, the parking lot at the grocery store was full, and cars were already heading across the highway and up the slopes of Haleakala. I am NOT a morning person, but I have been on the road at 4:45am once or twice, and what I was seeing was not normal.
When I picked up my son, he was as bleary eyed as I was. We headed home, and since our house is outside of the inundation zone, we all went back to bed. Or tried to…the first Civil Defense alarm went off at 6am.  I tried to go back to sleep, but after the third set of alarms I gave up.
That’s about the time Cheryl called.   She lives a little higher up than we do, and was calling to ask if we wanted to come up. The more we thought about it, the more we decided it was better to be safe than sorry. With the Indonesian tsunami on our minds, we decided to pack a few things and head up the hill. This included putting a very indignant feline in his kennel and he wasted no time in telling us how much he disliked this plan! It was an hour and a half before he stopped complaining.
As we sat together in Cheryl’s house, it felt like a party, except of course for the threat of enormous destruction. We watched the live broadcast, eventually starting to make jokes about the news anchors trying to find something new and interesting to say as time ticked by and no significant wave appeared. The biggest applause of the morning came for what appeared to be a wasp crawling across the lens of the camera that looked across Hilo Bay, and eventually we started shouting at the poor weather guy whenever he came on-screen and blocked our view.
When it became apparent that the equivalent of Class II rapids through the mouth of the bay were all we would see, we opened a bottle of wine to celebrate and quit watching the newscast. (It was noon by then!) Since I wasn’t sure if we were going to be Cheryl’s guests through dinnertime, I’d grabbed some leftover spaghetti and a bottle of wine before we left the house.   As fate would have it, the wine was Chilean.
As much as we enjoyed ourselves, it was sobering to think of the people of Chile. I grew up in California and know how destructive an earthquake can be.  I’ve never experienced a tsunami, and as fascinating as it would be to see the power of nature I think I’ll settle for the relative hum-drum of a near miss.
The tsunami alert system worked exactly as it should have, and we all had the opportunity to decide how we would react. You don’t always have 12 to 15 hours of warning before disaster. Do you know what you would do?
