#56: Italy and Sri Lanka, September – December, 2004
Scar, Star and Tsunami
One of the great things about living in Italy was all the folks from our past who came to visit. Another was the joys of the changing seasons, as handyman Graziano and I worked together through each one. A scar and a star marked the autumn of 2004, but Russell and I could never have imagined how the year would end with the most destructive natural disaster in recorded history.
Here are excerpts from letters to family about what happened in the last four months of 2004.
September
I love September. It starts off nasty, dry and hot but ends up cool, foggy and green. What a pleasure to sleep under a comforter, windows open and fresh breeze blowing.
Graziano’s due to have an angioplasty as soon as they can schedule it. A simple country man, he’s quite worried, despite doctors telling him it’s uncomplicated and routine. Russell and I have both tried to reassure this wonderful fellow who’s like a brother to us.
And speaking of medical challenges, neighbors’ son Giosue (he of the lost keys) was stung by some of those giant wasps (I think they must be hornets, despite the English translation of the Italian word for them). He went into anaphylactic shock and spent three days in hospital, some of it very touch-and-go. You can bet I redoubled my efforts to smoke them out of the chimney. Looks like I succeeded.
Now the good news, the biggest of which was Russell’s ten-day quarterly visit. He flew in one evening, and our friend Charles Salmon arrived on the 10:30 train from Geneva the next morning. (As you may recall, Charlie was U.S. Ambassador to Laos when we were there.) We did our best to give him a taste of central Italy — Porto Ercole for seaside sight-seeing and a marvelous seafood lunch; Cascata delle Marmore (the tallest man-made waterfall in the world, created by the Romans in 270 BC, when they diverted a river to drain the marshes around Rieti). If Charlie and I look a bit chilled in the enclosed photo, we were; lost in the cool mist above us was the rest of the 541-foot cascade. Our trout-and-truffle lunch in nearby Valnerina went a long way to warming us up.
Our reunion ended, we drove Charlie down to Rome, then continued on to L’Aquila in the mountains NE of the capital. We stayed in a renovated 17th century palazzo overlooking the main piazza. L’Aquila is a relatively new city by Italian standards, having been founded by the German emperor Frederick II in 1242. Often damaged by earthquakes, it still retains a lot of its old buildings, including a dry-moated castle (now a museum), several interesting churches, and traditional neighborhoods for exploring.
Our second day, we drove up to the Gran Sasso, the high peaks surrounding Campo Imperatore, a dry alpine plain which stretches more than 15 miles at over 6000 feet above sea level. This strange landscape has been used for movie locations representing the moon, Mars and Tibet.
We knew a major storm was forecast for the next day, so we hightailed it home right after breakfast. We avoided most of the bad weather during our drive, but when we arrived, we found Montecampano had really taken a hit. A lot of our packed clay-and-gravel driveway had washed down, flooding the north terrace with muddy water, and all our phone lines were out. There’s always good news, though: the cistern was full after only one storm!
A lot of the rest of Russell’s visit was devoted to clean-up, and before we knew it, he was back on the plane to Colombo. One happy aspect of his visit was that we were able to plan the outlines of my trip to Sri Lanka in December, helping him “pack out” at the end of his two-year project, followed by a week’s vacation en route home in January.
Enclosed are two more photos — one of the daily market just outside our hotel window in L’Aquila, and the second showing my scar six weeks after surgery. The latter is much improved from the days when it looked like a scarlet caterpillar with a forest of black hairs sticking out (the 10 stitches). Before long, it won’t even show.
October
As you may recall, a U.K. agent expressed interest in my book, so I put together a packet, as requested, of the first three chapters and a three-page synopsis. My author-mentor from last summer’s Winchester Conference was complimentary about my submission, so there’s room for some hope.
I think I broke my toe at the beginning of the month. I was watching TV, when a commercial came on featuring the Rolling Stones. So I got up to dance, made a particularly spectacular turn and smashed my foot into the wall. Hurt like crazy and still tender. Same symptoms as when I broke a toe on the other foot. By the time I thought it might be broken, it was too late to go to the doctor, and there’s not much they can do for toes anyway. Besides, “it’s all right now…Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas…”
Another reunion, this time when Dad’s lawyer and family stopped by. I’d come to know Jim Shaw well when we were dealing with Dad’s estate, so it was a pleasure to have them here if only for a day.
A great year for fall fruit. Despite Giosue trying to kill it, our little apple tree was amazingly prolific. Now the persimmons are coming on. I have to harvest them a few at a time, a day or so before they’re really ripe in order to beat the wasps. They like to drill holes, eat the inside and leave the skins hanging limply on the bough.
November
I’m sixty years old, and I just saw a shooting star. Those words rang with awe through my mind on 17 November when I observed something enormous blaze across the sky and then explode. I had seen little fellows before, but this was a Big Guy. Now I understand how ancient peoples thought these celestial events were magical and mystical, full of portent. I may never see another one like that, but I’ve surely seen one now.
Graziano, fully recovered from his angioplasty, has been busy the last week of the month with various members of his family harvesting our olives. It took five days, and now the north terrace is piled high. G&I will take them to the mill, making two trips each in his little station wagon and my bigger van. I didn’t participate in the harvest this year, being full of tons of other chores and having lots of oil left over from last year. Olive oil can easily last three years, but Graziano and tiny wife Giuseppina are insisting that they add my old oil to their old oil and that I accept 30 liters from this year’s crop. They’ll keep the rest and sell old and new oil for different prices, depending on what buyers want. The usual practice is for the harvesters to split the yield 50-50 with the field-owner, so we’re both ending up with a good deal. I didn’t do any work, but I get new oil, and they get more than half of what’s produced.
While they were harvesting, I was tackling all the things left undone while I concentrated on the book. I’ve finally got all the household papers (gas, electricity, etc.) filed, put away summer clothes and taken out winter ones, commissioned new cushion covers for the rattan furniture which is outside on the north terrace in summer and inside the verandah in winter, cut up an old quilt to cover pillows that go with same, taken the Turkmen rug to be cleaned, and commissioned a bookcase for the guest room, which is now overflowing with all sorts of tomes on Italy.
I haven’t put away all my summer clothes, though. Some are hanging in the guest room closet in preparation for my December 20 departure to Sri Lanka. Russell’s already sent my ticket, so it feels like it won’t be long before we’re together again.
Email sent December 27
Subject: Alive and well in Sri Lanka
We owe our lives to a monitor lizard.
We went to Sri Lanka’s South Coast for a Christmas weekend of sun, sand and seafood. Yesterday, we were on our way down to the beach from our hotel, which sits high on a bluff above the sea, when Russell called my attention to a two-foot lizard and suggested I take a photo. I must confess that I was a little peeved, thinking, “How many times have we seen monitor lizards, and why do we have to take a picture of this one?” But I decided R had been under a lot of stress lately, and the least I could do was take a photo when he asked for one. So I scurried around, chasing a monitor that was also scurrying around, trying to get under the bushes before I could snap a very poor pic.
We got to the bottom of the garden, which was still 25 feet above the beach, when some local men came running up the steps shouting, “-uddha! -uddha! -uddha!” I couldn’t catch the first consonant and thought they were shouting “Buddha!” because it was a “poya” day, a full-moon day, which is sacred to Buddhists.
But they were pointing out to sea, so we thought there must be a big fish stranded or something. We went to the edge of the retaining wall and saw a large wave rushing toward us. But it wasn’t that large, maybe six feet in height, and I thought it was just an exceptionally high tide due to the full moon.
Just before the wave struck
But the wave kept coming and coming, finally crashing into the half-moon beach, rushing over rocks and sand, through the coconut grove on one side and the mangrove barrier on the other, up, up until it covered more than half of the tall coco palms and half of the hill which crowns one end of the bay. It hit the garden’s 25-foot retaining wall and bounced high above it.
Finally, we realized it was a tsunami, confirmed when the water literally sucked out of the entire bay, revealing large rocks which had been deep under water. The local men ran down to catch the stranded fish, and we were shouting, “No, no, come back!” because we remembered that was how so many people were killed in Hilo, Hawaii some decades ago. Fortunately, some of their friends who had stayed on the retaining wall with us saw the next wave coming and shouted in Sinhala at the men to come back. All sprinted back in time, though the last one had roiling water lapping at his ankles, and his friends reached down to pull him up.
The next wave smashed into the beach again, this time carrying huge, broken palm trunks, uprooted mangrove trees, rocks, boards and all manner of things which could easily have killed anyone left in the water who’d managed to survive the first wave.
Several more waves arrived, but none so powerful as the first. All the guests and staff came down from the hotel to stand with us in the lower garden. The hotel owner, an Italian from Milan, said such a wave had never arrived in his 40 years there. By the grace of God, no one from our bay was killed or injured.
It was only later that we learned the sad facts that you have probably seen on your own televisions by now. One day afterward, the death-toll for Sri Lanka is 4500 and likely to climb much higher.
A Scandinavian man and his family in the next bay were swept inland but managed to save themselves when they were washed into a house. They ran to the second floor, broke through the thatch roof and climbed out in time to keep from being swept out to sea. Along with many other survivors, they were evacuated to our hotel, where he was still in shock the next day, recounting the sight of bodies floating everywhere and wondering if they were going to make it.
That afternoon, a military helicopter flew over, seemingly surveying the destruction and using a public address system to ask everyone who wasn’t hurt and didn’t need to stay on the coast to evacuate as soon as possible, so they could get emergency vehicles and crews in to help those who needed it, and so we wouldn’t deplete vital local resources.
We were to have left after lunch, but our driver couldn’t get down the coast road, which was closed not only from debris and broken pavement, but also because a train had been swept off its tracks, killing nearly everyone aboard. We were able to contact Kumar via cell phone, advising him to come inland and down. He finally arrived at 8 pm that night, so stricken by what he had witnessed that he was fearful of another killer-wave. No reassurance would do, so I took him by the hand and led him to the top of the bluff, so he could see how high above the sea we were. The sight seemed to calm him, and we went back up to the hotel. Knowing all the guest rooms had been filled with evacuees, often a whole family to a room, we had arranged for him to have a meal and a bed in the staff quarters. A good night’s sleep seemed to help.
We left this morning at 8:30 and only arrived back in Colombo at 3:30, having come directly north to Ratnapura, the gemstone capital in the mountains, then west to Colombo. We passed through Tangalla, where hundreds are reported to have been killed and injured. Tangalla, unlike our hotel, is only slightly above sea level, and the water rushed up a canal and into the heart of the city. We passed through devastation — a VW van on its side sitting in the middle of the first floor of a house, a fishing boat dashed up on the rocks in front of a windowless Tangalla Hotel, streets full of bandaged people, their faces still filled with shock. What most struck me was how they lined the road, holding onto each other and swaying back and forth, as if that touch and motion somehow comforted them.
On the way up to Ratnapura, we passed all manner of vehicles with sound systems telling people how they might donate to help survivors, replenish hospital medical supplies, etc. And here in Colombo, all the houses of worship are accepting various kinds of donations, not only to help local people (although Colombo wasn’t as badly hit as the South Coast) but throughout the coastal areas.
Hopefully, some of you received a message about our survival through best friend Bettina. Because we’d only gone down to the shore for the weekend, neither of us had taken an address book. I could remember Bettina’s number, because I’d stayed with her for three months while I was taking that writer’s course at UCLA. We had only a few moments left on Russell’s cell phone, so we called, left a message on her machine and hoped for the best. Bettina, if you were able to get the message and relay it to our families, we now owe you a major reward of your choosing!
Our love to everyone. We hope you have’t been too worried. Both electrical and telephone lines were out on the South Coast, so we couldn’t get in touch until we returned to Colombo.
And now, a new word in Sinhala: “Muddha! Muddha!” It means “The sea! The sea!” After yesterday, I’m sure I’ll never forget it.
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The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, caused by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, was the most destructive in recorded history, with 230,000 killed across fourteen countries.
In Sri Lanka, December 26th was a big holiday for both Buddhists and Christians. There was a long-standing tradition to spend it at the shore, whether at a fancy hotel or a poor man’s picnic on the beach. When the tsunami hit, thousands of people were enjoying a day by the sea — fishermen and extended family taking a break from their nets, bureaucrats teaching their sons to swim, mothers strolling through surf’s edge with new babies in their arms. The country suffered 30,000 confirmed deaths, although authorities estimated there were many more who were washed away uncounted. Added to these losses were 1.5 million people displaced with additional deaths due to cholera and other diseases which decimated those victims who survived.
But a lizard saved us.
COMING NEXT MONTH
#57: Sri Lanka and Italy, January – May 2005
After the tsunami, journeys around Italy,
a dear friend dies, vipers mate,
and Zack sends Russell to the hospital
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