Tsunami is a word much in the news these days. There was even a lively exchange of letters in the Globe about whether tsunami is a pretentious word and we should all go back to saying "tidal wave," an inaccurate phrase reminiscent of '50s adventure movies ("Bruce, we have evidence that this whole island is about to be attacked by a giant tidal wave! We must move to higher ground immediately!" "But, sir, what about the women and children? And the natives, sir? We can't just abandon them." And so forth).
Tidal wave was the phrase we used, in 1959, when I lived in Honolulu. I was teaching at the posh Punahou School, my first teaching job. (One's respect for a school does decrease somewhat when one realizes they've put a novice teacher in charge of their 7th and 8th graders.) Anyway, I was learning how much I didn't like teaching 7th and 8th graders, and in the meantime I was sharing a large house with three other young women teachers, all of them new to the island, all of them new to Punahou Schools.
Our landlord was Chinese. The interior doorways between the major rooms were moon-shaped and latticed. The only other thing I remember about the house is that, to maximize the rents, the landlord had built a long room onto the side of the house, outfitted it with the appropriate facilities, and called it an apartment. It was rented to a young newly married couple, and their bed adjoined our kitchen. That juxtaposition pretty effectively kept the four of us out of the kitchen whenever hubby was home. The casual, noisy randiness of our neighbors made us exceedingly uncomfortable. And the frequency! My dear!! Who knew?
One more thing about the house: it was on the Ala Wai Canal. I'm ashamed to say I made no attempt to find out about this canal. I don't know what it was for. I knew how to find my way around it by car, following the Ala Wai Canal Boulevard to get places. But it was hardly a transportation canal. The Erie and Wabash canals actually opened the Midwest to trade and industry, but that was not the reason for the Ala Wai Canal. All I know is that at one end it opened to the ocean.
It was November. We'd all been in Honolulu since August. And in November there was an earthquake in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The cry went up! Tidal wave! There may be a tidal wave! It could hit the Hawaiian Islands! The radio warned us to take steps.
We were all Midwesterners. What did we know from earthquakes and tidal waves? Secure in the knowledge that nothing could ever happen to us (because we were ourselves, young, and in our skins), we paid no attention to any of the warnings.
The word was that the tidal wave could "come right up the canal." Who knew what that would look like? It might raise the water level of the concrete-lined canal by a foot or two, which would cause some flooding. Or the wave itself might come racing up the canal and engulf us all. So, since no one knew, and since we wanted to be able to relate the straight dope to our family and friends back home, we went outside and walked over to the canal.
I distinctly remember strolling along the walkway that bordered the water, the four of us, peering into the canal and looking for changes that we could attribute to the "tidal wave." Nothing.
Finally, we got bored and went home to bed. In the morning we learned that nothing at all had occurred.
I hadn't thought of this for 40 years. Not, in fact, until a more recent earthquake and tsunami made it clear how unpredictably, how suddenly, how powerfully the ocean can respond to a shuddering of the earth. If our Honolulu experience had been more serious, the four little mainland innocents might have been no more than a statistic.
As it turned out, we were just stupid and lucky. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here to tell the tale.
Copyright 2010 Ann Tudor
Posts
