shift ten inches. The planet’s moment of inertia had been shaken loose. The earthquake was inertia in action: what inertia does when it dances. Earth spun faster and days were shortened. Perhaps it will keep spinning harder and harder until there are no days at all.
Along every water-logged road Masumi traveled on the way home there were obstructions. The Tohoku coast had droppedvertically two feet, allowing flood water to stand and not drain, and the narrow harbor and river openings invited the wave to intrude inland as much as six miles. Roads were also rivers, and rivers ingested salt. The Wave was time pouring onto shore, the future moving into the present, invading houses, taking lives, and ordering the warped world into an unstable
now
.
Wave follows wave. They can be crust or else water. It’s thought that a quake like this can jar the planet into what’s known as “free vibration,” setting up new kinds of terrestrial wave rhythms. Earth is not water, but bell. The tsunami proved it: the sea’s wet clapper made Earth ring.
Masumi’s drive took longer because the planet’s mass had been redistributed, as if mass and mantle were currencies. She’d thought Honshu was a solid place, but between the moment the cell phone alert sounded and the beginning of her drive home, the width of the island increased by almost eight feet, and near the epicenter of the quake, the seabed shifted seventy-nine feet.
By the time Masumi arrived home, no one on the Tohoku coast had heat, water, electricity, or phone service. Unbeknownst to them, the earthquake and the tsunami had knocked out the diesel backup generators that cooled the four operating nuclear reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, releasing a reported 1.7 × 10 19 becquerels of xenon-133, and 3.5 × 10 16 becquerels of cesium-137, as well as iodine and strontium.
Between March 11 and 13, the wind was blowing out to sea, but on the morning of March 14, it changed direction, carrying radioactive particles inland, west toward the spine of mountains that dissects Honshu, and north up the devastated coast, passing directly over Sendai, where rain began, intensifying the deposition of radioactive material onto the ground.
Inside their house, Masumi and her parents wrapped themselvesin a Pendleton blanket given to her by a Blackfoot Indian in Canada. As it grew colder, they piled on quilts, sheets, and the living room drapes. In preceding days there had been fore-shocks, some as strong as 7.1. Now aftershocks came in sharp spasms, the earth’s crustal instabilities making themselves known. Masumi and her parents huddled, cried, and laughed. The sea, the air, and the ground were now drenched with radioactivity. She asked her father, a tall, calm man from a family of alpine skiers, if it was the end of the world, and he smiled, wiped his eyes, and said, “I don’t know.”
* * *
No fixed points. No shore. Only continual flux, nuclear explosions, vented radiation, flooding and flexing, crustal recycling and collapsing, the annihilating heft of water.
Masumi and I have begun to explore the coast where she spent her childhood. Every morning her mother, Kazuko, fills thermoses with ice water, packs rice balls for lunch, and stuffs our pockets with charms from the sacred mountain of Haguro, plus gloves of garlic and small packages of salt to keep ghosts away. When I ask, why salt? she stares hard at me. “Ghosts don’t like it,” she says.
Kuruma no michi
. The path of the car, or rather, Masumi’s bright red 4×4 Toyota. It’s the small joke between us, this allusion to the poet Matsuo Bashō’s
Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
. But we’re driving, not walking, looking for the living among the dead, so fraught and hypervigilant, we sometimes break into hysterical laughter, followed by tears.
A
michi
is a road but can also mean “following the Buddhist way” as well as “a path to
Along every water-logged road Masumi traveled on the way home there were obstructions. The Tohoku coast had droppedvertically two feet, allowing flood water to stand and not drain, and the narrow harbor and river openings invited the wave to intrude inland as much as six miles. Roads were also rivers, and rivers ingested salt. The Wave was time pouring onto shore, the future moving into the present, invading houses, taking lives, and ordering the warped world into an unstable
now
.
Wave follows wave. They can be crust or else water. It’s thought that a quake like this can jar the planet into what’s known as “free vibration,” setting up new kinds of terrestrial wave rhythms. Earth is not water, but bell. The tsunami proved it: the sea’s wet clapper made Earth ring.
Masumi’s drive took longer because the planet’s mass had been redistributed, as if mass and mantle were currencies. She’d thought Honshu was a solid place, but between the moment the cell phone alert sounded and the beginning of her drive home, the width of the island increased by almost eight feet, and near the epicenter of the quake, the seabed shifted seventy-nine feet.
By the time Masumi arrived home, no one on the Tohoku coast had heat, water, electricity, or phone service. Unbeknownst to them, the earthquake and the tsunami had knocked out the diesel backup generators that cooled the four operating nuclear reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, releasing a reported 1.7 × 10 19 becquerels of xenon-133, and 3.5 × 10 16 becquerels of cesium-137, as well as iodine and strontium.
Between March 11 and 13, the wind was blowing out to sea, but on the morning of March 14, it changed direction, carrying radioactive particles inland, west toward the spine of mountains that dissects Honshu, and north up the devastated coast, passing directly over Sendai, where rain began, intensifying the deposition of radioactive material onto the ground.
Inside their house, Masumi and her parents wrapped themselvesin a Pendleton blanket given to her by a Blackfoot Indian in Canada. As it grew colder, they piled on quilts, sheets, and the living room drapes. In preceding days there had been fore-shocks, some as strong as 7.1. Now aftershocks came in sharp spasms, the earth’s crustal instabilities making themselves known. Masumi and her parents huddled, cried, and laughed. The sea, the air, and the ground were now drenched with radioactivity. She asked her father, a tall, calm man from a family of alpine skiers, if it was the end of the world, and he smiled, wiped his eyes, and said, “I don’t know.”
* * *
No fixed points. No shore. Only continual flux, nuclear explosions, vented radiation, flooding and flexing, crustal recycling and collapsing, the annihilating heft of water.
Masumi and I have begun to explore the coast where she spent her childhood. Every morning her mother, Kazuko, fills thermoses with ice water, packs rice balls for lunch, and stuffs our pockets with charms from the sacred mountain of Haguro, plus gloves of garlic and small packages of salt to keep ghosts away. When I ask, why salt? she stares hard at me. “Ghosts don’t like it,” she says.
Kuruma no michi
. The path of the car, or rather, Masumi’s bright red 4×4 Toyota. It’s the small joke between us, this allusion to the poet Matsuo Bashō’s
Oku no Hosomichi, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
. But we’re driving, not walking, looking for the living among the dead, so fraught and hypervigilant, we sometimes break into hysterical laughter, followed by tears.
A
michi
is a road but can also mean “following the Buddhist way” as well as “a path to
Similar Books
Never Laugh as a Hearse Goes By: A Penny Brannigan Mystery
Elizabeth J. Duncan
Vulgar the Viking and the Rock Cake Raiders
Odin Redbeard
Breathless
Anne Stuart
Champions of the Apocalypse
Michael G. Thomas
Virtually Real
D. S. Whitfield
Carolina's Walking Tour
Lesley-Anne McLeod
Revolutionaries
Eric J. Hobsbawm
The Cin Fin-Lathen Mysteries 1-3
Alexie Aaron