Facing the Wave Read Free Page B

dead.
    Traffic police stop us. They wave their batons so gracefully they might be conducting a symphony. The road ahead is twisted and a bridge in the distance is out—the entire middle section gone. On the side of the road there’s more debris: a coat, a tree branch, five metal light poles bent completely in half, the sixth one standing. The arm of an orange crane moves, piling up a stack of crushed cars. We’re motioned ahead, and as we creep along on a temporary gravel track, civilization stops. We enter a wild place of total devastation.
    Don’t breathe. Don’t swallow. Stay covered. Knee boots, gloves, face masks on. I thought it would be black, this tsunami-devastated coast, with a Hokusai wave frozen in place, always arriving, always threatening. But on this June day the Pacific Ocean is flat and blue, the ruined coast is gray dust thick with crematorium ash, and there is no wave.
    Yet I see aqueous corruption: the ruined, broken, bloated; the sickening to-and-fro of corpse-thickened water, and ghost-thickened air. An odd smell pervades—one that is hard to pin down. It is decomposing plants, fish, and flesh, and the mineral smell of bodies being burned; but the radiation that moves through flesh has no scent at all.
    For three or four hundred years Masumi’s family has grown rice and lived in abundance and wealth, just north of where the Natori River empties into the Pacific Ocean. Once there were rice, flower, and vegetable fields here; now three feet of mud, left behind by the tsunami, is a thick skin that seals the rough corners of these fields, smoothing them, and carrying the vague shine of a midday moon.
    We drive on a temporary raised roadbed toward the barren ground where Masumi’s grandmother’s capacious house once stood. When I open the car window, the noise of heavy equipment fills my ear. Mountain-building is ongoing: the flat horizon is being lifted into hills of stacked debris, a word that has cometo be a euphemism for the dead, the rotting, the wrecked, and the broken bones of what once stood.
    “The Wave came over the seawall there,” Masumi says, pointing east. “The wall was useless. The Wave crossed the river and many people were swept away.” We pass a small airplane, its battered wing stuck in the mud. Boats ride waves of rice straw. An entire Shinto temple lies crushed under its own heavy roof. We pass a crematorium and stop to read a hastily hand-drawn sign instructing people to carry the bodies through the back door. “One at a time, please, because there are only two stoves working.” The wave even washed through the dead, I say to Masumi. A priest is standing where a body has just been wheeled in. He puts his palms together and bows. “They say he comes here every day to pray,” she tells me.
    In the distance pine trees at the beach are jack-knifed. Some are down and broken into bits. Pieces of seawall are strewn between dead trees. Down a dirt track in what was once a neighborhood of cultivated fields and farmhouses, Masumi stops, clutching the steering wheel. Her head drops. “It’s been difficult for me to come here. I feel ghosts all around me,” she whispers.
    We get out of the car. The foundation of Grandmother’s house is all that remains, but curiously, the rock garden that graces the entrance is intact. Orange and pink flowers bloom in the clefts. Toward the ocean her uncle’s rice fields are thick with mud and debris, but a single head of lettuce remains—all that’s left of the kitchen garden. I kneel down to look: the lettuce is a tiny ball of green, a miniature globe of a lost world.
    Objects retrieved from the house have been carefully placed in boxes by the heavy-equipment operators—a tea cup, a rice bowl, and two bags of broken glasses. I ask Masumi why she doesn’t take these things home. “No,” she says. “I’m not next in line. That’s for my uncle or my mother to do.”
    We adjust our white face masks and walk back to the car. Asmall river