Unhappy neighbours

Bodies are washing up on beaches.

I read that in a newspaper article about the tsunami in Samoa. I wondered about the person who wrote that. Bodies.

For me, the saddest thing that happens when there’s a natural disaster is that beating hearts - living breathing people - become bodies in just a few catastrophic moments ... bloated bodies washing up on beaches, bodies with a foot peeking out of building rubble in newspaper photos, bodies floating along on a magic carpet of debris on floodwaters through villages. People who love and are loved somehow morph from being single souls and instead become part of rising death tolls and statistics and numbers unaccounted for and people-shaped mounds in yellow body bags.  

It happens when death makes sweeping movements. When the deaths come in piles – when people die in the hundreds and thousands. All of a sudden the process becomes business like and emotionless. And people wash up on beaches like pieces of driftwood.  

Perhaps the language is supposed to desensitise us to the shocking calamity that has ravaged our world, perhaps without this we would have trouble processing the enormity of thousands of lives (thousands!) lost all at once, all in a moment. Is it even possible, as a fellow soul on the earth, to comprehend the horrifying reality that sometimes the ground beneath our feet betrays us and rears ferociously, bringing utter devastation to our world? It’s far too sad and scary a concept to consider.

When people aren’t numbers, then they might be me or you.  

Imagine the ground shaking so strongly that you need to sit on it to keep yourself from toppling over. This is what people in Padang, West Sumatra, had to do a few days ago. Imagine your home collapsing in on you while the world lurches and shoves in all directions.  Imagine the panicked screams of your friends and family members as your world crashes and falls around you. Or the ferocious sound of the sea rushing in from all directions and snatching your voice away so you can’t yell out to your husband or wife who is being swept away on great bulky waves.

"I don't know how to describe it, it was like a mountain coming out of the sea," a chief in one of the worst hit villages in Samoa told AFP.

These are the scenes of childhood nightmares; of Armageddon and cataclysmic planetary episodes. In the midst of all that, you would think the whole world was ending.   

Imagine that your father, or mother, or babies, or brothers and sisters – are somewhere in all that madness, in amongst the crashing and the jolting and the collapsing and the flooding and the screaming and panic, and you can’t contact them because all the communications are down. Imagine searching through hospital corridors, or worse, along rows of yellow body bags, for a hint that somewhere in there is a familiar somebody.

The transition from alive to an approximated number in a death toll comes quickly.  

The tectonic plates of this region are unhappy neighbours. It’s an odd thought to ponder, that beneath our feet, the very crust of the earth is rumbling, shifting and colliding, mostly without warning and sometimes with calamitous consequences.

In Australia (the lucky country) we have our very own plate. Which I guess is kind of like living out in the countryside where your neighbours’ fences are somewhere out on the horizon, so that when they’re screaming out for help, you can barely hear them. But they’re still your neighbours, and if they were in trouble you’d still do everything you could. And you’d still mourn with them in their sorrow, because it could easily have been you.