The front was unbelievably steep, and when it hit, the anchor chain snapped immediately, whipping around the pilothouse and smashing the windows. The boat arrowed seventy-five feet up into the curl like they were climbing in an elevator, their backs pressed against the pilothouse wall as if they'd been tilted back in barber's chairs. The wave's face was a wall of green taking them up into the sky. They were carried high over the south shore. Sixty-foot trees down below disappeared. Then they were thrown up over the crest and down the back slope, where the backwash spun them off again into the center of the bay.
Another couple, the Swansons, had also turned into the wave and had their boat surfboard a quarter mile out to sea, and when the wave crest broke, the boat pitchpoled and hit bottom. They managed to find and float their emergency skiff in the debris afterward. The third couple, the Wagners, tried to make a run for the harbor entrance and were never seen again.
Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were scoured down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trimline had their bark removed by the water pressure.
Sonny's dad was still in his underwear, teeth chattering, and Sonny was washing around on his side in some icy bilge water, making noises like a jungle bird. The sun was down by this point. Backwash and wavelets twenty feet high were crisscrossing the bay, spinning house-sized chunks of glacier ice that collided against each other. Clean-peeled tree trunks like pickup sticks knitted together and upended, pitching and rolling. Water was still pouring down the slopes on both sides of the bay. The smell was like being facedown in the dirt under an upended tree. And Sonny's dad said the time that passed afterward — when they'd realized they'd survived but still had to navigate through everything pinballing around them in the dark — was worse than riding the wave itself.
A day or two later the geologists started arriving. No one believed the height of the wave at first. People thought any devastation that high on the slopes had to have been caused by landslides. But they came around.
My wife fell asleep beside me, wrapped over me to keep me warm. We're still on the floor and now it really is dark. We've got to be late in terms of picking up Donald from his play date, but if his friend's parents called, I didn't hear the phone.
One of my professors at Saint Mary's had this habit of finishing each class with four or five questions, none of which anyone could answer. It was a class called The Philosophy of Life. I got a C. If I took it now, I'd do even worse. I'd sit there hoping he wouldn't see me and try not to let my mouth hang open while he fired off the questions. What makes us threaten the things we want most? What makes us so devoted to the comfort of the inadvertent? What makes us unwilling to gamble on the noncataclysmic?
Sonny's dad was famous for a while, selling stories with titles like “My Night of Terror” to magazines like Alaska Sportsman and Reader's Digest. I read one or two of them to Donald, though my wife didn't approve. “Do you like these stories?” he asked me that night. In the stories, Sonny's mom never gets mentioned. Whether she was mad or dead or divorced or proud never comes up. In one his dad talks about having jammed a life preserver over Sonny's head and then having forgotten about him entirely. In another he says something like, in that minute before it all happened, he'd never felt so alone. I imagine Sonny reading that a year or two later and going, Thanks, Dad. I imagine him looking at his dad later on, at times when his dad doesn't know he's watching, and thinking of all that his dad gave him and all that he didn't. I imagine him never really figuring out what came between them. I imagine years later people saying about him that that was the thing about Sonny: the kid was just like the old man.
The First South Central Australian Expedition
April 1st, 1840
The three of us traded Christmas tales during our long portage. Hill and Browne both professed shock at my contribution, which seemed less than shocking to me. I had related to them the method by which my father, with what I remember to be the sad-eyed support of our mother, celebrated our Lord's birth each Christmas Day.
Having three sons, myself the eldest, he had resolved, he said, to no longer be tyrannized by the understanding that during this particular season he was obligated as a Christian to provide even more for his family, by way of gifts, than he did in the course of the normal round. Henceforth, then, one and only one child each year would be favored with a lovely gift to commemorate the day. He hoped that the child's siblings would derive the pleasure they should from their compatriot's good fortune. In accordance with his understanding of the general workings of the natural world, the process would proceed by lot. So it was entirely possible that one child would be favored by chance two or even three years in a row. We would all find out only upon coming downstairs on Christmas morning, when we saw what was set about the hearth.
He made this announcement having gathered the family together on Christmas Eve the year I turned five. My brothers, being at the time only three and two, hardly knew what they were being told. His wife and our mother, by all accounts gay and outgoing before her marriage, stood by while he entertained questions about his decision, and then did her best to salvage some measure of wan cheer over the course of those Christmas Days that followed.
My story was greeted with an extended silence. We were having trouble with the horses in the current. Browne announced himself, finally, to have been cudgeled about the head by the damned thing. He meant my story. Hill found it odd that such a father would have shown a willingness to finance a part of the expedition. “I'm sure it's not entirely unusual,” I remarked to them, some time later, about my father's notion of gift giving. “I'm sure it is,” Browne responded.
April 3rd
My father instilled in me the habit of resolving every day to make a resolution, to be repeated aloud when dressing and undressing. Today's has been: “Think well before giving an answer, and never speak except from strong convictions.”
“Are you conversing with yourself?” Browne asked from outside my tent this morning when he overheard.
The rock here is of an oolitic limestone and treacherous with hollows throughout. The surrounding area is beset by stupendous tufts of porcupine grass (spinifex) four to five feet high. The country so far has been stupefyingly consistent. We are now fifteen weeks out and for the last six have continued to wait for some kind of happy transformation in the path ahead.
We stopped at a marshy creek and it came on raining, and Cuppage shot himself. Somehow in stowing his saddle he managed to allow a binding loop to catch the trigger. The ball came out his back under the shoulder.
Our legs are full of the sharp ends of the spinifex. Large numbers of crows are following the baggage train, apparently for the sheep's offals.
April 5th
We have left a note in a bottle as to our progress in the message hollow of the great gum tree at Sadness Creek, per our arrangement, to be collected and carried back to Adelaide by a native sent for that purpose. The bottle is marked with indelible ink South Central Australian Expedition, R. M. Beadle.