Tsunami hits RIABiz and hits home

It started as a noise that stayed in my subconscious but that made my black lab, Shadow, bark and rush outside to investigate. My houseboat was sitting on mudflats at dead low tide but a torrent of water was quickly filling the cove where I’m berthed. It was as if the tide was coming in about 300 times faster than usual.

I had been reading about the Japanese devastation and the tsunami that was sent streaking across the Pacific. It was on my computer, along with mild warnings for the Bay area from the local newspapers’ websites. Stay away from the beaches! But there were no instructions for people like me who live on the birdhouse-like structures that sit in the shallow waters of Sausalito.

I had decided that I was more worried about dying of my cold than being swept out to sea and so when some of my older neighbors were evacuating merrily in the morning, I chose to peel another orange and make tea.

There was an insidious quality to waters rushing in. Normally crystal clear, these were deeply turgid from having swept up mud in their hasty inward sweep. The grey viscous sea water made it seem more menacing than it proved to be – though had it happened at high tide, it would actually have caused significant damage.

For me it was the end of a sobering week of being under the weather and caring about little but returning to health. It was also a week when a valued member of the RIABiz team lost her mother and spent the week in Canada for mourning. It hasn’t been long since RIABiz lost one of our regular contributors, Bob Margolis As the fiction author Julian Barnes wrote: It is always the dangerous time.

The gravity of life beyond business was palpable in how few phone calls got returned today – even from PR professionals. I even made four phone calls for my upcoming high school reunion and got voicemails and no return calls.

The surge of muddy water reminded me that the horrifying images shown on the Internet were as real as I feared. (I even did my viewing, in seeking comfort and familiarity, on the website Boston Globe – the paper I looked to as the Big Paper growing up in Maine.)

The only thing that didn’t have the decency to be subdued were the market averages, which unsentimentally rose.

The first little tsunami that hit my South 40 Pier would not be the last. There would be four more over the course of the morning – each of about the same size and each eliciting a bark from Shadow. It was an eerie force on an otherwise sunny, still Spring day in California.

Before the waves struck, I was thinking that my health was what mattered. I progressed to humility about life, death and our collective consciousness with help from the sound of splashing waters and a silent telephone.