OTIS AND I WERE ON the beach this morning when the police came along in their truck. In the company of a child building castles with drips of wet sand—an enormously satisfying activity—it is hard to muster up any energy for negative emotions. Even sharks can seem benign.
The Byron Bay police are as relaxed as people who make sand-drip castles. They stopped on the beach and then a slow-talking metallic voice came through the loudspeakers on either side of the truck. ‘There is a tsunami scheduled for eleven o’clock somewhere along the east coast of Australia. It’s your decision to remain on the beach. We’re just giving the warning because that’s our job.’ I wondered at the use of the word ‘scheduled’.
On the Gold Coast, I learned later, they closed the beaches, but this was Byron Bay, where individual freedom was highly valued.
I thought of Indonesia, as many people did. I heard conversations on the way to the car.
‘The sea sucks out first.’
‘Well, when it does, we’ll go home for lunch.’
‘It’s a ripper and apparently we’re deadset in its path.’
‘Wicked!’
‘Which board d’ya reckon?’
Otis told me it was probably called a tsunami because sometimes the army comes. That sounds about right, I said. We headed for higher ground and the farm. The cows saw no danger they could tell us about.
I have a writing table here at the farm, simple pine boards on tube-steel legs on the veranda of our cottage. The table overlooks a hillside at the bottom of which is a deep dam that runs into a creek where we found dragonflies such as I haven’t seen since my childhood. Today the cows are on the opposite hillside. You can watch cows for a long time and not get bored.
This is a place you might hold a story in your hands, a place that might take your story and hand it back to you at peace.
I would like to tell you more about Otis, but I am hesitant too, for everything I say about him is something I should know about you and don’t, something I would know, I cannot make up for, something I must let go of as I cannot change it.