“Thank you, sir, thank you,” the mahout said, as he pumped my father’s hand. “I do not know what happened. She is a good elephant…never before did she do such a thing…you must believe me!”

“We know. We’ve been coming here for years. My children have been on your elephant before, many times. It was just one of those things.”

We started to head back to where Mom was waiting, and as we walked I could hear the mahout talking to his elephant. He didn’t sound angry, just concerned, like a parent.

“Now don’t you wish you had gone on the ride when you had the chance?” my father asked.

“That was certainly more exciting than I remember it. Instead of the two of us going snorkeling, do you think Mom might be keen on another elephant ride this afternoon?”

“I think she’s going to take it easy for the rest of the day. She’s pretty tired.”

Tired. That was the word he used when her condition wasn’t good.

“Looks like the elephant generated a lot of interest,” my father said as we rounded the corner of the building.

Sure enough, a lot of the people who had been lounging by the pool or drinking on the patio were now on their feet, looking at something…but they were all staring out, away from the building and toward the beach and the ocean.

“What are they looking at?” I asked.

“Maybe a whale or a shark is near the shore.”

I hated sharks, and I’d long ago convinced myself that the water was way too shallow to allow a shark to come close.

We rounded the pool and peered out toward the ocean. I didn’t see anything except beach…lots and lots of beach. It was as if the ocean had receded.

“I’ve never seen it like this before,” my father said. “The beach has to be a hundred yards wide…or wider.”

Mom had walked up off the beach and was now standing by the pool among a group of people, and she waved at us. We trotted over.

“It just happened,” she said, before we could even ask. “It was like the water was just sucked away.”

There was a clear line showing where the water level had been. Above that was dry, white sand. On the other side of that line the ocean bottom was exposed. It was hardened, rippled, wet ground, with lots and lots of puddles, little pockets of water left behind when the ocean ran away.

A man ran out onto the newly exposed ocean floor. He picked something up and turned around, holding it up to show us. In his hand was a large fish, still alive, flapping and flopping! It had been left behind when the water retreated. Then I noticed that there were other fish—dozens and dozens of them—tossing and turning in the mud.

“Look at the boats,” I said. Farther out there were boats stranded, sitting on the mud at the bottom. A few minutes earlier they’d been bobbing on the waves.