I started walking again, but I needed to get off the road. There was nothing there but death and destruction. I cut down to the beach. I’d always loved just strolling along with the ocean beside me…I could only hope it would be better now than the road. I cut between two familiar hotels. Their once-beautiful manicured gardens were gone. Bushes, flowers, trees, even the grass—it was all lost, either ripped out or buried beneath a layer of sand. Now there was just sand and dirt and mud and puddles. There was a foul smell in the air, like rotting vegetation or putrid water.

I walked along the front path leading up to one of the hotels. The circular driveway was deserted and, strangely, it was clean and clear—no sand, no garbage, nothing. It was as if the tsunami had completely bypassed that one driveway. That didn’t make sense. Somebody must have cleaned it already.

The windows and all the front doors leading into the lobby of the hotel were boarded up. Looking up, I could see that the second-floor windows were also broken, but they weren’t boarded. Above that, the windows on the third and fourth floors were fine. If I looked only at the top of the hotel it appeared as if nothing was wrong.

I circled the building. I could hear noises—hammering—but couldn’t see anybody. Around the side of the building, where there used to be gardens and seats and a patio, there was a giant pile of garbage. Somehow the wave must have simply left everything right there, pushed up right against the building. Just then a television set came flying out of an upstairs window and landed on the pile with a loud crash, sending pieces flying up into the air! They were cleaning out the rooms, the same way they’d already swept the front driveway. They were already trying to get things back to normal.

I walked in a wide arc around the pile, making sure that I was far enough away from the building to avoid anything else that might be tossed out.

Soon I was on the lip of the beach, and what had once been pristine, clean, open sand was now littered with garbage. The only thing that seemed untouched was the ocean itself.

I moved down until I was walking along the edge of the water, with the breaking waves washing up at my feet. I suddenly felt anxious. Here I was right beside the ocean. This was where people were—where my father and brother might have been—when the tsunami hit. I looked out at the water. It was brilliantly blue, with just a few gentle waves showing white edges as they broke against the shallows. Birds soared overhead, white against a cloudless sky. On the horizon there were fishing boats. It looked like a postcard. So perfect. So beautiful.

I tried hard to imagine the wave, a wall of water, rising higher and higher and crashing on the beach and…I couldn’t do it. I’d seen the devastating results, even proof of the deaths, but I couldn’t picture the ocean rising up to cause it.