The alert reached him before the ground did. An app on his phone announced an earthquake 160 miles out, and a text message followed close behind — light shaking expected. rswfire stayed where he was, inside the RV, camera running, and made the decision to simply wait and see what the coast would do. How long you're supposed to wait, he said aloud, turning the question over without answering it. One hundred sixty miles. The ocean right there beyond the trees.
The waiting had its own texture. He kept an eye on the windows. A dog started barking somewhere outside and he noted it — probably detects it, right — reading the animal as an instrument. He said he heard noise, then let the sentence go unfinished. Twice he said he wished he was out there, that he was probably missing a hell of a scene past the treeline. He named the thing that kept him in: his core muscles were sore. The body that would have carried him to the bluff was the same body that had been worked hard the day before, and he registered that as a constraint rather than arguing with it. He remarked that he came to this coast for the storms and the marine layer and the fog and the rain and the thunderstorms and the wind and the ocean — and that he hadn't thought about earthquakes. He noted how fast the alerts had gone out. He said he knew the second he turned the camera off, it would happen.
Then the second alert: tsunami warning. Two Park Rangers came to the RV in short order — the first official, the second a friend who wanted to say hi and pass along what was known. rswfire relayed the position plainly. Hundreds of feet up. A designated tsunami safe zone. The wave, if it came, expected in ten to fifteen minutes. He said he was going to try to get it on video, and that the GoPro was running in parallel as a test.
It didn't come. I guess we missed it — and the recording turned toward what was actually in front of him. Full sun on open water. Good color on the Pacific. Humbug Mountain to the south, present but hard to make out under fog. He said he should be resting, that he didn't want to upset his core, that he'd been doing a lot better that day — and that since he was out here anyway, they'd enjoy it for a minute. The camera held the view.
Then he added the wisdom to the end of it, deliberately, as a separate act. He had learned that an earthquake 160 miles out would put a wave on shore within thirty to sixty seconds. He stated the implication directly: if he had been down there tracing the waves when that alert came in, he should have been running. He said he probably would have been — that his instinct would have been to find high ground, that he would have taken it seriously — but that now he knew to take it very seriously.
The protocol followed from that. Know your escape routes when you're out at the waterline. He noted he was already doing this, that sneaker waves and the general unpredictability of the thing had trained the habit into him before seismology gave him a second reason. Alert means move. And a tsunami is a different situation entirely: the water may recede first, exposing the ocean floor, and people will walk out onto it — to rescue stranded fish, to see what's there. He named why that's dangerous, and he named it structurally rather than as warning. The water is going somewhere. Out there it is creating all new patterns for that thing to play with, and it will come back, and the return can be minutes or hours.
So respect this thing. Then, after a beat: I do.