"The failed Hawaii tsunami washed away my Pulitzer Prize."

Tweet By Jonathan Schlosser

I was in Hawaii when the tsunami hit. I was visiting my girlfriend in Kona and living in a condo near the ocean and when I woke up in the morning the alarms were already going off outside. I thought they sounded like old Air Raid Sirens from World War Two, and then I realized they probably were. I got up quickly and went to the window and looked out and didn’t see the wave coming.



“What’s going on?” Brittany said.

“I don’t know,” I said. I was thinking that it had to be the tsunami alarm and that there was no way it was the tsunami alarm.

Brittany went out on the walkway and there was our neighbor standing on outside and drinking a cup of coffee. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s the tsunami alert,” he said, and smiled. And drank his coffee. He looked not only content but maybe happy.

“What do we do?” Brittany said.

He shrugged. “Better go to high ground!”

Brittany came back inside and told me, then began throwing clothes and sunscreen and everything else into a bag. “Hurry! We have to get further up the mountain.”

“Right!” I said, and turned on my computer. And wrote a blog, about how a tsunami was coming. And posted it. “I’m like the photographers in the war!” I said.

“What?” Brittany said.

“Pulitzer, I’m coming!” I said.

“What?” Brittany said.

I looked at her and she had packed all her things and was now packing mine. “You know, reporting from the face of death.” I looked back at the blog post and smiled. There were some misspelled words and I started to fix them. No one got famous for misspelling words. “How much time do you think we have?” I said.

“Get over here and pack!” Brittany said.

“That long?”

“Hurry!”

So I packed a few things. My shoes. The coffee. An old sausage that would probably go bad outside of the fridge but you never knew and it was very good sausage. And then I got to the half-full bottle of Crown Royal.

“So,” I said. “Um, how long did you think we had?”

Brittany stopped where she was grabbing all of our money and valuables and looked at me. “It could be ten minutes,” she said. “I have no idea.”

“But not ONE minute?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

I opened the Crown Royal and thought of it breaking when the wave hit and going to waste and started to drink it out of the bottle.

“What are you doing?” Brittany said.

I drank more and grimaced and then drank more. “We can’t waste it,” I said. I held the bottle out. “Have some.”

“I don’t want any dammed Crown Royal!” Brittany screamed.

I looked for the wave and didn’t see it. “Are you quite sure?” I asked.

Eventually she got everything packed and I finished the Crown Royal and was then rather drunk and added some things into my blog post that were not actually there: for instance, I wrote that I was holding the tsunami back with the power of my mind and that my mind was fueled by alcohol. I felt like my Pulitzer chances were slipping a little, but one could never be sure. I packed up the computer and grabbed some other bags and staggered out to the road to walk up the mountain.

We had gone out the night before to eat at a place called Huggo’s that a fisherman had suggested to us. We’d sat on the deck and drank wine and eaten quesadillas and chicken and watched a girl doing the hula. The wine had been very good. I looked down at the coast as we walked and stopped and was, for the first time, horrified.

“Brittany,” I said, “Huggo’s is going to be washed away!” I thought of all the wine that had been so good and thought of it being swept away by the ocean.

“Come on,” Brittany said.

“We have to go back,” I said. “We can get in the water after the wave hits.” It would be all wine, I thought, and we could drink it. Salty, but all right.

“Are you insane?” Brittany said.

“But,” I said.

“Come on,” she said.

So I kept walking up the mountain and I thinking of Huggo’s and the good wine being washed away and I cried softly and tried not to let anyone notice. I looked at Huggo’s once, or where I thought it was (it may actually have been a McDonald’s, but the effort was what was important) and put my hand on my heart. Thought of the wine again and began saying the Pledge to the Flag under my breath, changing the flag to Huggo’s in my version. It really had been a good time and I was sad to see it, or what I thought was it, go.

We kept walking and it was hot and there were people driving both up and down the mountain. They didn’t look scared. I had so many bags that I felt like a refugee, like I’d just picked up everything I owned and ran. We walked and got to the top where her school was and I wiped the tears away from my face without letting anyone see. At least I hope I did. We sat on the road and looked down at the coast to see it hit with the other students from her school.

And we waited.

And waited.

I ate a sandwich. Brittany ate some fruit snacks. I thought about Crown Royal and thought I was going to be sick.

Then we waited some more.

In the end, it was something that nothing can prepare you for. Nothing at all. We sat and waited and watched and it was just something you can’t ever be ready for no matter how hard you try. When you are looking down at the coast where you think there is still a lot of wine that is about to be wasted on the fish and waiting for that killer wave to come crashing in and destroy everything with apocalyptic violence and then nothing at all happens, it is something you can never be ready for. There is nothing in the world that can prepare you for a failed tsunami.

The walk back down was much less exciting but full of a lot of hope and I was very thirsty.

BYLINE:

Jonathan Schlosser is a writer and part-time library worker. He has published some short fiction and is working on finding a publisher for his novel. He has a B.A. in Writing, which means that, for a living, he is allowed to put away books at the library. He is also allowed to tell parents to tell their children to be quiet. He lives in Grand Rapids, MI. Email Jonathan at jonathan@zoiksonline.com.

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