Tsunami, ground zero

I have been here before, a long time ago. In January of 1984, two months shy of my 30th birthday, I explored the west coast of Sri Lanka on one of my first travel assignments. My girlfriend Teri and I started in Colombo, and traveled by bus to the southern tip of the island at Dondra Head: the last landfall until the frozen beaches of Antarctica. Then, as now, Sri Lanka was recovering from the flare-up of the civil war, and tourism was beginning to blossom after a tense hiatus. Some of my memories from that visit are still vivid: from walks along the long, lazy beaches of Panadura to visions of the "stilt" fishermen of Koggala, balanced above the surf on precarious wooden posts.

South of Moratuwa, beyond the famous Mount Lavinia Hotel, the impact of the tsunami becomes evident. It's worst along the beach, where the poorest citizens inhabited makeshift wooden houses. Chandra parks the car. I walk over mounds of household flotsam toward the ocean. There are piles of debris everywhere: surreal assemblages of televisions and teddy bears, checkerboards and linoleum flooring, tattered pants and half-filled ledger books. The displaced inhabitants moved amid the chaos, sifting listlessly through what had been backyards and kitchens.

We drive on -- until, a mile further south, we seem to cross a line. The traffic thins, and the whole western shoreline is suddenly an expanse of rubble, shattered houses and bulldozed woodpiles. Chandra holds a hand up to his wizened face, and keeps a running line of dialogue: "Oh, look ... Sir ... See!  Tsunami! Sir, look "

It's not as if he thinks I'm missing anything; he simply needs to express his astonishment, to connect with another soul in the face of so much destruction.

This is where, after two weeks of television footage and magazine photos, it hits home for me. This isn't news; it's not a TV drama, or a story with a start, middle and ending. It's tens of thousands of unhappy people in the midst of their ruined lives, homeless, waiting for their longest bad dream to end.

Every time we walk amid the destruction, locals wave us over. They want us to see what remains of their lives. This is where their children went to school; this was a restaurant, or post office, or hotel. "Come this way! Come, come!" We hurry ahead, stepping over ragged blocks of cement, broken glass, broken pails. Chandra is barefoot; I'm wearing hiking boots.

On the beach at Panadura, a group of young volunteers from the JVP -- Sri Lanka's communist party -- work to untangle what I assume is a fishing net from a rubble of electrical posts. Actually, it's a volleyball net; this was once a popular playground. They let me take photos, and point to the cleanup they've accomplished today.

"Thanks for showing me what you're doing," I nod, moving on.

"We are not showing," their leader states pointedly. "We are doing."

Driving through Payagala, we navigate long stretches where everything seems normal, untouched, before entering zones of utter destruction. "Sir, see " Chandra points to the train station; it looks like it's been hit by an asteroid. Now the traffic is bad again -- accident up ahead, or a bulldozer -- and we're stuck. Right ahead of us is an ambulance, packed with medications, also trapped. I glance in the back window at a box, reading the bold letters through the glass: "Keep Refrigerated."

Beruwala, halfway to the southern port of Galle, was a thriving fishing village. You can still see the boats; they're well-made, brightly painted, and strewn all over the roadside. Some are snapped in half, while other have simply been flipped over, like beetles. They lay in the surf, belly up. Piled up this way, the simile is unavoidable; they look like toys, churned to destruction in a soap-filled tub.

The road looks nothing like I remember it; nor does it look anything like it did right after the tsunami. One week ago rubble covered everything, and two major bridges were washed away. The road reopened just five days ago, Chandra tells me, after a fleet of bulldozers shoved tons of debris, boats and broken buildings to the side.

We stop for lunch at the Avanhala Restaurant in Bentota. Manager R.G. Jayawardena, a short man with an enormous belly, hands me his business card; it proclaims his diploma in journalism. When I press him on this, he opens a file and extracts the snapshots he took of the Queen of the Sea, the packed tourist train that was derailed by the tsunami, with an awful loss of life. They're not good photographs, but they were taken fresh. If anything, they show that the voyeuristic impulse is universal. Jayawardena's images, showing him standing beside the train's wrecked engine, remind me of the photos people took in San Francisco's Marina District after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Such photos are highly prized, for they show us with monuments that are both majestic and temporary, and as spectacular as they are notorious.

We pay our bill and drive onward to Balapitiya, which, Chandra informs me, was a mainly Muslim community. Looking at the egalitarian damage -- to the homes of Hindus, Christians and Muslims alike -- puts paid to the notion of a God who takes sides. On the other hand, it's remarkable to note that, in many towns, the most significant shrines of each religion -- a crucifix in Maggona, a meditating Buddha in Akurala, and a statue of Shiva in a Hindu shrine along the road -- were miraculously spared. Seeing one example, I'd be tempted to dismiss it as coincidence. But witnessed in nearly every settlement, the site of these lone shrines, standing amid endless rubble, is enough to make even this cynic hedge his bets.

Next Page: A family of seven wrapped their arms around each other -- and survived

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