Wooden Memories

crack

It was the most vivid cracking sound I’d ever heard, awake or asleep. The thundering splinter of massive wood members, breaking under unimaginable strain.

craaaaaaaaaack

I was a small child, sitting on a mat floor alongside my family. They seemed older than parents, maybe grandparents, but our hair matched in jet black. We had a small radio, listening around the short table, and while I couldn’t understand it I could understand the darkness outside. The howling of the wind, the banging of shutters and debris.

cra-ck....cra-ck...cra-ck

And that. Our entire village, our home, stood on wooden supports that jutted up out of the water. The walls, floors, walkways, boats, all built from wood. Wood that had seemed so strong, so thick, so secure. Yet now another force of nature - stronger even than the earth itself - reduces it to driftwood in moments.

craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack

My family picks me up now, as a roar drowns out the radio. The darkness outside turns to pitch and I can’t see anything now except a wall of water rising outside the window. Yelling, they desperately push me upwards through a hatch into a tiny attic that will likely become my tomb. It’s not high enough. Nothing is.

I am surprisingly calm as I watch the wall fall, the black water roaring the last sound I hear, the curtain of wet the last thing I feel, the brackish salt the last scent I breathe.

CRACK

And I am swallowed up with the wood.

............................................................

I wake up in bed, in a home settled on adobe clay in a valley surrounded by dry grasses and the threat of wildfire filling the sky with ash outside. All I can think, as my mind settles down, is Huh, one disaster to the next I guess.

At least this time I won’t hear the wood break.

Instead, maybe I’ll hear it crackle.