During a 1980 trip down Baja California, I camped for a few days on the beach near Cabo San Lucas with R, J, and some friends. One calm, sunny afternoon, I learned to body surf. I soon had the hang of it and was enjoying the relaxing feeling of being carried along on the gentle swell. But I hadn't noticed that a tanker had passed by behind me. Suddenly--too soon to take a breath--the bow wave folded over me, the air and sky vanished, and I found myself whirling through the water, uncomprehending, propelled by a force so strong that I could not hope to fight it. Then I was slammed down onto the beach, and the receding wave began to pull me back out to sea. I dug my fingers and toes into the sand to resist the powerful suction force, finally broke loose, and scrambled up the beach with dignity lost and swimsuit full of sand.

That episode must have lasted only a few seconds, but it terminated my body-surfing career. Of course, I remembered it as I began to take in the enormity of last week's tsunami. The wave that caught me must have been tiny compared to the tsunami, but it gave me some small idea of the immense force that struck the Indian Ocean coasts-- just enough personal experience to create the beginnings of empathy.

When something terrible happens in some faraway place, I often think that somewhere in that place there must be a woman like me. I try to imagine what she is experiencing. For the dead, the pain is over, of course, but for the living it has just started. We hear stories of people who have lost their entire families, and who perhaps saw it happen, or found familiar bodies on the beaches, or will never find the bodies. How will they go on living? How will they find any meaning or comfort in this?

This line of thinking brings me to B, whom I knew when I lived for half a year in Iliamna, a village in the Alaskan bush. At that time, B constantly emoted a sort of happy maternal force, so that you felt warmed any time you were in her presence. She and her Athabaskan husband A were central and favorite figures in Iliamna, and I never saw either of them sad. B and I worked together in a fishing lodge, she as chief cook and me as waitress. She taught me to polka; we once danced together on the bar when the owner was away; and from time to time she rescued me from hunting guides who had gotten too fresh.

B originally came from the Seattle area. She had been living a happy life down here until she lost her husband and children in a car accident. I don't remember how much time passed between that day and the day she arrived in Iliamna, or how she managed to get through that time. When I knew her, I was too young and inexperienced to comprehend what she must have gone through. I don't remember just what circumstances brought her from Seattle to Iliamna. But I remember her now as an example of someone who could not be kept down.

For the Indian Ocean dead, may they find auspicious rebirths in some fortunate country. For the living, may they find the resolute courage that B found in herself and, in some future time and place, her unextinguishable joie de vivre.