Asian tsunamis a scary reminder of shrinking world

The world shrunk again last week. The Southeast Asian tsunamis sent ripples all the way to Spokane.

At our house, we watched CNN with our younger daughter who was anxious for news of a Seattle University classmate missing in the Andamancq Islands.

We made phone calls. The waters lapped up on the South Hill. Our friends, Mike and Gail Sweeney, celebrated Christmas at a beach resort in Thailand. Mike’s mother, Ann Taylor of Spokane, spent a frantic day waiting for word. “I had such visions all Sunday of all of them being swept out on a big wave,” she said. “I didn’t know where they were in Thailand.”

The ripples spread.

Ann suggested I call her friend, Liz Gale, for another tsunami tale. Gale worried last week about her son Matthew, a Gonzaga Prep graduate who in December was putting the final touches on a remote beach resort he planned to open on Christmas Day on the southern coast of Sri Lanka.

Soon practically everybody we knew seemed somehow splashed by Asian salt water. I called our favorite restaurant owner, Phonesy Muongkhoth cq at Linnie’s Thai Cuisine, who has family in Thailand. I checked in with our friends, Jan and Duane Swinton, who spent last New Year’s Day on Phuketcq, visiting their son Nathan who was teaching English in Thailand.

And throughout all these phone calls, I was struck by how much the world has changed. A generation ago, when I was the age of our daughters, none of my friends or family would have known anyone in Southeast Asia. When I was 20, my first taste of Pad Thai lay a decade away. No one I knew took beach vacations in Thailand, sent their college kids off to volunteer in India, or moved to Beijing or Sri Lanka for new jobs.

Had the tsunamis struck then, in those days before CNN and nytimes.com, we’d have listened to Walter Cronkite for a few moments, scanned a story in the newspaper, and turned quickly back into our regular lives.

Today Asian tsunamis have the power to send ripples across oceans and continents, reaching all the way to the Inland Northwest. We found this week that in our circle of family and friends, we lie within one or two degrees of separation from disaster.

Paradoxically, as the world grows smaller, we watch our children’s sense of adventure expand. We baby boomers raised our kids to be undaunted. They graduated from high school with a copy of Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” tucked under their arms. Now, as the world news seems filled with devastation, war and terrorism, they just keep packing their bags.

All this sends my sense of intuition into overdrive. When our older daughter packed up for an internship several summers ago, I had the ominous feeling SOMETHING BAD MIGHT HAPPEN in New York City. In fact, it did. Her new job in lower Manhattan was scheduled to start Sept. 11, 2001. Today, she’d make the same decision all over again.

Now our younger daughter, inspired by the social justice mission of Seattle University, yearns to join her friends volunteering with the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. My motherly intuition has been waving huge red warning flags for months.

But this week tsunami stories and lessons seem to be lapping up on the pine-covered lawns of Spokane.

It turns out our friends, Mike and Gail Sweeney, were riding elephants in the Thai jungle, about 200 miles east of Phuket, when the earthquake struck. They didn’t feel a thing. Phonesy’s family in Bangkok was scared, but fine. Nathan Swinton, now a first-year law student at Georgetown University, has applied for an internship with a Bangkok law firm next summer. He hopes soon to return to that beautiful country.

Our daughter’s friend, Jessica Arena of Springfield, Ore., we finally learned, is alive on Havelock Island and awaiting evacuation.

And then there’s Liz Gale. Her 42-year-old son, Matthew Gale, lost everything but his life when the tsunamis struck Sri Lanka last week. He’d built three beach cabanas on stilts, hired an Indian cook for his restaurant and planned to start serving tourists on Dec. 25. He escaped with only his watch and his passport.

His mother plans to wire money to help him leave when he can. But she suspects he’ll choose to stay in Southeast Asia. “Knowing Matthew, that’s what he’ll do,” she says. “He’s so loyal to the people there. They are gentle, gentle souls.”

I ask for her secrets. She’s raised 10 children, and she’s a firm-minded woman whose steady gaze seems designed for staring down disaster.

When Matthew first left home for Alaska at age 17, she says, “I’d pray, ‘Please God, keep him safe.’ “

Gradually, as her son moved on to Japan and traveled the world, she felt her fears begin to subside.

“He had such confidence and such moxie that I began to let it go,” she says.

Over the years, she became more adventuresome, too. In fact, she returned on Christmas Day from a cruise to the Mexican Riviera with several of her “pew pals” from Sacred Heart parish.

“You raise your children up to let them go,” she says. “I just say, ‘Go with God.’ “

I take notes and tell her of our daughter’s desire to travel to Calcutta.

She laughs. “You can stay home and worry with me,” she says, somehow reaching through the phone and wrapping a motherly arm around my shoulder. Her words sweep my anxiety right out to sea.

Jamie Tobias Neely may be reached at The Spokesman-Review, 999 W. Riverside Ave., Spokane, WA 99201, by phone at (509) 459-5465 or by e-mail at jamien@spokesman.com.