There were two anchors working together and they explained it very calmly, but the woman was shaken. You could see she had been crying. Her eye makeup was all smeared around her eyes and I wondered why nobody fixed her makeup. It was CNN, for God's sake.
The man in the blue suit said he would repeat the chain of events for anyone just joining the broadcast. That was us. He said a volcano had erupted on an island called La Palma, in the Canary Islands.
Shaky, handheld images of ash and a fiery mountain appeared on the screen behind the anchors.
The woman with the bad makeup said that the western face of the entire island had exploded with the eruption of the volcano. Five hundred billion tons of rock and lava had avalanched into the ocean.
They didn't have footage of that.
Blue Suit said the explosion had created a "megatsunami."
A wave a half a mile tall.
Moving at six hundred miles per hour.
Bad Makeup said that the megatsunami had grown wider as it approached the coast of the U.S. Then she stopped talking. Her voice caught in her throat, and Blue Suit took over.
The megatsunami had hit the Eastern Coast of the United States at 4:43 a.m. mountain time.
Boston, New York, Charleston, Miami.
All had been hit.
They couldn't estimate the number of fatalities.
I just sat there. I felt completely numb.
It was the worst natural disaster in recorded history.
The most violent volcano eruption in recorded history.
The biggest tsunami in recorded history.
They played some footage.
It played so fast they had to slow it down so you could see what was going on.
From the street, a shot of the Empire State Building and a tall cloud drawing closer and closer, frame by frame, but it wasn't a cloud—it was a wall of water—and then the image went blank.
A beach and you're looking out at the water, only there is no water, just a boat stranded about a mile out into the ocean bed and you hear a voice praying to Jesus and then the image is shaking, shaking, and a wave so high the minitab can't see the top thunders up. Then darkness.
Chloe said she wanted to watch kid TV. We ignored her.
Bad Makeup said the National Connectivity was down because three of the five satellite centers had been located on the East Coast.
Blue Suit said the president had declared a state of emergency and was safe at an undisclosed location.
We watched, mostly in silence.
"Turn it to Tabi-Teens," Chloe whined. "This is bo-ring!"
I looked at her. She was totally clueless. She was listlessly picking at a label stuck on the minitab counter.
None of the little kids seemed to understand what we were learning. They were just kind of slowpoking around, hanging out.
I had to keep watching the TV. Couldn't think about the kids.
I felt gray. Washed out. Like a stone.
Bad Makeup said the megatsunami had triggered severe weather conditions across the rest of the country. Her voice caught on "rest of the country." She mentioned storms called supercells, sweeping across the Rockies (that was us).
