Today's Wall Street Journal tells the story of Smith Dharmasaroja, a Thai meteorologist who forecasted fierce water from the sea instead of the sky. After spending several years investigating the history of Pacific quakes, he discovered that every tsunami there started with a temblor of 7.4 or above on the Richter scale. Eventually, he concluded that some similar catastrophe could hatch off the coast of Thailand. In 1993, he wrote letters to local officials. Those letters were ignored.
Smith was officially the Cassandra of Thailand, a man whose predictions nobody wanted, destined to be ignored until it was too late.
So in 1998, Smith passed his prediction to the Thai people, and a panic erupted along the coast:
Villagers along the country's western coast thought the threat was imminent and ran into the hills, causing traffic accidents as they fled. Tourists checked out of their hotels.
Government officials, fearful of a washed-up tourist season, branded Mr. Smith a dangerous man with a screw loose. Authorities on the resort island of Phuket fastened loudspeakers to pickup trucks to broadcast a mollifying message to beachgoers, and warned Mr. Smith not to come to town."
(Barta, Patrick. "His Warning Ignored, Thai Meteorologist Now Plays Key Role." Wall Street Journal. 10 January 2005: A1)
Voices rose in a tsunami of rage against him. Needless to say, his career was over. For awhile.
Since the tsunamis last December, he has been lured out of retirement.
Against all common wisdom, this man foretold a disaster. His faith is a little like when my aunt Joann (mentioned in yesterday's post about the Iowa floods) believed her ignition would fire, or when the orphanage director (also mentioned yesterday) stared into the tsunami wave and commanded the water to stop.
Except nobody believes the darker, deadlier, mysterious messages we sometimes receive from who-knows-where.
We like our mysteries hatched over-easy.
Note: "earthquake hatching" is an allusion to images from The Road is Wider than Long by Roland Penrose, a book Wendy gave me this past Christmas, mentioned here.