We’ve all become used to computer-generated scenes of disaster — of meteors thudding into the Earth with the force of a thousand nuclear explosions, seas engulfing cities, or people flash frozen mid-stride.
There was something cinematic and unreal about the video from the Himalayas this week, showing what can be described as a flood, only if one wants to be euphemistic. It was a disaster the scale of which seemed, in the earliest moments, to make it the product of a wild fictional imagination.
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A wall of water, unleashed apparently by a glacier breaking on the China–Nepal border, caused utter devastation. One video showed a building that looks sturdy — it is, or was, about eight stories tall and straddled a valley — being swept away like a flimsy cardboard box. One moment, people are walking, then running, on the pavement below the building, and the next, a gray-black monster hits the uphill side. Ice, water, and mud smash into, over, and around the building precisely as one sees such things on a movie screen and never quite believes.
The tsunami, filled with debris from its path — vehicles, concrete, iron machinery — scours the valley floor and walls, sweeping over everyone and everything. Where once was life, activity, and daily business, there is suddenly boiling, grinding, and destruction. One man’s house was reportedly swept away despite standing more than 1,600 feet above the valley floor.
The aftermath of such events is wrenching and cinematic in a different way, like those scenes on grainy video shot by Allied forces that liberated Nazi extermination camps.
In years of reporting around the world, I’ve been in such scenes. In the city of Ormoc in the northern Philippines in 1991, heavy rain funneled down a valley denuded of trees, creating a tidal wave that cut a trough through neighborhoods and swept all before it.
Days later, battered cars were hauled out of the sea with their drowned drivers still strapped in at the wheel. Soldiers prized bodies out of the mud of the beach, and bulldozers pushed victims into mass graves. I interviewed a boy aged about 12 who had lost both his parents but saved himself by clinging to a tree that, by sheer luck, had not been swept away. On such details, lives hinge and are never the same again.
I have trudged over mountain and jungle terrain in the aftermath of plane crashes and found myself in scenes of human wreckage and corruption that might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch.
There again, I reach for a comparison from the fictional world of creative art. But what makes such massively fatal disasters so powerful — hundreds are dead and missing in the Nepalese mountains, including some 50 Americans — is their harsh, solid, and sickening reality.
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When the twin towers burned 25 years ago, before they collapsed, people trapped above the flames jumped to their deaths from hundreds of feet up. In the background of one amateur video, a woman’s voice can be heard saying with perfect human sympathy words that capture the central, almost unbearable, reality: “Oh no! Those poor people.”
T.S. Eliot wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” But scenes from Manhattan canyons in 2001 and from a Himalayan valley this week remind us of how reality makes itself felt.
