The "Santa Cruz Tsunami" .. nah.. it couldn't be.

It's 6am; I wake to an unearthly wail, blaring from my nightstand.

It's a phone call. It's my Father.

Haven't talked to him in a while... --wait a second

-why in the world is he calling me at the crack of dawn?!

I grumble a half-hearted greeting into the cell phone. I am swiftly informed of last night's most current events; Japan experienced a 9.0 earthquake, and the entire eastern coast was wiped out by a tsunami.

Oh.

Being so overcome with grogginess, my ability to process the gravity of (or really even the point of what my dad is telling me) the situation, is quite limited..In fact, limited to only obscure grunts and the occasional grumble.

He goes on to assure me that my demise is imminent; that there is a 100ft wave heading straight for our shore.

It is at this point that I decide something serious might actually be going on in Japan.. (not Santa Cruz), and that I should actually investigate the matter.

The television pops on. As I sift through the various littered new channels, I am assaulted by scenes of a flooded urban sprawl: 2-ton trucks floating like rubber ducks.

Shit.Is.Fucked.Up.

In conjunction with my father's bold claims of proposed danger, a news reporter posted up near Capitola beach spits out a similar tune of catastrophe --

"There's going to be a tsunami in Santa Cruz.." - seriously?

My dear father, yet again besieged with concern, makes me promise I'll inform my sleeping mother of the soon-to-come wholesale and wanton slaughter of California.

I console him as best I can, and end the phone call awkwardly attempting to humor his concern.

The smug, straight-backed figure staring at me through the colored phosphorous and light offers one more alarming nugget of wisdom: "The wave is projected to hit the coastline at 7:20am".

Given the situation, there's only one thing to do:

Get down to the beach ASAP.

I swiftly collect myself, and head out. Along the way I peek inside my mother's cave - she clings to an all-consuming slumber - and, despite the fact that our home and everything we hold dear is about to be wiped off the face of the earth, I decide that I just cannot bring myself to bother her with such trivial details.

Knowing that the roads will be blocked closer to the water, I mount my faithful 10-speed steed, and, armed only with my camera, cell phone, sunglasses, and a week's worth of food/water, make way towards certain doom.

After about an hour, hundreds of people lined up on the cliffside on either side of me, and surfers daring the sea below, the tide begins to recede well past the halfway point of the wharf.

I'd say the results in Santa Cruz were a little less extreme. However millions of dollars worth of damage occurred in the Yacht Harbor; I don't think anyone was hurt.