And the people! The masses are at the outset, agog. They had been strolling, jogging, watching, talking, shouting and otherwise engaging in some form of frolic or deep thinking. They are now rendered stupified before the sight and sound (the increasingly more rapid receding of the mighty Pacific and the increasingly loud hiss of water over sand), as if their brains were drawn into the retreating briny, and they had lost the cognizance to retrieve them. They could only watch, some with terror creeping into there eyes, some with a gleam, each one staring at his or her own individual fear.

And then someone, a husky-voiced man wearing hip-waders and carrying a fishing pole, snaps the thickening fear and wonder hanging over Ocean Beach, San Francisco like a musty wet shroud, with the following near scream:

"Run! It's Neptune's trident -- the Tsunami! Run, my friends, or perish!"

Suddenly their brains were back in their casings, and their wretched frames sprung to life.

The sea, meanwhile, continues its cruel, now deafening, race from the landmass, its counterpart, it's yang. But now, all the creatures from the spectral depths found themselves aground, at least those not carried out by the force of the westward moving waters. Many, including turtles, large fishes, some sea lions a wounded Great White Shark, and porbeable carcasses (J) are forcibly alit upon the sandy bottom (now exposed), with the myriad starfish of different colors and sizes and arm counts, and anenomae, seals, otter, fish, weeds, all now occupying the same strata on the freshly uncoverd sand, confused by both the surroundings foisted upon them by their keeper, Neptune, and compounded by the ear-splitting roar.

But some of the masses, unaware of what this meant, and filled with a false sense of security and immunity, typical of the self-appointed Master Species and ruler of [Mother] Earth, tentatively followed the water line out as it receded. Many thought they would gain access to never trod-upon real estate, with stuffable strange sea-creatures, which would hang on the walls of expensive new hotels, condos, and a giant strip mall. They thought as they do that here was more land to conquer. They had images of Iwo Jima and John Cabot and Cartier and De Leon and the first man on the Moon in their heads.

These members of the species homo sapiens, even fearing the Ocean, thought that it was receding because "Mankind" had won the battle against what was thought to be the arch-overpowering sea. And they followed the waterline for fully 900 meters as it gurgled further out to sea.

And then, of a sudden, it all stopped for a moment.

And the greedy landowners and developers and treasure-hunters stopped too. Was it done receding? Was all of this strange and beautiful land now ours? Their greed knows no bounds, not even the powerful Pacific.

But then a terrible thing began to happen: it reversed it's direction slowly, beginning to approach the bug-like humans, who, aghast by now, either stood frozen in fear, staring at the immensity of the wall, now 2 meters high and growing in both height and speed, unable to move, being what they would call when they hunted, "like a deer caught in the headlights."

The others, the ones who at least knew enough to fear for their lives before such a severe misbehavior of the generally consistent dynamics and perimeter of the big ocean, finally fled, their bones rattling and their muscles atwitch with with life-preserving adrenalin. They turn to run, fearing Davy Jones' Locker, as a fate too macabre for any man or Everyman. Alas the people, men, women, children, and fools, and the dogs -- setters, retrievers, beagles, mongrels -- all turned on their heels and sped on foot and with fervor toward the leveed dunes, which now stood a full 2,000 paces from the wailing, weeping people and fleeing tides. Now revealing some rock 300 meters from what was once the shore, only one minute or more ago, and exposing rotted wood beams, more exotic plant life, and bones of ancient mariners and other unfortunate victims of the surf. So the people ran like little bugs up the bluff, knowing that they had to go beyond, across the Great Highway, and up through the gently inclining Avenues of the Sunset District, San Francisco, lest they be torn from their roots, plucked like three-leaf clover and pulled down the streets, now raging canyons of foaming, rapids-like ocean water, gurgling in the drowning of windows.

What was happening presently, of course, was the giant tidal bore-like wall, continued to grow and accelerate. It made a horrific sound, like a melding of a huge toilet flushing and again, the hiss. It chased the small people with what seemed like a vengeance. It traveled, ever faster, now twice as fast as the running people, now thrice, now a mere 100 paces behind the stragglers, now with yellow-tinged fear in their bulging eyes, their greed forgotten.

And it was a little before this time that one group of people, a group of hearty souls, both women and men, and groms both girls and boys, and those edlers with weathered faces, who knew intimately the workings and fickleness of the ocean, and respected and protected her, and played sometimes all day with the dolphins and sharks in her swells, and took photographs and painted and drew pictures of the ocean, and wrote about the ocean...they began to run, with mystical boards under their arms, clad in stretchy black armor, straight at the receding waters. They ran faster than it receded. They, upon reaching the last of the receding of the waters, pitched their magic boards forward, nose-first, fins down and pounced in the prone position upon the baords and began to paddle. They knew what was to come of any poor lost souls caught in the path of Neptune's giant oblivious shrug.

Just as the first of those fatally marked souls onshore, who ran in blind fear, began surmounting the crest of the grass-haired dunes, the terrible hand of Neptune had reversed its westward travel, the windup, parrying now with a still more pronounced serpent's hiss.

And then a strange thing happened: the tsunami began to project old tires and oil drums straight upward and into the sky, belched end-over-end, and toxic sludge atrophied and encrusted its rim. And the sea, uncharacteristically, appeared to seek the taste of human blood.

This once paradisical setting, a place of recreation and laughter, had become a theater of the damned, a roiling mire with miasmic dark fog clinging like mold to the hills, they sky neutral and slate-grey.

And on the Great Highway, as other people, unknowing, negotiating, some carreering, some straight and true, but fast, their self-created and manufactured metal-and-oil death monsters, as they make their scarring stampede down the Great Highway, ignorant and clueless about the inexorably encroaching beach-escapers, who were of course now seeing the world through the terrified eyes of a desert hare scampering crazily before a predator's death monster on a cold, unforgiving surface, that was built by men, the tarmac.

Once upon a time -- the year was around 1993 -- at a little slice of heaven (Hell when it's way overhead and pounding, and you're caught between the bars) called Ocean Beach San Francisco, the blue sparkling Pacific Ocean, which begins where the land ends, abruptly and sometimes violently beating at it's rock, dirt and sand perimeter, sometimes decpetively calm, joining with the firmament on the horizon, with a swooshing gurgle, drew back, very slowly at first, and then with a growing hiss, like the squirming adders on the head of Medusa, sucking at the sand, the earth, the spiny exoskeleton of California.

And the people! The masses are at the outset, agog. They had been strolling, jogging, watching, talking, shouting and otherwise engaging in some form of frolic or deep thinking. They are now rendered stupified before the sight and sound (the increasingly more rapid receding of the mighty Pacific and the increasingly loud hiss of water over sand), as if their minds were being drawn into the retreating briny, and they had lost the cognizance to retrieve them. They could only watch, some with terror creeping into there eyes, others with a gleam, each one staring at his or her own individual fear.

And then someone -- a husky-voiced man wearing hip-waders and carrying a fishing pole -- snaps the thickening fear and wonder hanging over Ocean Beach, San Francisco like a musty wet shroud, with the following near scream:

"Run! It's Neptune's trident -- the Tsunami! Run, my friends, or perish!"

Suddenly their brains were back in their casings, and their wretched frames sprung to life.