The Oddity of Pizza Dough and Tsunami

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 9:18:51 PM GMT-11:00

It is an incredibly odd experience to live through a natural disaster in what could be described as a “3rd World Country.” Several times (in prior days), Katrina and I had cursed the fact that our stove/oven and hot water heater are powered by gas instead of electricity. The gas runs out sometimes, we have to call the gas company, they take several days to come out and refill the tanks, during which time we take cold showers, etc. But the odd thing is that during a disaster like this, where we have no electricity whatsoever, it’s pretty incredible to have a gas stove.

Monday night, we made our classic homemade pizza dough. This is something Katrina and I love doing together. I am the kneader in the operation, which is an oft overlooked position. Usually it is the “concocter” of the dough that is given the credit, and look, I’m not deriding that. The “concocter” (if you will) is responsible for the assimilation of all the ingredients, the mixing of said ingredients, and the general oversight of the affair. But it is the kneader who then must take these raw ingredients and make something of them. It is the kneader who breaks the yeast down so that it can work through the whole dough. If the dough is kneaded well, then it will rise well. And so that is my humble job. And I work at it faithfully, gladly, and, some would even say, methodically.

So, we had made some pizza dough on Monday night, and our stove was working Tuesday night after the tsunami, since it runs on gas. So, what did we do? We made fresh pizza. We had some cheese we had previously frozen, we had some basic tomato sauce (which we season heavily with our unique--and dare i say, patented?--spice combination), and we had our fresh pizza dough.

And so we inhabited a strange world on Tuesday for countless reasons. We had survived a natural disaster, we were wondering when the next tremor would be, we can constantly hear the Pacific Ocean roaring outside anyway, and we had no power. And let me tell you, when there is no power out on the east side of American Samoa, it is dark. I mean, there are no lights anywhere. It’s just you and the moon, and that’s it. And in the midst of the rubble, the dust, and the strange exhausted peace after the chaos, we made fresh homemade pizza in our gas-fired oven. And we drank a Vailima, which is a beer brewed only in Western Samoa, in honor of the day. We are thankful that this day, which could have gone so badly for us in so many different ways, ended in fresh pizza and beer. What a strange, miraculous set of events for us. Our neighbor Nate, who works for the EPA, and who we had previously spent almost no time with, came over and we fed him fresh pizza. What an interesting end to an unbelievable day.

Tomorrow is Thursday for us, and we will hopefully be packing during the day in anticipation of flying out on Thursday night. We will undoubtedly struggle with some guilty feelings over leaving in the midst of crisis here, especially Katrina with her work at the hospital. I’ll tell you more soon about some of the stories we’ve heard from folks. Survival stories. The kind of stories that heighten the awareness of the fragility of life.

Indeed, we are both struck here with the strangeness of a life that sometimes seems so random: in the harbor, one boat is lifted up and over a building, killing everyone inside, and another is left in essentially the same place it was anchored a few minutes earlier. We are reminded of the great blessing of life, the blessing that we have of getting out of bed each morning and going about the rhythms of the day. It is only when those rhythms are interrupted, when the time signature changes, that we stop and notice.

And so we are thankful today to be alive. Katrina could easily have been on the road heading into work when the tsunami hit. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for that to happen. It would have been a fairly normal morning for her to be driving at that time. But she was at home with me. And when the tsunami hit, we grabbed some stuff and ran up the mountain as fast as we could. We are thankful. We are thankful for many things today. We are thankful for life, we are thankful for each other, we are thankful we live near a mountain, we are thankful we have a lot of candles, and we are thankful to have a gas-fired oven.

I’m also thankful that I had another Vailima tonight.

peace,

mark