30 June 23 | Vol 2 Issue 24
The first time I faced my own death I was in Bali.
A departure from the usual fare this week. These last weeks I have purchased a cooler box, and a mattress topper, which along with the word departure all sound as if they could be woven together into an anecdote The Grim Reaper might relate. Instead, I’m going to retell my contribution to Will Ashon’s marvellous book The Passengers.
I recommend buying a copy. He writes my words better than I do. Strangely, I can recognise my voice in his recounting - I told him this story down the phone - but I find it difficult to read from the book out loud. The words don’t seem to fit my pattern of speaking. Some form of Doppler effect?
While we are on this subject a quick shout out to Jack, who is convalescing. Please don’t die. I have too few subscribers as it is.
One of the advantages of living in Hong Kong is you can fly to the rest of SouthEast Asia very easily. The same way Europeans can nip to Paris for the weekend. For a holiday I decided to stretch a little further and book a villa in Bali. A mini palace. I have yet to stay in a more idyllic location. The villa was built along traditional Balinese lines, open plan with a high ceilinged thatched roof. The master bedroom upstairs, replete with old fashioned ceiling fan hanging from the thatching beam, wall sized windows leading to a balcony overlooking the almost navy blue Pacific Ocean. All dark wood and whitewashed walls, one side opening out onto the outdoor dining and lounge area, covered by its own timbered and thatched roof, and the pool. With a couple of non traditional bedrooms behind the patio.
More thatched gazebos were scattered around in the garden, leading down to the beach. No fence, just stepping from the frangipani and hibiscus strewn lawn onto the sand. No fence because the villa comes with day staff, and a night guard, who doubled as some sort of holy man. He would patrol the grounds at night, turbaned, ash marked in a finger dab on his forehead, garlands of marigolds around his neck, carrying a silver tray chock full of burning incense.
Before you think ‘really Julian, enough rubbing it in’ these details all play their part. Otherwise I would have mentioned the pond with stepping stones leading to the front door, and the outdoor rain showers. In reality this luxury cost the same for a week as a couple of nights in a Hong Kong hotel. With three bedrooms going spare - you don’t get your own pool unless you go for a certain scale - I invited two friends to come along and stay. Let’s call them Em and Mia.
These two friends were very keen to see as much of Bali as possible. It was my first visit too, but I had no intention of leaving the villa. I mean, would you? The place came with a chef who grilled fish by the pool for lunch and sliced mangoes for dessert (and sliced mangoes for breakfast and supper too). I did go waterfall jumping.
After leaping off fifty foot high ledges I watched someone slip just before taking a running leap from atop a neighbouring eighty foot sloping cliff drop into a rock pool far below. If I were going to predict a place to die, it would have been there, doing that. In fact I had been standing there quietly on my own, watching the jumpers, contemplating doing it myself, the others having straight away refused and headed back to shade for a can of fizzy pop, when the person in front of me slipping signalled a very strong not today Death, not today.
Another of the trips they organised was a drive to visit a mountain top lake, with a sun setting into the water finale. I would have most likely gone but ended up having to stay and prepare a pitch for some possible work. So there I was, left behind on my lonesome, early evening, under my Balinese thatched roof by the pool, tapping away at the laptop, the night guard holy man keeping me company, sauntering by every now and then, festooning me in sheaths of fragrant inspirational smoke. I remember some mild chanting as well. When the ground started to move.
The liquid in the drinks left behind from lunch on the table started to slop about in their glasses, while the windows in the modern bedrooms behind me started rattling in their frames. Gosh I thought, this is an earthquake. By the time I had reached for my phone to Instagram that moment, it had ceased.
As a teenager I had visited an earthquake exhibit at London’s Science Museum, where a small room held a simulation. At the time I was rather underwhelmed, it felt akin to standing up on the tube - Brit speak for the underground train. An earthquake isn’t an up and down motion as you might expect, shaking a blanket out, it’s sliding it back and forth a little, at a moderate speed.
A few minutes later the rattling starts up, the drinks are sloshing about again. I reach for my phone, and again, by the time I’ve turned it on and switched the camera to video, it’s died down. I leave my phone on, in case of another occurrence. Five minutes pass. My phone turns off. I return to work. Then the rattling returns, except this time it’s escalated to a banging, and the drink glasses themselves are jiggling about on the table.
The banging noise the door and window frames are making is growing loud, the water in the pool has begun slopping over the edge of the tiling onto the patio in little waves, as if a giant is shimmying back and forth in his bath. The earthquake is lasting minutes now. I am a little alarmed, it takes a moment for me to have the wherewithal to switch camera mode and video the aftermath of the pool splashing over, the glasses jostling down the table. It dies away. I have my Instagram moment.
It occurs to me, at this point, that I might have become one of those people who record their own death in their final social media post. That sitting under an open air thatched roof consisting of thick, heavy wood timbered beams and pillars during an earthquake was probably exceptionally dumb. But it held, and I had my video clip. The excitement was over, no more quaking returned.
Ten minutes pass, and my phone rings. It’s Anne. She’s excited. She’s shouting. It appears there are hundreds of people, if not thousands, driving up the mountain road towards her with a look of abject terror on their faces, as fast as they can. Which isn’t very fast since every vehicle possible is on the road, from scooter to lorries, crammed with entire families, possessions, I’d to imagine chickens but I think I’m being fanciful.
The government has issued a tsunami alert. The whole population of the coast is trying to reach the summit of the mountain. In twenty minutes. As that’s how long you have between a major quake - 5.0 on the Richter scale I later learnt [1 ] - and the giant eighty foot wave hitting the shore. Ironically the same height of the rock pool jump I bailed on the day before.
Ten minutes have passed. I do the maths. The wave is due in ten minutes. “I’m coming to get you,” Anne says. “That’s insane” I say. I can hear Em and Mia are definitely agreeing with me in the car. But the driver has family near me with no means to reach higher ground. I would have to run ten miles in ten minutes to reach the foothills.
“Go to the beach and ask the watchman if a tsunami is coming”.
Of all the advice I’ve ever been given, being told to go to the beach to look out for an impending giant wave is I think the worst I ever received.
You need to be four or five stories high on a tsunami proof structure to survive. A two story villa made of wooden beams, twigs and plate glass didn’t seem a good option. I did think of going up the balcony and clinging to the rail, but the big bad wave was pretty much going to blow down a house made of twigs. And plate glass. Bleeding to death as I drowned sounded a bummer, so off to the beach I trundled.
Stepping off the lawn onto the sand, there’s the holy man night guard, contemplating the stars, the night air, the serenity of existence. Without incense this time. The option of drowning slash being pummelled by telegraph poles, broken villas, and cars in a vortex of mud, seemed way worse than going out facing a majestic wave of Pacific water on the beach.
Looking out to the darkness of the sea, night had truly arrived, I asked the guard “Is there a tsunami coming?”. He hardly spoke English but understood my question, “No” he replied. Given there was a government warning being broadcast on the television, I persisted. “Are you sure there is no tsunami?”. Calmly he unclipped his torch from his belt, held it up, turning it on, and pointed it at the ocean, out into the darkness. Turning to me he said again “No”.
Now, I don't have a geology or physics degree, but I am fairly certain that shining a torch at the ocean hoping to spot an oncoming tsunami is not the most scientific method of detection. In fact I’ll admit I was highly sceptical it was of any use whatsoever. In fact possibly the worst method, second only to doing the same procedure without a torch.
Unconvinced, I tried to explain warnings had been issued, “Are you certain there isn’t a giant killer tsunami rushing at breakneck speed towards us right now?” I tried to ask as casually as I could. Not wanting to upset too much the beatitude he was emanating. “No” he said, pointing up the beach to a group of small children playing in the sand a hundred metres away, “My family”. Turning, he pointed up at the palm tree next to us and replied “No tsunami”. The conversation now closed, he turned back to continue mystically contemplating the nature of existence.
I knew he was deeply spiritual but taking your advice from trees was beyond my range of acceptable guidance. I stood by his side, certain I was about to die in the next few moments. Along with a holy man and his children. You may have already gathered by the fact I’m writing this today that the wave never came. But I genuinely thought death was imminent.
The surprising thing was that I was at peace. Like the Tenet quote, you don’t know if you’ll run into the burning building until it happens. I realised I had told everyone I cared for that I loved them, I had no aching regrets for things left undone.
I think that facing your death (and living, mind) is a very useful rehearsal for further life threatening situations. It also brings perspective. If you can’t have one of your own what I would consider instead is telling everyone you care for that you love them. If you’re male please note I’m talking about same sex friends as well. Let’s normalise men telling their male friends they love them. Because don’t die thinking you never told someone what they meant to you.
Postscript. It turns out the holy man was utterly fucking scientific. In an actual tsunami all the water dramatically recedes, exposing a huge swathe of seabed normally kept underwater. He had simply observed that the ocean was just where it should be, a short distance from his bare feet.
🌊
My correspondence with Will Ashon can be read here –
“The Passengers” by Will Ashon
Between October 2018 and March 2021, Will Ashon collected voices - people talking about their lives, needs, dreams, loves, hopes and fears - all of them with some connection to the British Isles. He used a range of methods including letters sent to random addresses, hitchhiking, referrals from strangers and so on. He conducted the interviews in person, on the phone, over the internet or asked people to record themselves. Interview techniques ranged from asking people to tell him a secret to choosing an arbitrary question from a list.
The resulting testimonies tell the collective story of what it feels like to be alive in a particular time and place - here and now. The Passengers is a book about how we give shape to our lives, find meaning in the chaos, acknowledge the fragility of our existence while alleviating this anxiety with moments of beauty, love, humour and solidarity.
Buy here | www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571364145-the-passengers
I have a small contribution this week to Jonathan Gibbs’ excellent short story compendium newsletter A Personal Anthology, and site (apersonalanthology.com), I recommend subscribing.
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I loved this! My moment of possible death came when I was 19 and peacefully biking along a stretch of forest in Germany. I heard popping sounds from time to time, but didn't know what they were - until a military jeep raced up to me and an officer screamed that this was a shooting range, they were shooting with live munition, and why I hadn't stopped at the signs that said that nobody should enter the area? I had never seen any signs.
If you go again let us know ... we love Bali (and Lombok .. check out Gili Air) ...and how's health? Fingers crossed! K xx