This is a long post, but then Shi Shi beach is long.  It’s one of the wildest, most forlorn, most beautiful beaches in the world, four hours by car and ferry from Seattle, and then another hour slogging through psychedelically viscous deep mud, ending in an ohmygod slither down a steep cliff, clinging to tree roots as you go, and then…  the magnificent wilderness of the Pacific Ocean.

Usually I come here in winter, after a storm, when the water wells up so high that you swear it’s going to swamp you like a tsunami wave.  The pounding of it makes the sand beneath your feet reverberate like an ongoing earthquake (seriously:  it registers on seismic sensors.)  With the wind high and rain flying at you, there’s no telling where water ends and sky begins.  Spume lifts in huge curtains off the tops of the waves;  giant balls of foam race along the beach as though propelled by some inner force;  the roar of the water drowns out anything but shouting.  To stand on Shi Shi at such times is thrilling and humbling and terrifying all at the same time.

The ocean tosses up whatever it carries here, and some of it comes back home with me.  Buoys torn loose from crab pots;  tangled nets and long lines of rope;  even, once, a blue hardhat that belonged to someone called Beata Riggo.  I know this because the name is there, carefully marked in indelible ink on the mesh webbing inside the hat.  A Norwegian name, I think, though I’m not sure.  The hat must have gone overboard.  But it wasn’t until last week that it occurred to me that its owner might have gone overboard too.

I was at Shi Shi on a sunny summer day, for a change.  Yet there was a certain overcast to the sun, at least in my mind, because now a different kind of flotsam is coming ashore.  The ocean has carried the debris from the tsunami that ravaged the eastern coast of Japan over a year ago, and now it’s beginning to arrive on the west coast of America, ten thousand miles away.  A fishing boat washed ashore this spring on Vancouver Island;  a floating dock on the Oregon shore.  And at Shi Shi?  I kind of didn’t want to know.

But the indomitable Jen Graves, art critic of The Stranger, was braver than I.   Like me, she’d been part of an kind of ad hoc temporary collective of art and tech types convened a couple of weeks ago to explore problems they might collaborate on.  The tsunami debris was identified as one such problem:  how to contain, it, how to handle it and collect it and dispose of it.  But for me, the problem was quite the opposite.  It was how to conserve it.

What Jen and I saw washing up on the Pacific coast is what remains of people’s lives.  It’s what remains of people who died.  There was stuff on the beach that day I’d never seen there before.  Nothing as dramatic as a boat or a floating dock, but small remnants of humanity like a piece of wood that might have been part of a broomstick, but with many layers of multi-colored paint on it, which made it seem somehow ceremonial.  Or matte black spheres that looked at first like mines, but turned out to be plastic floats from Japanese fishing nets.   Or – the bane of our oceans – Styrofoam, brittle and yellowed by salt and time.

This is only the beginning.  More will come.  I can see that it’s an environmental problem, of course, but surely it’s also a cultural one, even an existential one.  This is, after all, more than mere debris.  It’s testimony.  Testimony to other people’s lives, to the power of the ocean, to the conditionality of our own existence.  To treat it as a problem that can be “solved” seems to me insufficient.  Surely a group of artists and technologists could find a more creative “solution”?

An interpretable site?  A memorial?  An installation?  I don’t know.  But another country’s tragedy as our debris?  I think we can do better than that.  And perhaps we will.  We meet again tonight, this time open to the public, and I’ll be wearing Beata Riggo’s hardhat – not because I look good in it (in fact I look idiotic), but as a reminder, at least to me, that we need to conserve not only the environment, but also memory.  That we need to respect the power of the ocean rather than try to control it.  That we need to be thrilled and humbled and terrified all at the same time.

Exactly a month after the humongous 9.0 earthquake and tsunami, Japan has finally raised the severity level of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant from level 5  to level 7.   That’s the highest there is.

I guess they could no longer deny reality.  Maybe we can’t either.

The decision came after another huge aftershock (6.6) today.  Which followed an identically huge one yesterday.  And another even larger one (7.1) four days ago.  Which makes me wonder what the new definition of “aftershock” might be.  The dimensions of the unfolding disaster at Fukushima seem to have had a devastating effect on, among so much else, our ability to react.

Now it’s true that a 7.1 is nothing compared to the 9.0 one on March 11 (reminder:  a 9.0 is ten times more powerful than an 8.0, which is ten times more powerful than a 7.0, and so on).  But as I write, these ‘aftershocks’ (any one of which would send Seattle into total panic) all seem to be right in the area of Fukushima.  Where things have clearly gone not from very bad to worse, but from very bad to worst.

So how come it’s no longer headline news? Have we gotten used so quickly to nuclear disaster?  Do we seriously think that because it’s “over there” in Japan it’s not quite real?

Take the word “indefinitely” in this April 6 front-page NYT story, for example.  It could mean an indefinite amount of time.  It could also mean a very, very long amount of time.

United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Among the new threats that were cited in the assessment, dated March 26, are the mounting stresses placed on the containment structures as they fill with radioactive cooling water, making them more vulnerable to rupture in one of the aftershocks rattling the site after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The document also cites the possibility of explosions inside the containment structures due to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater pumped into the reactors, and offers new details on how semi-molten fuel rods and salt buildup are impeding the flow of fresh water meant to cool the nuclear cores.

Buried in the very last paragraph of the story is this, from the director of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists talking about the nightmarish pile-up of problems at Fukushima:

Even the best juggler in the world can get too many balls up in the air.  They’ve got a lot of nasty things to negotiate in the future, and one missed step could make the situation much, much worse.

Two days later, and a 7.1 quake hits — a pretty good definition of a missed step —  and yet the story is suddenly not on the front page of the NYT, but on page 14, with the scariest part again buried at the end:

At Fukushima No. 2, extremely radioactive material continues to ooze out of the reactor pressure vessel, and the leak is likely to widen with time, a western nuclear executive asserted.

“It’s a little like pulling a thread out of your tie,” said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect business connections in Japan. “Any breach gets bigger.”

Flashes of extremely intense radioactivity have become a serious problem, he said. Tokyo Electric’s difficulties in providing accurate information on radiation are not a result of software problems, as some Japanese officials have suggested, but stem from damage to measurement instruments caused by radiation, the executive said.

In other words, nobody knows what’s happening because there’s so much radiation — those “flashes of extremely intense radioactivity” — that it’s fried the gauges.

Meanwhile, that “extremely radioactive material” keeps oozing out.  Into the Pacific Ocean.  And into the air.   Which means that in an “indefinite” amount of time, it will reach us, wherever we are.  And that sounds pretty definite to me.

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If you want to see just how many earthquakes there’ve been in Japan since March 11, click here for a horribly hypnotic visual timeline of the size, frequency and depth of the ongoing tsunami of quakes (it comes courtesy of a researcher at the University of Canterbury in, no coincidence, Christchurch, New Zealand).  You can follow every one since March 11, when the 9.0 lights up the whole screen, or click on the upper right-hand corner for any date you select.