The Great Wave

Bainbridge Island, Washington.

It was 1973. I was eight years old and Hollywood was into disaster movies. Somehow, I fibbed my way with a friend and his teenage, baby-sitting sister into a matinee screening of the Poseidon Adventure.

There was only one movie house on Bainbridge Island when I grew up there. The Lynwood Theatre was set in a faux-Tudor commercial ensemble of buildings from the 1920s built directly on the Puget Sound near the south end of the island. Just behind the theatre was Rich Passage, through which one line of the Washington State Ferries continually passed and, far less frequently, some of the great warships of the American Empire, including the USS Missouri, sailed to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton. With its brick and half-timbered façade, wooden floorboards, creaky seats and cramped foyer, the cinema looked like the set of a Gothic horror film.

The thrill of going to the movies without parental supervision and seeing the latest blockbuster come over from Seattle had me in a state of heightened excitement. This feeling tipped towards terror within seconds when the plush purple curtain closed after the previews and then just as quickly opened again as the feature began.

It was the music that pitched me into the churning waters of fear. The soundtrack was composed by John Williams, then not yet forty. It was a turning point in what would become a long, illustrious, hugely prolific career that is not yet over, his last movie score is supposedly forthcoming in 2024. Williams rode the symphonic wave of Poseidon Adventure to a dominant position—one is tempted to say towering (his score for The Towering Inferno came in 1974)—in Hollywood.

The Poseidon Adventure title music began with the hesitant, distrustful half-step motion that the composer would set to frenzied back-and-forthing off of Martha’s Vineyard two years later in Jaws. The industrial clang of a gong, as if a mammoth hammer had hit a giant hull, sent shock waves through the theatre. Could one hear the complaint of propellers and entanglement of cables in its unsettling after-shimmer? The basses crashed into a droning C, an epic portent, as I would later learn, borrowed from Brahms’ first symphony. Out of this fatal sea of sound emerged horns, both foreboding and intrepid. Steadfast brass tones pushed upward towards light and air but were then pulled downward against coursing rivulets of the other woodwinds like water gushing through the breached hull and open hatches as the violins clung to life. This was the awful counterpoint of capsizing, desperation, and drowning.

The score anticipated both the dread of Jaws and the derring-do of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In the theatre that afternoon, Williams’s Poseidon Adventure score was terrorizing the ocean and the audience long screen minutes before the New Year’s Eve tsunami struck the eponymous luxury liner and its all-star cast that included Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, and Leslie Nielsen as the hapless captain (a haplessness he would later comically capitalize on in the disaster parody Airplane!).

At the moment that the rogue wave swamped the ship I was sure that Puget Sound would come blasting over the beach and through the screen. I jumped from my seat and scurried to the higher ground of the lobby, occasionally peeking through my hands and the curtain in the doorway over the next ninety minutes for mortified glances at the survivors’ attempts to save themselves. As far as I can remember, it is the only movie I’ve ever (almost) walked out of.

My father was an oceanographer and when I got home that evening I told him I’d been at the movie and asked him if there was any chance at all that a tidal wave would hit our island. He assured me that in the protected inland sea that is Puget Sound this was impossible. Still, I had nightmares for weeks. I don’t know whether he was just playing the percentages or doing his parental duty by dispensing a white lie, but what my dad said wasn’t true. Now on the beaches around the island, there are tsunami warning signs offering the sound (!) advice to get to higher ground in case of earthquake and receding waters. I’ve just learned that the 1949 Olympia Earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale triggered an eight-foot tidal wave that hit shorelines three days later. That wasn’t exactly the foaming mass of water that overtook the Poseidon on screen, but it was no time for a seaside picnic either.

I thought of The Poseidon Adventure and heard Williams in my head as I rode the ferry yesterday from Bainbridge to the mainland then walked up First Avenue to the Seattle Art Museum for “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence, from the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.”

The show remains in Seattle until January 21st, when it concludes its three-month run. In June I visited the exhibition where it began in Boston, in the more cramped quarters and amongst even bigger weekend crowds at the Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition poster features Hokusai’s most famous image, The Great Wave, created around 1830 when the artist was about sixty years old.

There is much moving water in the show. A hanging scroll painting on silk from Hokusai’s last year, 1849, depicts a 3,000-foot waterfall, the cataract’s immeasurable force captured in abstraction as nested columns. A lone figure, the 8th-century Chinese poet, Li Bai stands at the base of what he described as “the Milky Way pouring down from heaven.” We see the poet from the back, his hat tipped up in poised reverence and wonder. The falls are flat and motionless. It is as if at the end of his life, Hokusai no longer felt the need, as he had for so long, to capture and convey the vital, even violent energy of water in motion.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the water is of dynamic detail. Sketchbook after sketchbook shows Hokusai’s meticulous, obsessive search for ways to depict surf and swell. In an ink drawing from perhaps 1830, the 13th-century Buddhist priest Nichiren (founder of the sect to which Hokusai belonged) calms the wild waves threatening his ferry by writing a sacred inscription in the water. At the upper margin, Hokusai sketched a self-portrait with a written description of what he is doing: blowing the white paint off his brush—“Pu! Pu! Pu!”—in order to represent foam on the paper.

This is the sound not of water itself but the act of its depiction. The images are silent, but the museum is full of imagined sound: falls raging; riffling streams; of a romantic evening, the music of flute mingling with koto; the rustle of bamboo; rice stalks bending in the wind; the songs of birds; the clash of swords and swoosh of arrows.

In this museum two blocks above the harborside, the biggest scrum of Seattle visitors gathered before the Great Wave. The print is only 10” x 15” but terrifying. As in so many of Hokusai’s sketchbooks and prints in the exhibit, the water has profound power. But it is the grasping white watery fingers at the crest that press danger most forcefully. These are the tentacles that will grab you and pull you under. Three express fish-delivery boats appear close to the viewer, the men at the oars struggling to escape with their lives. The crafts seem curved with the wave as if about to become part of it and that would mean their death. Like a conical wave, a white-capped Mt. Fuji rises in the distance in the center of the image.

I held my position in front of the picture for as long as I could, admiring the craft, beauty, and fearsome brilliance of the image and thanking the heavens and the seas that I hadn’t seen it back in 1973.

In the museum gift shop, the cashier told me that the exhibit is headed next to Kansas. No threat of tsunamis there, but Hokusai unleashed on paper and silk many other kinds of storms and terrors.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at  dgyearsley@gmail.com.)