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Lake Erie's north shore, about 1:30 pm on December 23. 
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"This is very interesting. I am finding bodies of humans, but I have yet to see a dead animal. . . . Maybe what we think is true, that animals have a sixth sense."
~Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, who owned a hotel in Sri Lanka's Yala National Park, speculating that wildlife fled to higher ground. The hotel was destroyed in Sunday's tsunami and 200 people in the park died. The park is home to 200 Asian elephants, crocodile, wild boar, water buffalo and grey langur monkeys (Associated Press).
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If animals have a sixth sense, then we should have one, too. Some of us do. A Canadian snorkeler said she survived Sunday's tsunami because she sensed something was wrong and decided to leave the water. It's not hard to believe. Nature is full of rhythms and cycles. When something disturbs them, it shouldn't take a sixth sense to pick up subtle changes in sound, light, temperature or the smell of the air. Perhaps its not a sense at all, but a subconscious centre in the core of the brain that picks up these clues and computes them, notifying us when a collection of factors has shifted subtly. Not one of them alone would register meaning, but together they make an equation our minds should grasp.
We are used to living mostly in our conscious minds, the higher brain that deals with sense perceptions and reasoning. But we are still fully equipped with the lower reptilian brain that controls many instinctive behaviours. Among other functions, it detects changes in light and secretes chemical cues that tell our bodies to sleep. It also controls many of our basic responses, like fear and hunger.
It is not a rational reaction, however. Rational society has taught us to ignore our instincts. We humans have so over-stimulated our senses that we have stopped paying attention to our animal insights. We are not only out of touch with the Earth, but with ourselves.
Images of my walk on Thursday afternoon remain stark in my mind as they are in the photographs. The bank of clouds marking the eastward retreat of a winter storm crossed the Lake Erie horizon. The winter sun emerged and bathed snow-covered beach, bank of ice, and distant green lake water in a strange pearly light.
Once, I ventured onto the ice, lying in a thick shelf across the verge of sand. Shifting temperatures and the forces of water had ruptured a chasm filled with chunks of clear ice and fragile crystals underneath, where ripples had hollowed out a cavity before receding. I crept forward cautiously lest I sink through and soak my boots. At the edge of the miniature abyss I leaned forward to take photos in the inscrutable shadows. My hand touched the edge, and a sound of tinkling erupted, crystals breaking and collapsing like shattered glass. It set off a domino effect along the fault line, tracing hidden corridors up and down the shoreline. The voice was musical but cold and spiritless. I had started a tiny ice quake. After two or three seconds the shattering subsided, and the winter beach fell still.
The say a butterfly's wings can start a hurricane on the other side of the earth. I wonder if a lightning collapse of icicles on Thursday could send impulses through the earth's mantle and molten core, triggering an earthquake on the floor of the Indian Ocean on Sunday. And I wonder if my sense of awe on the beach—at the austere power of earth, water, stone and light—might have tasted like foreboding.
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