Northbound: High atmospheric pressure, cherry blossoms, news of deaths Southbound: Dust clouds, strikes, debris
NEWS OF THE DEATHS MOVED FAST that week. Word was spreading quickly, but it wouldn't be long before people lost interest. By the time funeral proceedings began, the public would have already forgotten the deceased. A tsunami had hit Jinhae, in the province of Kyeongnam. Jinhae was where cherry blossoms first bloomed in early spring. When it happened, on an otherwise typical afternoon, life in the city had stopped. In an instant, everything was underwater: tourists beholding the flowers, pedestrians meandering about, buildings that had been warmed by the sun, and street lamps on the edge of the beach. Yona went down to Jinhae on Friday evening. Jungle-the travel company where she worked as a programming coordinator-didn't currently offer any travel packages to visit the post-tsunami rubble, but it would soon. After arriving, Yona’s first tasks were to hand over donations and dispatch volunteers. She spent the weekend giving out money—ten-thousand-won contributions from nearly a thousand Jungle employees—expressing her condolences and assessing the situation. Jungle divided disasters into thirty-three distinct categories, including volcano eruptions, earthquakes, war, drought, typhoons and tsunamis, with 152 available packages. For the city of Jinhae, Yona planned to create an itinerary that combined viewing the aftermath of the tsunami with volunteer work.
Yona’s return to Seoul took longer than the trek down south. As Korea marched into spring, cherry blossoms were blanketing the country. The flowers had already bloomed in Jinhae, and during Yona’s weekend away from home, northern blossoms began to bud as well. Once she was back in Seoul, Yona turned on her TV. After the south coast tsunami, the news broadcast not only typical weather forecasts and programmes about the flowers’ arrival, but also information about where the ocean currents would take the tsunami wreckage now trapped in their waters.
The trash consisted of artefacts of daily life stolen by nature, mostly pieces of plastic and forgettable knick-knacks not yet decomposed. Soon to be forgotten by their former owners, they were destined to swirl about the sea for decades. The debris flowed south along the currents, bobbing atop ever-moving waves.
Predictions about the trash’s future path varied. Some said it would flow into the garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, the one that was seven times the size of the Korean Peninsula. Others guessed that within the next two years it would end up along the coast of Chile. Some people even estimated where the trash would be ten years from now. Most citizens just hoped that they wouldn’t cross paths with the tsunami’s remains. They wanted to shield themselves from disaster, to hide from risk.
However, one segment of Korean society differed from the risk-averse majority. These voyagers carried survival kits, generators and tents as they searched out disaster zones worthy of exploration. They were the kind of people who would relish the chance to weather the open sea in search of the mythical island of trash. Jungle was the travel company for such adventurers.
Yona had once dreamed of going on treacherous journeys. The first place she’d ever travelled to was Nagasaki, her trip inspired by a single sentence in a guidebook: “The city is home to statues commemorating citizens who lost their lives in the atomic bomb explosion, as well as those who passed away in local storms.”