Mandy was sitting in the workroom, looking at a website called Ravelry for some knitting patterns she might use for her new yarn, when she saw Emil come rushing in.
Pippa and Pauly were there, too, playing cards on the daybed.
“Hey, Mandy!” Emil said, climbing up on the big office chair. “I have a question for you.”
Mandy closed the laptop, and pushed it and her yarn aside. Emil’s questions usually took some time to answer, and she knew she could get back to her project later. “What’s up?” she asked him.
“I got a letter from Holly,” he replied, after he had settled himself next to her at the table. “She says something I didn’t understand, and I thought you might be able to explain it.”
Mandy and the other dolls were always happy to hear about Emil’s friend Holly, who exchanged letters with Emil often. Emil had met Holly when both of them were in the doll hospital. Emil was there because he couldn’t see or hear, and Holly because she couldn’t walk. Emil felt lucky that the hospital was able to fix his problem with special glasses and that they were able to help Holly by giving her a wheelchair. She got to do a lot of different fun things along with Sam, the human girl she lives with, who also uses a wheelchair to get around, so Holly’s letters were always interesting.
“What does she say in the letter?” Mandy asked.
Emil pointed to the letter. “She says her family was camping at a campground near the ocean,” he explained. “They were having a good time, when they heard a siren go off.
Holly says Sam’s dad went to the campground host,” Emil continued. “He asked what the siren was for and found out it meant that something called a tsunami (tsu-NAH-mee) might be coming in just a few hours. It wasn’t safe to stay at the campground, so everyone was taking down their tents or connecting their trailers to their cars and trucks so they could leave.”
“Holly’s family drove up into the hills away from the ocean,” Emil said, “where they would be safe.”
“It’s good to have a warning,” Mandy commented. “A tsunami is nothing to mess around with.”
“That comes to my question,” Emil said then. “What’s a tsunami? Holly doesn’t say in her letter.” (He was thinking about some kind of sea monster, like a shark with legs, so it could come out of the ocean.)
“A tsunami is a really big wave,” Mandy replied. “It can be caused by earthquakes under or near the ocean, or by volcanic erruptions or by landslides close to the water. It moves through the ocean. If it comes to land where there are people or buildings, it can wash them away.”
“I’ll draw you a picture of a regular wave, so you understand what I’m talking about,” Mandy said. By then, Pippa and Pauly were interested, and had joined the other two dolls at the table.
Mandy got a piece of paper from the paper supply by the printer and a pencil from the desk, and brought them to the table. Then she got out her glasses and put them on. She drew sort of a wavy line on it and wrote a couple of words on her drawing.
“This is what waves look like from the side,” she told them.
“This part up here is called the crest (KREST).” She pointed to the highest part of the wavy line.
“It’s like the crest on some birds, like blue jays or cardinals,” she explained. “It’s where feathers stick up on the top of their heads.” Mandy concentrated on what she knew a blue jay looked like, because she knew the other dolls had seen them. She would have closed her eyes, if her eyes were the type that close, but she couldn’t, so she did her best. When she did that, the others saw the picture in their minds.
“The feathers on the top of its head does look like the picture you drew of the wave,” Pippa agreed.
“This part,” Mandy explained, pointing to the lowest part of the wavy line, “is the trough (TROF).
“It’s called that because a trough is sort of a feeding bowl where several animals can eat at once,” Mandy told them. “The trough of a wave looks sort of like one of those, only my picture is looking at it from the end.”
The dolls looked at the picture Mandy had drawn. Then they imagined sheep lined up along a long feeding trough.
Mandy drew a line through each wave. “Now,” she said, “the distance from one crest to the next one is called the wave length.” She added an arrow from one line to the other to show what she meant.
That’s important, because it changes. If it gets shorter, so the waves are closer together, the crest gets higher and the trough gets lower. As a wave approaches the shore the wave length shortens because the shore or the beach resists the water, so it sort of backs up.”
“We have buoys (BOO-eez) in different places out in the ocean,” Mandy went on. “These buoys can sense when the crest of a wave, remember, that’s the top of the wave, is much higher than usual and the trough of the wave, or the valley between crests, is much lower than usual. If a possible tsunami is detected, people near the ocean where the wave is headed will get a warning, like the siren Sam’s family heard.”
“We have boys out in the ocean?” Pauly asked, concerned.
“Not boys,” Mandy replied. “Buoys (BOO-eez). They’re big floats that are fastened to the bottom of the ocean, so they stay in one place. Some buoys are used to guide ships into a harbor, so they know where it’s deep enough for them, but these are special buoys that have sensors and a way to send the information by way of satellites to people on land who make decisions about our safety.”
“Out at sea,” Mandy went on, “where the ocean floor is very deep, the wave length will be long, and there won't be much difference between the crest and the trough, but when it gets close to the shore, where the ocean bottom is shallow, the wave length gets shorter, making the crest of the waves much taller and the troughs much lower. The wave pulls up the water from the trough and grows bigger and bigger. When it gets big enough, the top topples over.”
“We saw that when we went to the beach,” Pippa reminded Pauly. “The water turned white when it toppled over.”
“It turns white because air mixes in with the water and makes bubbles,” Mandy told them.
Mandy turned the piece of paper over and drew another wave. This time the crest was very, very high, and the trough was very low. The top of the crest was curled over and falling into the trough.
“A tsunami is more like this,” she said. “Waves are very strong things. They can wear away the shore, even rock, over time, but a tsunami is a giant wave, so it can remove everything on the shore all at once.”
“The first thing that happens, though,” Mandy went on, “is the tsunami sucks all the water from the shore, like when the tide is low, but much more. People might think they can walk out on the ocean bottom, but that’s dangerous, because when the tsunami wave comes in, it can sweep them away.”
“So that’s why Holly’s family and the other campers had to leave,” Emil concluded.
Mandy nodded. The other dolls all thought about that.
“Holly wrote the letter after they moved to a safe place,” Emil pointed out, “so we know they’re safe.”
“It’s good that they heard the siren,” Pippa said, “and that they found out what it was about.”
“It’s a good thing they could hear the siren when it went off,” Emil said, thinking to himself that he should not be to near the ocean overnight by himself, because he would not be able to hear the siren when his special glasses were charging.
“A very good thing,” he repeated.
Emil: Götz Happy Kidz Emilia
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Copyright © 2025 by Peggy Stuart
