There was a morning after

We joked on our cruise that neither "Titanic'' nor "The Poseidon Adventure'' would be among the movies shown on our ship's giant outdoor screen. Neither were.

But I still got an unsettled feeling in my stomach reading today about the earthquake in Haiti that set off tsunami warnings around the Caribbean.

As I recall, it was an earthquake in the Mediterranean that set off a tsunami that flipped over the "S.S. Poseidon'' in the first version of the movie from the '70s. (The more recent remake told the same story, but with better special effects.)

I remember a closeup of the horror on the face of the captain in the movie as a giant wave bore down on the hapless ship. In the movie, the wall of water capsized the vessel, making Gene Hackman, Shelly Winters, Carol Linley and the other stars of the show climb up to the bottom before being rescued. Fortunately it didn't sink until they were safely off. Whew.

I wouldn't have wanted to try to climb up through the 17 decks of our ship to get to the bottom. It was hard enough to figure out where to go when it was right-side up. We only got fore and aft straight on the last couple of days we were aboard.

Turns out there wasn't too much for cruise-ship passengers to worry about this time. The tsunami warnings were canceled pretty quickly. It seems that for some reason the phenomenon is more prevalent in the Pacific than in other bodies of water. One web site said that in any event in the middle of the ocean the waves typically pass unnoticed under ships and don't do any damage until they break onto shore.

So the misery caused by the earthquake was limited to many of the 9 million people who live in Haiti, who had enough trouble to begin with.