FAULTY GROUND
Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash
I have a friend who grew up on the East Coast who during her wild and party-loving youth took a job teaching grade school in a small town outside Bakersfield, California. One school morning, she woke up with no one but herself and some particularly choice home-distilled tequila to blame for the fact that she felt like a parched rat crawling through a sewer, and bravely and resignedly dragged herself to work.
She struggled through the day, and it was just at the end of it when the full wave hit her. It was, she says, the worst hangover attack she could ever remember. Her vision swayed, even the ground seemed to rock, and for one terrible moment she thought she might lose her footing, right there in front of her pupils.
My Yankee friend is a steely soul. “You brought this on yourself,” she reminded herself silently, “and you will not give in to it. You are here to teach these children, and no matter how you feel, that is exactly what you will carry on doing.”
She finished the lesson, bade a dignified good afternoon to her class, and made her way home to lie in a darkened room for the rest of the night. The next morning, when she walked into the school, both staff and children were staring at her in fascination and something horribly close to approaching awe. My friend’s stomach sank. Oh, lord, she thought miserably, what on earth did I do or say yesterday to give myself away?
At last, a fellow teacher approached her.
“Is it true what the kids are saying?” he said. “That you were able to keep on teaching clear through the earthquake?”
British people sometimes ask me how I can bear to live with the daily risk of earthquakes. The answer is the one most Angelenos would give: that, although I obviously take reasonable precautions, like not living in a brick building, and not keeping a framed picture above my bed where it might fall on me, I don’t really worry about them.
Yes, they’re a constant risk, but then there are risks everywhere. If you go to the city, you might be run over by a car; if you go to the country, you might – or so my irredeemably urban imagination cautions me – be attacked by a homicidal maniac leaping from a bush, brandishing a machete, and screaming “Death to evil-doers who defy the Green Lord of the Cornfield!” and no one would be able to stop them because no one would be there to see. (I don’t go to the country very often). We’re all of us on some level in danger all the time; and my feeling is that if we’re going to live in a world so uncertain as ours, we might as well do so within easy reach of the Pacific Ocean.
Most earthquakes are mild, anyway, a simple little juddering of the coffee cup on the table to remind you that you’re living in California, and maybe a blink-and-you-miss-it power outage: as often as not, the only way we will know one has happened is that the electric clock on the oven will need to be re-set.
My own first earthquake experience was actually quite pleasant. Strangely, I grew up quite accustomed to having the house shake while I was in bed; and before anyone begins to imagine some luridly technicolored private life for my usually sober and unfailingly churchgoing parents, I must explain that the garden of my childhood home backed onto the little local railway line, whose trains would cause the house to shudder gently as they passed: during the day, this slight disturbance provided scant competition for the clamor produced by the five Donnelly children and their late and sainted mother, but at night it was the coziest feeling in the world to lie tucked up safely in the darkness, feel the train going past, and know that out in the world were brightly lit railway carriages carrying adults to the all manner of exciting and sophisticated grown-up experiences that lay along the line from Hertford North to King’s Cross via Palmers Green.
So when, late one night a quarter century later and five and a half thousand miles away, I awoke to feel that familiar vibration of the bedroom floor, it felt like nothing so much as the late train chugging by, and the associations it brought were none but happy ones. Earthquakes last only a matter of seconds; and by the time I had figured out what was really going on, it was over.
By far the most frightening earthquake I have ever been in was the infamous Northridge Quake, which happened on January 17 1994, at 4.30 in the morning. That was a considerably different matter from a mild vibration: it measured 6.7 on the Richter scale – for comparison, the disastrous San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was estimated at 7.9, and anything from 6.1 to 6.9 is regarded as serious – and lasted for an uncharacteristically long 10-20 seconds. This was long enough for me, not only to leap from my bed to the doorway – which, as every native Californian has learned with imbibing their mother’s milk, is the sturdiest part of the house – but, unusually, to register fully what was happening and to experience what I admit was brief terror as the ground shook violently, the night turned pitch black, and a furious invisible hand tore books from tables and pictures from walls, scattering a sea of broken glass across the floor.
The fear didn’t last long. As soon as the ground had quieted itself, I tiptoed gingerly but safely back to bed in my bare feet, and lay there, shaken but snug in the darkness, until the morning’s light could reveal where the broken glass lay. Outside, neighbors began to congregate with flashlights, checking on each other and comparing notes; a few of them came to rest outside my window and we all kept each other company until dawn. It was really quite sociable.
The situation could not have unfolded like that had Mr. Los Angeles been in my life at the time. Now that I live with Mr. Los Angeles I am sternly forbidden even to think of hitting the hay without a pair of sturdy and waterproof shoes standing at attention by my bedside for just such an eventuality. Mr. Los Angeles is not only a native Angeleno but a former Boy Scout, and to say he takes earthquake preparedness seriously is to comment that Dolly Parton likes to gussy herself up at times.
We have in our garden shed shelves upon shelves of canned hypothetically edible excrescences such as Spam and creamed chipped beef, which he assures me I will be only too happy to consume should the necessity arise. We have enough bottled water stored to swim to Japan and possibly back. We have a chest of medical supplies that would impress Marcus Welby himself. We have a tent should the house collapse. We have – this a particular source of pride – a post hole digger (ask Mr. Los Angeles, not me). Mr. Los Angeles regularly inspects his troops and checks them off on a lengthy list he has drawn up that has been consulted by everyone who is anyone in town, from visiting actors to high court judges. Mr. Los Angeles is ready.
Somewhat to Mr. Los Angeles’ disconcertment, this is not how I approach the threat of natural disaster myself. In my family, we took the particularly Irish view that the Almighty is an eccentric individual with a sense of humor all of His own; and that since His omniscience knows no outwitting, there is little point is preparing oneself here in this world for anything in particular but the prospect of meeting Him one day in the next. In my family, if a tornado had blown the roof off the house, we would have spent the rest of our lives sitting philosophically under a collection of umbrellas, occasionally remarking idly, “Remember when there used to be a roof up there?” before turning to more pressing concerns. Mr. Los Angeles tells me that one day I might well be very grateful for his forethought; and Mr. Los Angeles is very probably correct.
However, as every cloud has a silver lining, so experiencing an earthquake – supposing that you survive it with life and spirit more or less intact – can have its side benefits too. It can, for instance, be most useful in putting priorities into order. I had a friend, an older man and not spontaneous by nature, who on the morning of the Northridge quake, crawled out of the rubble of his mostly ruined apartment, climbed into his car, and drove clear across town to bring breakfast bagels and a marriage proposal to his lady friend, with whom he lived happily ever after. I know of at least one other couple who, standing together in the doorway while the earth shook, realized that their life together was finished. I knew of several who decided that Los Angeles was not for them and moved somewhere else. An earthquake is a great clarifier of thought.
It is also a unifying factor. In the week or so after the Northridge quake, we were all of us somehow more tender with each other than usual, asking each other how we were, how we had fared during the night, how we were feeling now. It was a welcome note of sweetness in a city that, like all big cities, can too often be brisk and brash.
On the other hand, that can sometimes backfire. A few days after Northridge, I had a visit from a British journalist friend, in town to do some interviews. I picked him up at the airport, settled him into the spare room, and we were halfway through the first glass of wine when my friend Patty called me on the telephone.
“Oh, hello, Patty,” I said, solicitously, as we were all addressing each other that week. “Are you OK?”
My journalist friend, who is a droll sort, slammed down his glass in mock horror at the interruption.
Patty was fine, she said, but her two kittens had been scared out of their lives.
“Oh, dear,” I said, diplomatically expressing that little extra touch of sympathy as I knew I would have to cut the conversation short. “Poor little things, that must be so frightening!”
Across the coffee table, my yuck-a-muck journalist friend glared at me in pretend outrage. I smiled in a conciliatory manner and motioned to him to wait.
And the worst of it, added Patty, was that because they were cats, she hadn’t been able to explain to them what was happening.
“It’s miserable, isn’t it?” I agreed, still sympathetically. “Just terrifying. But you’re OK, are you?”
Oh, Patty was fine.
My friend pretended to reach for the receiver. He was making something of a show out of it, I thought, but then he was jet-lagged.
“Well, that’s good at least,” I said. “But, oh, lord, that sounds like a nightmare, poor things. Patty, I have to go, can I call you back later?”
I finished the conversation and turned cheerfully back to my friend. Whose face, I now observed, was ashen.
It was only then that I remembered there were at the time two Patricias in my life, of both of whom I was, and remain, extremely fond. That one of them called herself Patty and was a dance instructor in Santa Monica. And that the other, who went by the more controversial Patti, was a mathematics lecturer at London University.
And that she was also my friend’s wife and the mother of their three small children. Back in London, where it was then 2.30 in the morning.
“That was a different Patty,” I told my friend. “Uhm … sorry?”
“I’ll have another glass of wine now,” he replied, not especially warmly.