I remembered the quake as taking place in the afternoon, but I Googled it and learned it occurred at 10:54 am. I was teaching an undergraduate class in Room 154, a state-of-the-art lecture hall of a just-built-to-code campus. The building swayed and swayed and swayed, just like it was supposed to, yet it was unsettling to feel a bit sea-sick on land. I didn’t immediately figure out what was happening, as I’d recently left California, a land where I expected earthquakes, to come to an area of the country I never thought of as having earthquakes. There’s no place to take shelter under a high-tech, multi-media podium, so I went to the doorway. There were too many students to send them under doorways, so I must have sent them under their brand new tables. But I don’t remember telling them to do this. I don’t remember dismissing the class, as I must have, since once you realize the ground is unstable and your lecture hall is in motion, there’s no further pedagogy to pursue.
When the 1994 earthquake hit the San Fernando Valley and reverberated through most of the LA area, I was out running; the fastest way home was to keep running. By the time I returned, the shaking had stopped, so there was no need to get under anything. I did wonder about the windows on the buildings as I was running, but there wasn’t much else to do but go home, even if the city around me wasn’t guaranteed to make it through. The ground acceleration from that quake was what proved most destructive: freeway overpasses buckled and collapsed, businesses, apartments and homes shifted right off their foundations, some without ever having had adequate support for even their first floor.
In my area, most homes lost chimneys, but mine didn’t.
Some of my belongings and appliances took flight and broke; my biggest losses, other than some knick knacks, were a TV that face-planted into the floor and an elegant, long-necked, hand-painted ceramic vase from Les Beaux de Provence. I re-glued it back together – the glue lines are obvious and it looks more awful as time goes on, as the glue has turned to yellow and brown and there are bits and chunks of it still missing, and, true to fate, it’s broken a few more times so it boasts clunky repairs of repairs. But I salvaged this piece because its unique shape keeps a memory alive of a long-ago trip to Provence. My neighbor, an elderly potter, lost almost all of her hand- and wheel-thrown pots, a lifetime of her creative energy. Not a thing of hers could be salvaged. The inequities of loss were surprising.
So this year is the 10-year “anniversary” of the 2001 quake. My son did the math and figured out that he was in my belly when that quake happened. I have no memory of being pregnant during the earthquake, which, given that I was in my last trimester, the 31st week of a 41½ week pregnancy, you’d think I’d remember that part of it. There wasn’t a waking moment that I forgot being pregnant – so it’s quite odd that in the 10 years that have passed, the only times I’ve remembered the quake I remembered me as if I was only me. I didn’t remember what I must have felt – the fear that any of my stress from the event could have endangered my unborn child. I was certainly worried about other things during the pregnancy, so the possibility of me not being worried about this is inherently impossible. But I don’t remember it.
I remember running to my car to get out of the parking garage before it was “red tagged” – using my learning from the earlier quake as to how quickly parking structures were closed down to check for damage, and the second they were closed, you couldn’t get your car out. You were trapped in whatever part of town your car was in, which is possibly worse than being in your car crawling home with every other panicked citizen, convinced that what they are going home to is more important than what any other driver in any other car is going home for, so aggression and ruthlessness ruled the roads. I have only remembered the part of me in the lecture hall, and me heading out to my car, and the sense of victory that I made it out before they stopped all cars from leaving. And that I couldn’t call my folks right away, as the overwhelming phone activity in and out of the area pretty much shut down communication. I don’t recall what happened when I returned home, nor how long it took me to get there. I don’t have a single memory of which items fell off the walls and shelves, and what got broken. Perhaps nothing? Were classes cancelled for the rest of the week? I don’t recall.
Not long after, my personal life shook and swayed, then ruptured wide open; I plummeted to the mantle between my own outer crust and core. The ground acceleration surpassed my ability to hold on. I let go. I scrambled to get out before being trapped in a structure that would collapse around me, or being swallowed alive in the cavernous breach. Nothing built around me could sustain the movement, the turbulence of the shake up, and sadly, nothing much lasted after the fault line erupted. Shards and broken bits, mainly, except for a fierce sense of having survived, internally, intact. My memory of this quake is indelible.
Despite living through two major earthquakes, I don’t think of myself as an earthquake person. Tornadoes were the natural disaster of my youth, and I have spent more time than I cared to in a basement waiting out tornado warning sirens. Many of these tornado watches and warnings occurred before my parents refinished the basement, so it felt more like the black and white Kansas desolation Dorothy avoided by heading to Oz. I’ve not lived through a hurricane, or flooding, or forest fires that encroach, but a friend of mine was hit by lightning. I imagine there’s no place anyone lives where there isn’t some form of destructive natural phenomena, so I can’t be unique in living through some.
My son is about to be 10 years old. Ten years is the time it took to grow him into the person he is. Ten years is the time it took for my parents to shift from being late-middle-aged, in their 60’s, to old age, in their 70’s. Every adult reading this entry has lived the last ten years, too, and has their own sense of their own hallmark shifts, changes, and tectonic plate movements, let alone the natural disasters they’ve lived through. In these ten years, I have created a mosaic from the broken pieces, shards and holes left from the geographical and emotional earthquakes I’ve gone through. I imagine that everyone I encounter has their own life mosaic – very few of us will live through decade after decade without something shattering, breaking, falling away, being lost to us forever, fundamentally altering our initial selves.
Maybe it’s the glue that makes us stronger - that and our conviction that certain pieces of our lives are worth gluing and repairing and others are worth walking away from – that the act of repairing and rebuilding makes us stronger, more solid and sturdy than we are in our original, naïve, unbroken (youthful) selves. We even come to learn that we will go through many unexpected shifts and movement – the ground will, in fact, shake during our lives - and that we won’t necessarily fall completely through the rabbit hole each time. I now know that I can rebuild after great, unexpected losses, and that I didn’t become bitter or reclusive or afraid to live life fully. I might die in a disaster, but until the moment I am gone, I will build and rebuild a life that make sense to me.
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