Living With Earthquakes
Finding calm in the prospect of catastrophe
I’ve got an app that lets me know whenever there’s an earthquake anywhere in the world that measures bigger than 5.0 on the Richter Scale. It alerts me like a text, and a twinge of excitement for the prospect of catastrophe immediately floods my body.
I click and scroll and Google to figure out, first, where in the world the stricken place is—I am, after all, a sucker for maps and far away places. Then, down the rabbit hole I go as one curious detail inevitably leads to another. There’s something redeeming about this sort of screen time. It feels more vindicating than scrolling social media.
I am fascinated by these sudden and extreme displays of nature. Utterly entranced by our planet’s aloof potential to enact acute and impartial obliteration of life and landscape.
My intrigue isn’t solely reserved for temblors. It’s not uncommon for my wandering mind to play out the possible worst-case scenarios of every day life. For example, what would I do if my tap stopped running? What if I had to flee to the woods for safety? Could I procure my own food from wild sources? Extract a smarting tooth? Sew up a wound? Live off of substantially fewer calories? Strangely, I don't spend much time coming up with answers to these ponderings—I mostly just fantasize about the myriad ways my life could quickly become a wreckage of my own ignorances.
But don’t read too much into this—I don’t live in a constant state of dread. And though I am intrigued by the readiness of preppers, I don’t, unlike my late father, have a stash of neglected weapons in the garage, or a year’s worth of canned goods stockpiled on industrial shelves in the basement. But I am similar to him in my desire for control, which, in my case, is a trauma response to an assortment of childhood misgiving.
Tracking Earth’s seismic action connects me to a part of the planet I’m less familiar with, sparking a deeper interest to learn more about it. But there’s definitely bigger reasons behind my quirky delight for quakes. Distant and abstracted scary things are a whole lot easier to deal with than ones affecting me directly. And spending time watching such events happen from afar, whether calamitous or benign, is a welcome distraction from my own insecurities.
On a sunny weekend in mid-January 1980, my parents arranged a gathering of my friends at The Roller King in Livermore, California. In a private room we ate greasy pizza and squares of a frosted sheet cake, probably double chocolate, until we were full. Then I opened my presents—some kid gave me two sets of Underoos, Spiderman and Batman, which I later learned was a re-gifting of something he’d received for Christmas. Eventually the room became too small for our sugar highs and it was time to skate.
We rolled drunkenly across the gum-stained carpet to the darkened concrete oval lined with handrails and lit by a large disco ball. I carefully stepped into the whorl, gathering balance and speed as I orbited the mesmerizing floor with my buddies, all of us in rented beige skates with extra long laces and dingy, orange wheels.
I stopped for an occasional mouthful of Fanta, and only slowed after the blisters on my heels formed, popped, and dampened my white tube socks. I remember bellyaching, exhausted and incorrigible, as the last kid’s parents arrived at pickup time. “Say thank you, Tommy,” my mom said wide eyed. To which I grumbled a few weary words of gratitude.
The following Thursday, late in the morning, my second grade class had just finished a lesson, math perhaps, and was in the process of transitioning to phonics class. I loved phonics, it was my favorite subject besides art. I specifically enjoyed the cover designs of the workbooks—red, yellow, or green plaid with simple, brutalist lettering. But more than anything I enjoyed playing with the words within.
I was born with an intense desire to look closely. To discover. It thrilled me to dig up arrowheads and artifacts in the dirt, and I was equally enthralled by a similar archaeology of notions, too. I spent many, probably too many, childhood hours scrutinizing concepts far beyond my young age, and never found a comfortable place for my introspections to rest. The apparent result—my nights were riddled with nightmares and my days peppered with bouts of depersonalization and disassociation. My childhood was fine, but also inescapably uncomfortable.
If there’s a definitive reason for these frightening phenomena, it’s lost in my subconscious. Maybe if, back then, I felt I had someone to talk to things would have been different. But my mom was busy, my dad disinterested, my siblings were, well, my siblings, and my pals were more preoccupied with Star Wars or Trans Ams to give a care about my adolescent existential crises. I grew used to feeling isolated and, for the most part, integrated silence into my life.
But phonics offered an uplift. It focused on words, and in words I found solace because they were unambiguous and governed by steadfast rules. There was only one way to spell a word correctly—the outcome of combining letters together was either right or wrong. Back then I viewed sentence structure similarly. I breathed into the predictability of subjects and predicates. Of correctly placed nouns and verbs. Words, to me, communicated plainly. They satisfied a gaping need for structure, for calm, for connection, that was otherwise left unmet. Words were clear and navigable expectations. They were safe.
We settled into our last lesson before lunch. The teacher directed our individual attentions to pages in our workbooks dedicated to the long A sound (ā) and the unstressed, relaxed schwa (ə). And once we were all settled in, the ground began to shake.
I distinctly remember the jolt. It was like a rolling pin had swiped the underside of the tiled floor. We looked to the teacher for guidance. Awaited her command to do what all those drills had engrained. But she sat motionless at her desk, her hands flat on its top, as she stared out the playground-facing windows. “That was an earthquake!” someone blurted. The teacher’s face mellowed. She stood up and told us to get back to work. “Yes, it was an earthquake, but a small one,” she said calmly. “Everything is going to be just fine.”
But as soon has we nosed back into our pages, the room and all it contained turned to rubber. A muffled yet thunderous roar, like a steam engine under water, soundtracked the earthen convulsions. We instinctively threw our bodies under desks as the metal legs leapt and danced unevenly. I watched ceiling tiles crash to the ground. One fell onto an adjacent classmates’s desk and his face exploded into tears. I remember seeing his small teeth and thinking, I don’t even feel like crying.
“Stay under your desks!” our teacher hollered over the melee. And as she said this I noticed a wooden pencil still in my right hand. It was brand new. Minutes earlier I’d cranked the sharpener’s arm and ground the pencil’s flat end to a dart-like point. The rumble continued as I rubbed the pencil’s smooth yellow under my fingers. No bite marks yet. The metallic green trim along the angled edges. I touched the steel end, then the fleshy and geometric eraser head. Something told me this pencil was an important detail. I stared at it until the shaking finally stopped.
On our teacher’s cue, we crawled out from under our desks and lined up at the door. Then she briskly led us to the center of the playground where we took a seat on the blacktop where, every day at lunch, we played hand soccer.
The mainshock, I now know, measured at 5.5 and was centered on the Greenville fault 17k north of town. It was preceded, 90 seconds earlier, by a single 2.5 foreshock. According to a USGS calculator, a magnitude 5.5 event is one thousand times bigger than a 2.5.
The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, then in its heyday of building low-altitude nuclear bombs and megaton warheads for the Peacekeeper ballistic missile, sustained the costliest structural damage (~$10M). At the nearby Sunrise mobile home park, 90 of the 133 trailers fell from their supports.
Over the next month, more than 600 aftershocks shook the Livermore valley. All but one, another 5+, were too small to feel. The quake was deemed significant to seismologists since it had been more than 70 years since anything like it had struck the area.
We sat cross-legged and quiet, waiting for our teacher’s instructions as our shadows disappeared under the midday sky. My eyes grew tired from the playground glare so I closed them and listened to the valley wind blow California winter through tall palms. We all anticipated the same thing—more shaking. We were young, but we knew enough to know more shaking would come.
My teacher approached me, knelt down, and with a tap on my shoulder, softly asked if I would accompany the janitor back into our classroom to secure the bin of lunch pails. “It’s a little precarious right now,” she said, “but you’ll be safe.” I looked around at my classmates who’d been trying to catch her words. “OK” I said. Then I stood up and walked towards the janitor whose beltlooped ring of keys jingled as his palm waved to follow him.
I quickened my stride to catch up as the teacher’s voice echoed in my mind. Precarious. Precarious. I silently noted—It’s spelled P-R-E even though it sounds like P-E-R. I moved my lips to the shapes of its four syllables. PER-CAR-I-OUS. Not spelled like it sounds. Then out loud I repeated my teacher’s words. “You are safe.” Then, “I am safe.”
As I write this essay in the morning hours of March 3rd, my earthquake app dings. A 5.0 just hit the coast of Peru, near Lima. And a few hours before that there was a 5.1 about 250 miles southeast of the island district of Alo, Wallis and Futuna, a French territory in the South Pacific.
Lately I’ve been thinking I really want to see Machu Picchu. So the earthquake restarts my internet dabbling. I check for United flights, and as I price one out for next week I imagine how cool it would be to just pack up and go on a whim. I scramble around my apartment to find my passport and when I do, the moment evaporates and I tuck the booklet back where I found it. I’m not going anywhere.
I switch my focus to the islands. On the smaller of the two there’s a village in the north called Alofitai that historically was a base for tobacco production. A 2003 census lists two people as permanent residents. In 2008, however, the count dropped to one. After browsing a scattering of more recent data, I learn the island is now uninhabited. Alone.
A satellite image shows the solitary, green landmass fringed by powder white beaches. The cobalt ocean turns ashen then turquoise as it touches the sand. I imagine the shells I could find along its deserted beaches and am immediately stirred by an electric flutter in my belly. The conches and cowries, cones and cockles. Gosh, they must be incredible.
I’ve stared at those same islands a few times Tom, and wondered.
Where our ship sails in the western Pacific is a string of volcanic islands, some still active, all uninhabited. I had a fleeting chance to visit one of them on a private yacht (the only way to access it), but it did not happen. We would have been the only people on an island of white sand beaches, coral reefs and tropical jungle, with a difficult, overgrown trail that leads to the steaming crater of a live volcano. I still think about that trip that never happened. I think about it a lot.
Don’t let that passport gather dust my friend.