The Ups and Downs of Matchlessness

Mind you, one should never denigrate the power of an earthquake. My mother’s mother used to tell about a good shake in the ‘30’s that hit so hard that her tall, glass-fronted bookcase swayed out from the wall. Its doors flew open, spewing books onto the floor. My grandmother quickly jumped into a doorway (that being the wisdom of the time). She shut her eyes, waiting for the crash, but another swift jolt caused the bookcase to jerk back against the wall with a bang, and that was it. The quake was over.

I remember myself as a teenager, sitting poolside when another quake hit, this time a gentle shake, but long enough to make a little water splash up over the coping. That, oddly enough, scared me more than the story of the teetering bookcase. A shake indoors can be many things: the furnace coming on, or a truck rumbling by, or your brother pounding his feet against a wall. But when you’re sitting outdoors on good old Mother Earth and she begins to dance around enough to splash water out of the swimming pool, you take notice.

My father’s mother often recounted the 1906 quake and fire that leveled San Francisco. She was living in Oakland at the time, and she watched as the city across the water went up in flames. A few days later, a group of her friends took the ferry over to look at the damage, but her doctor would not allow her to make the trip, because she was pregnant. Exactly four months later, she gave birth to my father, who, despite her fears, was not “marked” by the experience at all, unless you can count his rather casual attitude toward earthquakes. They were, he claimed, not nearly as frequent as tornadoes or hurricanes, and usually did far less damage.

I find myself wondering what he would have to say about The Big One predicted to occur within the next 50 years. The last big jolt in 1989 was strong enough to break the San Francisco Bay Bridge, just minutes after a beloved cousin had crossed it on her way home from work. The television coverage from that event had me in tears, because anyone from the San Francisco Bay Area loves all her bridges, even the rather pedestrian (and some say ugly) portion of the Bay Bridge which broke.

My other grandparents were back east at the time of the ’06 quake. Since the wires were down, they could not reach anyone in San Jose (their home) by telephone or telegraph, so they just jumped on the first train west. When they got to Oakland five or six days later, they managed to hire a rig to take them down the eastern side of San Francisco Bay to San Jose. Looking at the damage around them en route, they feared that their house might not be standing, but when they arrived there, it looked fine — except that there was someone living in it. My grandfather’s cousin had been in San Francisco at the time of the quake, and survived it. However, he couldn’t find a way to get back north to his home in Alturas, 200 + miles away, so he had walked the 25 miles south to San Jose. Finding Grandfather’s house empty, he simply broke in and helped himself to food and shelter. My grandmother’s only comment was: “Well, bless his heart, he even watered the garden!”

As I write this, there is a large hurricane building in the Caribbean, and our forecasters are telling us that it may well take aim at the Southeastern coastline of the US. No doubt the folks who live at the beach are scurrying to protect themselves and their homes, boarding up windows and preparing to move to temporary shelters. The ones who refuse to leave will be stocking up on batteries and fresh water and food that won’t spoil when the electricity is out. Preparing for a potentially disastrous storm is the dark side of living at the coast. But the rest of the year when no hurricane threatens, and the sun glints off the water, and the waves crash down and then recede in hissing foam, and the sky above is wide and glorious, surely the chance to live by the sea overrides potential dangers.

Ms. Dickinson had it right: Mother Earth is indeed matchless, no matter our occasional distress when she asserts her right to do as she wishes. Whether you believe in the creation of mankind by a divine hand or by a series of evolutional improvements over a one-celled ancestor, it behooves the human heart to be grateful for our blue bubble of a planet, hanging here in space and allowing us life.

Hurricane Image courtesy of Mike Trenchard, Earth Sciences & Image Analysis Laboratory , Johnson Space Center.

Virginia 2011 Earthquake Shakemap from USGS

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The Ups and Downs of Matchlessness

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