Quake Fears Bring Us Back Down to Earth

After the shaking has stopped, or merely been put on hold, the speculation starts.

Which is worse, the talk goes, an earthquake or a hurricane, or how about a flood? People tally up their experiences, assess damages and pronounce. They say that’s why they wouldn’t live in Florida or Texas or out here, on the edge.

Then they struggle to come up with a name of a place that is safe.

This is how fear works, lurking behind the bravado and the pretense of control. Fear unites.

This measuring seems important, somehow, in the same way that chatter about the humidity, or the cold, demands a response. It is neighborly, leveling, decidedly human. Is it Nature, is it God or is it Phenomena that is loosening the pins of our lives? People ask such questions in the aftermath, others leave them unsaid.

Psychologists say they can tell something about us by observing how we react when such Big Forces exert their control. They talk of personality types, our different ways of looking at things and how that affects the way that we cope. Or maybe it’s the other way around, maybe the forces define who we are.

It doesn’t seem to matter all that much when the earth starts to convulse.

When an earthquake measuring 8.1 shook Mexico City in September of 1985, I was asleep in the city’s south. The bed danced a bit, then it stopped, and I went back to sleep. I figured it was the cat playing around.

It was 7:19 a.m.; the electricity went out.

Later that day, and for many more days after that, I saw the capricious destruction up close, smelled its stench. All told, about 30,000 people were killed. To this day, I remember some of the faces of the dead. Unclaimed bodies were laid out on ice. Many were buried in a common grave, sprinkled with lye.

I’ve never been quite the same since.

The latest rude awakening, at 4:58 a.m. this Sunday past, sent me stumbling from bed. I needed to check on my daughters; the rattling went on for too long.

Would I throw my body of top of theirs? Would we die? Was this a dream? The house seemed to be listing, like a ship. My daughters didn’t even wake up.

My husband and I listened to the news. The television was a static blur, the cable out.

After the second jolt, at 8:04 a.m., when I held on to my daughters as we watched objects fall from shelves, the baby wide-eyed and the 5-year-old telling me that she’s scared, more people started to call.

“Well?” they wanted to know.

Then we talked about what we felt, where we were, what we thought. It’s not news, really, these words through the phone. Maybe it’s therapy. It’s a connection that we need.

A friend had a picture jump from the wall to her feet, shattering glass in the hall. Others woke their children up, to hold them, to comfort them. Or were they comforting themselves?

My sister, hours to the north, believed it was an opossum that had disrupted her dream. Naturally, she woke her husband. She had seen a shadow, she was sure, and now things were falling from the closet shelf. “Do something!” she said. He went for the dog and a broom, to shoo the creature out, and he left open the sliding glass door. He brought down the ice chest, a makeshift opossum trap.

Hours later, our mother was on the phone. “Did you feel the earthquake?” she asked. This is how my sister and brother-in-law heard the news. A Big Force had sent a phantom opossum to shake them from their sleep.

The ground has been rumbling for days now, punctuated with sharper jolts, as if the speed on a motor were suddenly turned up. The seismologists, ordained in the science of deciphering such earthly moods, said there was a 50-50 chance of another big tremor striking this week. Then they knocked that down to a 30% chance of a whopper coming by the end of the month.

Seismologists like to talk in odds; I wonder if they bet. Their science is relative, they remind us. There is much they do not know. So maybe what they do is really an art.

When the ground shakes, we are left to interpret its meaning on our own.

Is the quaking a warning, or a punishment, or merely the sign of an earth giant turning over in his sleep? Or is it nothing at all, a blip in the Southern California lifestyle best to shrug off? We build our own myths to help fill in the dark holes.

I am reminded that our advanced civilization has much in common with those of more primitive ilk. Fear is the link.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.