Permission is granted to make one printed copy for personal/non-commercial use only.
Permission is granted to make one copy and one backup copy on electronic storage media, for personal/non-commercial use only, as long as these electronically stored copies are accessible to a single personal computer only, and are not accesible from a network of any kind, including the Internet and World Wide Web.
Any reproduction of this material must include this copyright notice.
Written permission from the author is required for further reproduction, by any method.
I was jolted awake by my bed rocking, cats flying, car alarms, and glass shattering. "This is the big one", I thought, detached, calm, riding the first seconds out on the bed, still sleep numb and slow to move out into the hall where four doorways meet and the roof would be less likely to fall in on me. It was pitch dark. Lights all over the city were out. It sounded like all the glass in the world was breaking.
When the floor stopped shaking I found a flashlight, and more importantly shoes. I put on a robe and went out into the rubble. A ceramic pitcher I kept on top of the living room bookshelves lay shattered on the floor mingled with pieces of the ceramic clown my sister and her husband had given me the opening night of Sawdust In My Shoes. My stereo/CD player was on the ground. Two shelves of Time Life cookbooks had crashed down en masse between the living room and kitchen.
But the living room was nothing. The epicenter of the January quake was in Northridge, but my own personal epicenter was in the kitchen. The cupboard doors had popped open and the glasses and spices had marched out in neat rows to shatter on the counter and floor below, leaving only a few stragglers poised at the edge. Most of the plates were heavy enough that they stayed put although a number of bowls followed the glasses. Some even survived the fall. The kitchen floor was covered inches deep in broken glass. It was God's way of cleaning my shelves of all the mismatched glasses and cups. However, it really was unneccessary to include the bottle of barbecue sauce. Sweeping up broken glass is one thing, but sweeping up broken glass with a zingy tomatoey glaze is another.
To my office. Easier said than done. The bookcase for software manuals had fallen across the doorway and into my bicycle. I climbed over the barricade, glad that I had bolted the other three bookshelves onto the walls. But most importantly the computer was still on the desk and the desk was standing. The monitor had tipped off the front of the computer but it wasn't broken. The synthesizer was still on its stand. A test of the sliding closet door showed that everything inside had fallen from the shelves onto the floor.
As I surveyed the destruction I also searched for my cats. I found Pita and Panipat under the bed. Punchinello was nowhere to be found. I made the rounds of the apartment again, calling for him, but couldn't find him. The left bottom corner of the living room window had broken out, a wicked eight inch high upside down "V" of glass guarding the bottom of it.
A disaster always makes me feel the need for human companionship, a need to share the experience, to breath a communal sigh of relief. I dressed and went out into the courtyard. That is where the tenants gathered. Someone brought a big battery powered lamp and a radio. We listened to find out just what had happened to us. It wasn't the big one. Big enough but not the big one. The San Andreas still groaned in its sleep. It was a local fault this time. I was nervous about Punchinello. I stayed outside awhile then went back in to look for him. Out then in, out then in, that's how I spent the still dark hours. Everyone was nervous, joking, some very frightened, frightened more as the aftershocks hit. I finally went back inside to clean out my kitchen. It was still pitch black. I swept with a broom in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I told myself that I didn't want to face it in the daylight but it was just nerves. I had to do something.
Daylight came. Still no Punchinello. I thought about my computers at work and decided to go check them out. It is only a fifteen minute drive. My neighbors asked me to look for cigarettes and batteries. In a disaster a smoker thinks about cigarettes before anything. There were cars on the road but not many. Plate glassed business fronts were broken out everywhere. At work I found the security manager guarding the entrance. Power was still off. There were no lights. I had to sign in before going to look at my lab. Pieces of false ceiling littered the floor in the offices outside my lab but the lab was in great shape. Just one manual had fallen out of the bookshelves. I unplugged everything to protect it from freaky surges once power was restored. There was nothing more to do. I found an open convenience store on my way home. The batteries and cigarettes made me a hero back in the courtyard.
The vacant lot at the end of the block across from our building was filling up with tents. Mostly first generation Mexican emigrants from the apartment house across the street who don't trust building codes. The tents didn't all disappear until the rains came, a week or two later.
The sun moved on and by the time it stood poised directly overhead the courtyard gathering began to look like a party. Beer and wine were rescued from debris littered kitchens. A bottle of champagne appeared. After we worked our way through what we had on hand we found a corner convenience store that was open. People lined up at the gated door. You couldn't go in. You handed your money in through the bars and your selections were handed back out. The electricity was still off. We had no television. The rest of the country knew more and had seen more than we had. Refrigerators were growing warm. The best plan seemed to be to cook and eat everything before it went bad. So the great earthquake party was born. The grills were fired up. Of course that's when the electricity came back on, but we didn't let that stop us.
Punchinello was still missing. There was only one way out of the apartment. The broken window. The inverted "V" of glass would have eviscerated him had he misjudged his leap. I searched again and again under the beds and in the piles of rubble in the closets but couldn't find him. I tried outside, walking around and calling for him. I would stop in the courtyard for awhile, join the party, but then would get restless and search again.
He turned up in mid afternoon. I was out searching around the complex for another tenant's cat when he came back to the courtyard and headed for my apartment door. He snuck along the edge of the courtyard, past all the people, and up the stairs to my apartment. He tried to run when he found the door closed but Dawn, my neighbor, stopped him and let him in. Imagine a cat's eye view of an earthquake. You are sound asleep, stretched out on the warm covers between your master's legs. Suddenly the world shakes, and shakes again, and won't stop shaking. You fly off of the bed with the other cats. Your object is to be somewhere else, anywhere else, and to do it as fast as you can. You race into the living room. Glasses are crashing down in the kitchen. Something sails from the sky and shatters in the middle of the floor. You race the other direction. You leap up on the stereo. Another shake and it crashes out from under you. There is a gap in the window. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. You sail through the gap, lithe, yellow, a feline arc flying fifteen feet to the ground. Hitting it and never looking back. You run and you run until you find something to hide under. The earth shakes again and you run again. Shake, run, and hide. Shake, run, and hide. Finally the earth stops moving and you stop. Maybe you're in familiar territory, maybe not. Maybe you're a little farther from home than you've ever been before. But wherever you are you are under something, you are hidden, and you are safe --- and you can't hear me when I call. I'm glad I let my cats out. At least when Punchinello made his dash he was familiar with the territory and was able to find his way back.
With Punchinello back I had no more worries. What if the earth shook? I laughed at the earth. We partied into the night. We were lucky. One of the great barbecues of all time. The meat sizzled. The wine flowed. Occasionally the earth gave a little shake, like a dog twitching in its sleep. I have pictures of the earthquake party. There is a frenzied, desperate look to the faces --- and relief. Faces of people that had been jolted awake and thrown to the edge of the world, staring wide-eyed over the brink. But each minute the ground seemed steadier and the edge of the world seemed farther away. We grilled, and laughed, and joked, and drank, turning fear into a celebration.
Gregg Writes
| 1989 | Besieged | Claire de Lune |
|---|
| 1992 | Flood --- Riot --- Earthquake! |
|---|
| 1993 | * Gregg and the Trail Bike * | A Stabbing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under a Full Moon | Burt Rutan | I Meet a Bear | |
| 1994 | * 7.2! * | A Star Is Born | * My Car Is Stolen * |
|---|
| 1995 | This Year I Flew Like A Bird |
|---|
Contact me by e-mail. You are 7.2! reader