Rolling with the aftershocks
While I get absolutely no joy from other people's fear, I have to say reactions by Right Coast folks to the earthquake on April 5 had me in stitches and taking a trip down memory lane with Manhattan Jake.
About a month ago, having nothing to do with any setting I deliberately changed, I started getting Facebook post notifications on my computer and phone. Most of the time, like 99.99% of the time, it's really annoying. Honestly, why would anyone feel the need to be immediately notified about the cute thing someone's dog, cat, child or gerbil just did or the fabulous Bloody Mary, taquito or flan someone just ate that they'd want to know in real time and constantly be interrupted by alerts? No one, including me, that I know of. Really gotta figure out how to change that setting.
Anyway, on April 5 just a bit after three o'clock my devices started dinging nonstop. It was so pervasive, I honestly thought World War III had started but, as it turned out, it was just a bunch of New Yorkers marking themselves “safe from the 4.8 magnitude earthquake” centered in New Jersey. Really? Seriously? A 4.8? That would register as no more than a blip on Left Coast resident's radar.
What tickled me though were the other posts and memes that came in quick succession including photos of knocked-over lawn chairs, garbage cans and traffic cones, all with the ever so NY attitude caption: “We will rebuild!”
One clever person harkened back to the 2003 Disney film “Freaky Friday,” when an earthquake follows Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis' characters switching bodies, and posed the question, “Does anyone have eyes on Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan?”
While I thought it was much ado about not much, it did occur to me that Manhattan Jake's younger brother — a life-long New York resident, unlike his sister, Manhattan Jake, who has been a California resident for more than four decades — might not have ever experienced a quake before and could possibly have been all shook up so, I called her to check on his status.
He was, in fact, if not all shook up, a bit shaken though, apparently, his rescue dog, Syd, was “faaaa-reeeaaaked ooooout.” His biggest question, Jake told me, was, “How do you know when you should get under a desk or table?” A perfectly legit question for a non-Californian, earthquake preparedness trained person.
“Did you tell him, `As soon as you realize it's not a truck that hit your house?'” I asked. “That's exactly what I told him,” she said.
“Did you tell him that the aftershocks can last for days and can sometimes be a bigger magnitude than the original quake? And that they come in different forms — rollers and jolts?” I asked. She confirmed she had but added, “I don't really think that made him feel any better.” He said this earthquake was a “jolter” and stated emphatically it was a West Coast experience he could have lived without. Yeah, I can get that.
The New York earthquake and her brother's reaction to it led the two of us into a “do you remember that earthquake in…?” conversation.
We both recalled the rolling earthquake that hit when we were in college. One minute we were sitting on one side of the classroom and the next, we'd been pitched into a tangled jumble of classmates and chair desks on the other side of the room. The screaming lasted longer than the event and brought a whole new meaning to the what to do during a quake rule “get under a desk.”
The biggest one we experienced together though came in '85 or '86. Jake was working in San Francisco's financial district as an editor for a legal documents publishing company with offices on the 30th floor. I was working in Hayward as an editor of technical publications at the corporate headquarters of a computer retail store franchise company with cubicleonly offices in a converted 30,000-square-foot warehouse.
We were talking on the phone about the evening's plans in these two very different environments when the quake struck. I was standing up. She was sitting down. Neither of us stayed in those positions. Still holding our respective phones, I was knocked off my 3-inch high heels, and she was knocked out of her chair.
Through my end of the phone, I could hear the cacophony of car alarms, triggered by the earth's sudden movement, sounding from the vehicles parked in crowded streets around her building. Through her end of the phone, she could hear all the potted plants perched on the tops of cubicle halfwalls crashing down. We both heard the screaming and then an eerie silence as the phone went dead.
It took a very frightening 30 or so minutes for me to get back through to Jake on the jammed phone lines.
When I was able to get a ring instead of a fast-busy, Jake answered (much to my relief) immediately and without so much as a hello, she said, “That's it! We're not going dancing tonight. We leave for New York at six o'clock. I've already bought the tickets.”
And, that, is how I got to take my first trip to
New York. Best earthquake ever.