I have a nice comfy bed. Small, but soft and cozy. However, our beautiful relationship was ruined last night, in the early hours, when the bed started to shake quite noticeably, just as I was trying to read a bit and unwind. All the peace and quiet you expect of your bed replaced by terror. The very awful moment you don’t know if you’re going to die or the bloody tremor is going to stop and there’s basically nothing you can do about it. We like to think we’re control of our little lives and we have the power to shape our tomorrow only to realize there might not be a tomorrow. As for being a good parent and protecting your children, forget about it. The best I could do was to inform my son, in a remarkably calm voice, that it’s an earthquake, followed by a steady string of fuck, fuck, fuck, just to let the earth know I’m totally pissed and I expect it to stop this nonsense. It didn't do any damage, but when you're in the middle of it you don't know that.
Living in an earthquake-prone country I must have heard a million times what are you supposed to do in such a situation. Like taking refuge under a door or lying down beside a solid piece of furniture. We didn’t move though, because I don’t really trust all that expert advice. Really, I live on the 3rd floor and there are other five concrete floors above me. If the building is going down, we’re screwed anyway. Just like on a plane - if it’s going to crash knowing how to put on a stupid oxygen mask won’t make any difference.
Picture from the quake in Italy a few years ago
I’m not a panicky person, but earthquakes always scare me. It’s an acquired fear, going back to my childhood and the experience of a devastating tremor, way bigger than the 5.8 magnitude of the quake last night. The big quake of ‘77, I did not actually witness the devastation, I did not see the buildings reduced to a pile of rubbish, but I do have very vivid memories of the panic that night, the people too scared to go back inside, desperate to get news of their loved ones living in other parts of the city. Even if I didn’t understand much of what was going on, I understood the panic. And much of that panic had to do with the adults around me having vivid memories of another big quake, sometime in the 1940s, a time when my own mother was but a child. It’s all down to survival instincts - those going through a terrible experience like a powerful earthquake learn that it can be deadly, hence the fear. How many times can you trick fate after all?
We all have our fears - hurricanes, mudslides, powerful blizzards, volcanoes, whatever happens to be deadly in your part of the world, you know the devastation it can bring and the only thing you can do is hope to make it through.
A natural catastrophe is also a moment when we’re reminded that no matter how advanced we think of ourselves as a civilization there are mighty forces out of our control and so many things we don’t understand. We’re no better than an ant colony crushed to death by a boy running in a field.
As always in scary situations there’s a lot of talk the quake was predicted months ago by someone and the moon was full or red or something. My first reaction is usually ‘yeah, right’, but come to think of it yes, it is possible the moon phase might play a role we don’t understand. Maybe not, maybe it has to do with something going on deep inside the earth, how are we to know what’s in there? Going over the news I appreciate the experts that have the decency to say that ‘well, we don’t know when the Big One will strike, we don’t know what triggers a quake’. All we really have is educated guesses. Probably, by the time we get our planet all figured out we, as a species, will get to witness some cosmic event in the face of which we will be as powerless as we are know when confronted to natural disasters.
The only good thing about an earthquake is that there’s absolutely no shame in pouring yourself a drink at 4 am. What else is there to do? And anyway, you deserve a little celebration as you survived. Again.
By the way, I feel there should be a law against quakes striking at night, not only because it’s way scarier, but you also lose sleep.
