|
|
|
|
|
Like so many others around the world, I've been moved these past six days by the plight of the people of Haiti. No more so, of course, than I was moved by the images and stories following the horrible tsunami in 2004 or Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the terrible earthquake in China in 2008. Something about the notion that buildings, entire cities even, can be destroyed in mere seconds is just unfathomable and infinitely mesmerizing to me.
I'm fully aware that my fixation and fascination with natural disasters stems from my own experience during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which I've written about before here and here.
I do not know what it's like to be without food or water or to be forced to live outdoors because my home has been destroyed. I don't know what it's like to suffer the gut-wrenching loss of my parents or siblings or children to such a horrific disaster. I don't know what it's like to truly suffer the consequences of a disaster on the scale of a Katrina or of an earthquake powerful enough to flatten my city to rubble.
But I do know what it's like to feel the kind of fear that only someone who has survived a significant disaster can attest to.
Yesterday marked 16 years since the powerful earthquake that rocked L.A. and changed my life. Haiti's earthquake measured about four times larger than our Northridge quake and yet the damage was substantially more extensive, for obvious reasons--California spends more on earthquake retrofitting of buildings, highways and infrastructure than the entire GDP of some countries.
Still, the 6.8 that shook L.A. in 1994 caused considerable damage to my parents' house, where I had returned home to live temporarily just a few months before. I was 22 and I took pride in my sense of fearlessness--at that age, even the smartest of us can tend toward carelessness. I sped in my car without a seatbelt, I ate and drank things I shouldn't, I took meds without reading the labels, I experimented with sex and drugs and laughed when I considered how I disputed my own intelligence and common sense when it came to taking care of myself. I was intrepid, but sensible, in that I knew how and when to look over my shoulder.
But being jolted out of bed at 4:31 in the morning by the world violently shaking beneath my bed--that was enough to turn me into a stuttering shell of a young woman in seconds. I know what it's like to feel like I am about to die. As I cowered beneath books and furniture being hurled across my room, landing on top of me, I felt the terror of imagining the entire house would come crashing down any minute and do me in. I know what it's like to fear that my beloved family members, experiencing the same ferocious shaking in their own beds, might not survive the fallout. I know the fear that comes with the sickening silence of the seconds just after the quake, before we called out to each other.
And yet, our house remained standing.
When I saw the initial images of Haitians gathering in the streets, setting up tents and makeshift shelters, I was reminded of how my parents, my brother and I set up camp in our backyard--making toast and coffee on a little outdoor grill while we rode out the first of dozens of aftershocks. We stayed outdoors for the next 3-4 days, sleeping in our cars on the driveway while aftershocks continued to rumble through our house. My mom and I wandered our neighborhood at all hours with our sleepless golden retriever, Skylar. We met neighbors we'd never spoken to before--families, like ours, sleeping in their driveways or in tents on their front lawns, using flashlights to navigate indoors, walking across broken glass or toppled furniture to get to the bathroom.
In the daylight hours, we'd sift through the mess that remained in our house, but none of us felt safe enough to stay indoors overnight without electricity and with the threat of aftershocks doing further damage while we slept.
Still, we had food. We had water. We had toilets we could flush with buckets of water from our swimming pool. We could bathe. We had radios with batteries and cars with fuel and working engines we could run to keep us warm at night. We had no streetlights or TV or open supermarkets, but our week of inconvenience was nothing that could be described as desolation.
What I can relate to is the lack of communication family members and friends have been coping with in Haiti. (Or, at least my sister can. She was studying abroad in England when the earthquake hit and--upon seeing images on the news of the quake in her hometown 6,000 miles away--could not reach any of us by phone for a frantic couple of days.)
So, I can relate. And yet I can't. The magnitude of death and despair and desperate need for food, water and medical care are far beyond the realm of anything I can imagine. And yet the fear--that's something I know. I know the terror that explodes from within at the first rumbling of an aftershock. I know how hard it is to forget that deafening sound of the earth fiercely shaking, walls shifting, glass breaking, alarms and sirens going off, transformers exploding and fires burning across the city.
I know how it feels to wonder if you'll ever feel normal again, ever be able to go to sleep at night without the fear of being jerked awake (though one stroke of luck for the Haitians was that the quake happened in broad daylight--most won't have the added element of fear of darkness). I was always somewhat of an anxious person and I am well aware of the L.A. earthquake's effect on my general anxiety level. It changed my emotional and mental landscape, to be certain. But in spite of the fear I lived with for so long, I am fortunate enough to have walked away physically unscathed, as did my loved ones.
If only the people of Haiti could say the same.