The daily fear

Most days, it’s easy to forget that I live in a place where at any moment the ground could literally shift beneath my feet. Today, not so much. It’s the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake, and the local paper is filled with reflections and predictions.

I wasn’t anywhere near San Francisco when the 1989 quake hit. I was working at a newspaper in a small town in central New Hampshire. But I was dating someone who had recently moved across country to take a job at the newspaper in Gilroy, Calif., the garlic capital of the world — and pretty much right on top of the quake’s epicenter. It was about 5pm his time, about 8pm my time, and we were on the phone, when suddenly we were interrupted by three short, sharp squeals like a car suddenly braking. And mid-sentence, he blurted, “Shit, I think we’re having an earthquake.”

The next 15 seconds were the most surreal conversation I’ve ever had: there I sat, in my living room, while 3,000 miles away someone delivered a terrified real-time narration of what was happening around him. The room was shaking, he could see cars in the parking lot of his apartment building actually bouncing off the ground, it’s still going, he was trying to get to a doorframe to stand under it but couldn’t walk straight, oh my god, oh my god, it’s not stopping, holy shit. I was yelling at him to put down the goddamn phone and go outside. And then it stopped and we were still connected, and I was saying “Are you all right? Are you all right?” while he was saying “I’m okay, I’m fine, I think I’m safe.” And we sat there for a minute just listening to each other breathe, and then he said, “Don’t hang up yet. If you hang up I know I won’t be able to make another call.” He gave me the phone numbers of a couple of his friends and asked me to call them and have them call other people and let everyone know he was all right. And then we sort of braced ourselves and said goodbye, not knowing how long it would be before we could talk again.

I thought about that call a lot when I moved west myself, ten years ago. I knew I needed to assume another earthquake would hit, that I should have emergency supplies and a first aid kit and a “go bag” (packed with the bare minimum I would need if I had to grab self and cat and run for my life). But here it is, a decade after my arrival and two decades after what everyone agrees was not the Big One, not nearly — and I’m not prepared. Not at all. I don’t have a go bag. I don’t have emergency supplies. I don’t have an extra week’s worth of my prescriptions. I don’t even have a pair of sturdy shoes and a flashlight next to my bed in case something happens in the middle of the night and I have to get the hell out of Dodge in the dark.

And that’s foolish. And I need to do something about it. Today is a good day to start.

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