Duck and Cover... Or At Least Remember

Where were you twenty years ago, on October 17, 1989, at 4:45 in the afternoon?

I was twenty years old, working as a nanny in Rohnert Park, which is a little north of San Francisco, supervising the three children I was in charge of and visiting with my employer's mother, who was visiting from Texas. Annie Laurie (the grandma) was half-bragging, half-wistfully saying that "in Texas they have all the biggest everything -- bugs, snakes, weather, natural disasters" -- except she'd never been in an earthquake. I chuckled and said we'd see what we could do to add that to her list of experiences, and I slid the pan of stuffed pasta shells into the oven. Annie Laurie went to the kitchen table to help Keith with some spelling homework, and I peeked out the front door at Kara and Ryan, who were happily playing with one of the family pets, Charlie Handsome. (He was a cat, and he wasn't... but the six year old named him, so that was what she called him.)

The kids' parents worked in Santa Rosa at a software company, and both were due home at the usual time -- 5:30.

A few minutes after 5:00 I remember chuckling under my breath at Annie Laurie's wish to experience an earthquake -- not in a mean way, but in a wouldn't-it-be-funny-if way... and then I was bending over the dishwasher, and it was rushing up to meet me. I thought I was getting a dizzy spell or something, and I put a hand on the counter and looked up across the family room. The whole wall at the far end of the room was covered in shelving, with a state-of-the-art stereo system (they had the first CDs I'd ever seen) and a top-of-the-line television system, complete with huge speakers. The entire wall lifted up and settled down as I watched, with the ripple then lifting the couch and setting it down, then the dining room, and then the kitchen. It was exactly what the surface of the ocean does -- swells that move in one direction, effortlessly, unconciously, powerfully -- but it was IN THE HOUSE.

At the dining room table Keith and his grandma looked up in confusion and the chandelier began to sway. I looked at Annie Laurie, and the look on her face said that I was clearly in charge -- so I went into automatic mode and shouted for them to get under the table. There was no table near me, so I got under the nearest doorway, where I could see the girls in the front yard, staring down the street with perplexed looks. The moment the shaking stopped we hurried outside, where Kara and Ryan complained that the ground was funny and they didn't like it. All up and down the street neighbors were coming out to stand on the sidewalk and stare at each other, as if attempting to understand what had just happened.

When an earthquake hits, you aren't sure if this felt like a strong one because it was so close, or if it was just the tail end of a much stronger one that was centered further away. You don't know if there will be aftershocks, or if the one you felt was a foreshock of a much stronger one to come... All you can do is get somewhere safe and try to get information any way you can.

I remembered the warnings about turning off gas, but I had no idea where that valve would be on the house. I settled for the next best thing: once everyone was settled on the front lawn I ran back inside, turned off the oven, and grabbed the portable phone and my car keys. We turned the radio on in my car and listened to the news coming in from the Bay Area -- wild reports that Berkeley was on fire, that the bridges were down, that San Francisco was going up in flames. (Later those were proved to be a bit exaggerated -- there were fires, and a section of a bridge had indeed gone down, but most of the greater Bay Area had not slid into the Pacific.)

Kelley and Kriss -- my employers -- had been getting ready to come home when the quake hit. Kriss was in her car, and she later grumbled that she didn't really get much of an impression of any force. She wasn't sure why everyone was so impressed with the rolling motion, because to her it felt like when wind buffets the car, a gentle sort of rocking. Kelley had been standing in front of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a vast parking lot, and he watched the same swells I saw roll through the lot, lifting light poles and cars and asphalt with no pausing or trouble. He said he was so fascinated by the effect, he didn't think to get away from the windows until well after the shaking had started -- and as president of the company his corner office was situated in a cantelievered position over the building's driveway!

Traffic was surprisingly light, which the newspeople put down to the big interest in the World Series game set to play at 5 PM that day... San Francisco and Oakland, the Bay Series, a rivalry that drew even people who weren't all that much into baseball. Kriss and Kelley made it home in no time, and I gladly handed over the responsibility for the household!

When there were no more big tremors we moved back indoors and took stock of the minor damage. A glass had knocked over in the sink; some items on a shelf were tumbled to the floor; the cat's water had sloshed out of the dish. On my pillow was a big rock paperweight that had fallen from a tall armoire next to my bed; if the quake had come in the night, it would certainly have hit me.

We turned the oven back on and heated up the stuffed shells --- renaming them Earthquake Shells, which they remain to this day in my recipe book -- and began to take in the news.

The images were horrifying, and surreal: three story houses collapsed into what looked like  card houses, with a roof balanced on windows balanced on sidewalks. The pancaked Cypress freeway, with motorists trapped in concrete tombs. (Again, the commute was incredibly light -- normally those roadways would have been packed with thousands of people returning from work, their minds on dinner and getting a load of laundry started and if they needed catfood -- but the ones who were on that freeway at the moment the shaking started had nowhere to go, and no hope of surviving.) The cameras captured dazed expressions of people who had lost possessions, were missing loved ones, or who were simply too stunned to react anymore to the world around them.

Compared to the devastation of the areas closer to the epicenter, we had no complaints. We were all safe, we had a roof over our heads and food in our bellies... and Annie Laurie had a doozy of a story to take back to lil' ol' Texas about the day the ground rolled like an ocean in California!