The Night of the Earthquake

I created my first blog in the year 2007.  Since then, I have created 12 blogs, most of which have only one post.  This is why I have chosen to start putting all these postings together. This is still a work in progress...   - Anita, February 13th, 2012

First posted on Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

It was a Friday night and I had invited some people from work over to my place, which I never do. We ate, drank, smoked and talked until Saturday at 3:00 in the morning, when the last few people left. Because it was a nice summer night, we had spent most of the evening outside in my small back yard surrounded by neighboring buildings. I remember being concerned about upsetting the neighbors with the noise, but then thought I never did anything like this and some of them had had plenty of noisy parties in the past. Even then, a little voice in my head was telling me people would be angry and complain in the morning. Little did I know that our noise would be the last thing on their minds the next day.

So at 3:00 everyone left, and I debated whether to bring all the plates and things inside right away or wait until the morning. Alex decided it would be best to bring them in right away and so we did. We went to bed at 3:15, and I fell asleep in less than a minute. Suddenly I felt the bed moving, and my first thought was that Alex was shaking his leg, the way he often does when he wants to fall asleep. See, this little habit of his used to scare the hell out of me when we first started sleeping in the same bed. But now, three and a half years later it has become part of our routine, which is why I did not pay much attention to it. Alex, however, kept trying to wake me up, saying that the ground was shaking. Could it be another tremor? If it was, I was also not interested in getting up. In Chile we get plenty of tremors and in a life time, just three or four may become earthquakes. More often than not, chances are that it will stop within 30 seconds and we will be able to continue with our lives.

So I complained a little, and tried to keep on sleeping in spite of the movement, but I quickly realized that it was becoming stronger and it was lasting longer than they usually do. Alex, who up to this point had experienced a situation like this only once when we were living in California, was getting very nervous and insisted we should do something. At that moment I got out of bed, and thought about many things all at once. When you live in a country that has deadly earthquakes every 15 years, you always hear about what you are supposed to do, how you are supposed to react, and in many occasions, especially during little tremors, you picture the situation and think about the first thing you think you should do. I guess at some point I thought about this scenario happening in the middle of the night, and in my mind the most important thing was to put on pants, and so that is what I did first. I got up and put on my jeans.

Then I thought about where to stand. I always knew this was a sturdy apartment building and never really worried much about it surviving an earthquake, yet when you are going through a situation like that, it’s hard to just stay in bed and think you will be safe. You look for a door frame, and stand under it, which is something people always say you should do. Alex, however insisted that we should go outside, but I told him not to, since the earth would be shaking just as hard out there as it was on the first floor of this apartment building. So Alex leaned on the door frame, and I stood behind him, grabbing on to him as tight as I could, not because the ground was moving that much, but because I wanted him to feel safe and calm. I had been through many tremors before, and this to me was just one more, long, strong tremor. Then we waited. The car alarms went off outside our building, and you could see all their lights blinking in sink with their individual alarms. The little clock on my night table with the little light that comes on when you push it back was swinging back and forth, the light coming on and off.

“It’ll stop soon,” I repeated over and over again, feeling Alex’s heart beating fast. But I said it to calm us both, because all I could think was “let it end, already!” but it wouldn’t. “Now the power will go out,” I thought, and though I couldn’t exactly tell because it was dark in the room before the earthquake started, I knew it had. “If the windows break, then we are in trouble,” I told myself, but they didn’t. Not even one. Then finally the shaking was becoming lighter, and the first thought on my mind was my friend MariaJose, who lives alone on the fifth floor of a building three blocks from here. “She must be scared to death,” I thought, and I went for my cellphone immediately because I knew for sure that if I waited even a second, the lines would be jammed and it would be impossible to reach her. So I called and she picked up in a shock. She was calm, and yet she wasn’t. I said I’d go to her place and pick her up so she could come to mine and stay with us overnight. She agreed as if she had just been hypnotized.

I put on my sneakers and waited for Alex to get ready and we left the apartment. Outside everything was dark and fairly quiet. The only sound you could hear were the car alarms going on and on everywhere in the city. I bumped into a couple of people on my way out of the apartment complex because I couldn’t see them until they were right in front of me. I dodged them and kept going, quietly. No one said a word. Not me, not them, not Alex. Then outside we walked down the street and saw a few more people standing outside. Everyone, to my surprise was calm. Everyone except the few drivers that had taken over the street and were now driving like mad people, probably trying to get to their homes to check on their loved ones. At this point cellphones were only useful as flashlights. No one could make or receive a call of any kind. So we kept walking and doing our best to cross streets without traffic lights.

We finally found MariaJose and went back home. Alex took out a radio/flash light/alarm that he bought once for situations like these. It’s one of those you charge by using a little handle and moving it in a circular motion, causing friction that somehow creates energy. It didn’t work. He tried many times because he could not believe such a brilliant instrument was useless. But it was, and since we were all safe and sound and without having anything else to do, we decided to go to bed and wait until the next day to figure out what had really happened.

Just like that, this strange night ended, and by the time I woke up in the morning, our electricity was back and we were able to watch the news. Then we learned about the real damage this had caused in other parts of the country and it was not pretty.