'The moment I heard...'

The moment I heard about the earthquake I was standing in a field full of cows. My cell phone rang. I had no idea I even got cell reception out here. At first a cow mooed and I couldn’t hear what was coming across on the line (do cell phones have “lines”?). Then I heard a voice, faintly familiar, telling me something had happened. I should have been there when it did but I wasn’t. I was here amongst the cows.

When I was 9 I was in a 7.5 quake in my home state of Idaho. I was standing at the bus stop when I heard a car approaching. No, it must be the bus. No…WHAT IS THAT?? The ground below me started moving. Ground wasn’t supposed to do that. I heard my mom calling to me from the house. She yelled my name and I started running to her. I looked down briefly and I could see the ground rolling beneath my feet. I felt like I was on the moon. 

One morning the cows from the pasture in back got loose. My mom noticed them when she walked out to get the paper with her flashlight and suddenly saw a big white face in the beam. The cows were cool, though. I imagine the grass tasted good.

When I got the news about this earthquake I realized it didn’t bother much as much as I might have in the past. I’d been through several quakes since living in Southern California, including on in Redondo Beach when my chair rolled softly on its wheels and the door to the patio swung gently. A couple of years ago I was working at the U-T on Easter and I thought I was going to die when the quake struck. The building is on rollers, so the quake went on and on and on. This was the big one, I was sure of it. Especially when my colleague said, “It’s not stopping.”

So when the big one hit it seemed kind of anticlimactic. I learned that no one I knew was hurt, the damage wasn’t quite as bad as had been predicted, and now it was over. It finally happened. No more hearing, “Why would you want to live down there with the earthquakes and the pollution and the crowds and the…”

There weren’t any crowds where I was standing now, unless you counted the cows, of course. I tried to approach one but she lumbered off when I got close. Cows aren’t cuddly, contrary to popular belief. Cows are cows. Big, soft, and slow.

I thought about the Idaho quake again recently when I viewed some home videos my brother had transferred to DVD. My husband watched with me and commented on how my childhood seemed idyllic. Except for that my stepdad would say things (on video) like, “Rachel, it’s time for you to put your boots away” … “before I throw them away with everything else.” I was quite compliant. Too compliant, I think now, until I’m reminded that kids have to do whatever they need to do to survive. Put up with emotional abuse that’s impossible to explain because it causes no visible scars. There are no cracks in the stairway like what happened at the U-T building. Walking down the stairwell I realized that it could all come tumbling down on top of me. Everything was built on fissures that we just couldn’t see until something got shaken up. I got shaken up. I left the paper 3 months later.

On Facebook a friend posted that she was receiving the command to “rest” from the universe, even though she felt like she should be out doing, doing, doing. A guy responded that value was only through action. Doing, doing, doing. What happens when you’re done doing? 

It feels like the building is shaking. Does anyone else feel that? Maybe it’s just someone next door. I always like the response, “It’s just a truck going by” when there’s actually an earthquake happening. Trucks aren’t that powerful, not even the triple trailers my husband seems so impressed with when we see them in Idaho. Nothing is more powerful than the little cracks in the surface that might bust open at any given moment. I’m kind of curious to see what’s underneath. Maybe just more of the same.