I ’m lucky to have escaped Los Angeles, friends and relatives tell me. From the safety of my Seattle apartment overlooking Puget Sound, I listen to their harrowing personal accounts of the earthquake, delivered in high-pitched voices over the phone. My mother, whose home sits precisely on the epicenter, tells excitedly of three-inch-wide cracks, a living room full of bricks, contaminated water, and a din worthy of the Second Coming. “A war zone,” she calls the house I lived in for more than twenty years. She would know. After all, her hometown in Austria was bombed by the Russians in 1944.
Was the quake really scarier than a hailstorm of bombs? I ask. Yes, she says unhesitantly. The bombs fell outside the house, the earthquake inside. Everything came crashing down: her Hummel collection, the Waterford goblets, those awful mirrored closet doors. (Repair costs are estimated at thirty thousand dollars, she proudly adds.) I would have been hysterical, she tells me. I couldn’t have handled it. The noise was terrible. And then the darkness — black like I’ve never seen. Amazing that she didn’t cut a major artery with all that glass flying about. She boasts of newly found guardian angels — how else to explain such a miracle?
Her faith in things celestial has been renewed, and epiphanies multiply. She never realized there were so many stars in the sky. You could really see them with the power down. “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” I think, recalling a poet I studied in college. Meanwhile, my mom has moved on to a new topic: she has had the privilege of shaking President Clinton’s hand. I haven’t heard such excitement in her voice since she won a five-thousand-dollar jackpot in Vegas ten years ago. But I am lucky I got out in time, she insists again. I offer to fly down and help clean up, but my assistance is politely refused: no need, we can handle it. The worst is over.
Hanging up the phone, I am overwhelmed with an embarrassing emotion: I am feeling left out. After all, I spent thirty-three years of my life in the San Fernando Valley waiting for The Big One. I should be in the muck of it. I should be a participant in this great happening, this scene, this postquake state that can only be described, my friends say, as surreal. Instead, my life remains anchored to the dull reality of alarm clocks, recycling, and deadlines.
Yes, I’m jealous. Shamefully jealous. Call it disaster envy.
I’m not alone. My best friend, Suzanne, who left Northridge last year for Boulder, Colorado, admits to harboring this same feeling — an envy of the unenviable. It’s not that our hearts don’t go out to those who suffer, who lost homes and loved ones. But then why aren’t we chanting, There but for the grace of God go we? Why aren’t we thanking our lucky stars?
What we envy is not the disaster itself — the demolished houses, tent cities, sleepless nights, aftershocks — but the neighborhood camaraderie that seems to grow out of disaster. I envy the flowering of community: the opportunity to love and help a total stranger, to make new friends. Crisis removes the mote from our eyes, makes us realize that this doesn’t have to be a dog-eat-dog world. Catastrophe can often bring out the best in people, push us to take stock of our lives and reevaluate our priorities.
For example, Myra Kaplar and her husband recently invited my parents over for dinner. They’ve been next-door neighbors for more than twenty years but had hardly spoken to each other in all that time. Now, however, they have shared an indelible experience. They can commiserate, comfort one another, and trade disaster tales. Suddenly they are on intimate terms: the Kaplars, still without water, are showering at my mother’s house.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Chinese characters for crisis and opportunity are identical. Translated literally they mean, “Crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind.” I think of a Zen poem: “Since my house burned down, I now own a better view of the rising moon.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not wishing for my house to burn down or for a major earthquake to hit Seattle. Besides, in time the residents of the San Fernando Valley will rebuild the walls of their hearts along with the walls of their homes. Things will get back to normal.
This essay originally appeared in the Seattle Times.
— Ed.
