Shake, Rattle and Roll

Tuesday, January  7, 2012

There has never been a tremor, let alone an earthquake, of this magnitude, in this area of the Philippines. Yesterday, I was driving my tricycle home from town when the first tremor shook the earth and the nerves of the people. As I was soon to discover, Emelie and her sister, Jane had run out of the house into the yard. On the way out, Jane grabbed her granddaughter (our little two year-old) Shane, and her 9 month-old, Meagan, off the porch and whisked them out to the yard with her.

But I wasn't aware of any of this. The center of the quake was about 40 miles from us, on the neighboring island of Negros. Many of our area's residents told me later, just how traumatic it was. The quake hit 6.9 on the Richter Scale. However, my tricycle - a motor scooter with a side car - rattles its way to the equivalent of about 8.0 on that same scale. So, my shake-rattle-and-roll machine kept me from feeling the quivering earth.

I had just sold a bicycle to a woman named Jam and I was taking her and her daughter and the bike, to her home in Guiwanon, a few miles further up the national highway than our rental house. Along both sides of the street, people had gathered to share their personal experiences of the tremors, and to discuss what might yet come. Since this was a first for Cebu, no one knew what to expect. I wondered why they had gathered as I still had no knowledge of the quake.

After pulling up in front of Jam's house, in the midst of a group of residents, Jam's husband, Romel, told us what happened. Other people there were either chattering or making cell phone calls to family and friends.

When I got home, Emelie told me how scared she and Jane were. She said the house was making strange noises as the moving ground put a serious strain on the steel and the cement blocks. A few minutes later, the Ginatilan fire truck passed, blaring an excited warning for residents living by the sea to move to higher ground, in case a tsunami, an enormous wall of water, is formed from the earthquake if it is under the sea.

Well, the tsunami never came, but a false alarm in Cebu City panicked crowds of people and sent them running in all directions to escape the rumored tsunami.

There were about 8 or 9 separate tremors over the course of the day and the night that followed. I had never experienced anything like it. The earth is a solid sphere, isn't it? It can't break apart, right? We depend on its stability without question or even thought. It's taken for granted that the earth does not move under our feet and fall apart in random places. Under every thought and thing we do lies an assumption that the earth is there to support us. We walk, over the earth. We drive a car, on solid ground. Instability is the stuff of water and air - where airplanes and boats waft and wobble - not the ground where our houses sit, where we sit comfortably in the evening watching the tube, relaxed as if the world is a safe place to be.