Destruction

You hear an earthquake before you feel it. I´ve heard it described as a car coming around the bend that just never passes the house. To me though, it sounds like a combination of what a giant´s rumbling stomach must sound like and the noise you hear when you press a conch shell up close to your ear. It´s loud but at the same time subtle and entirely distinct.

The dogs went crazy for a long time before the termors began. We only have one dog, but with all the dogs within earshot it was about fifteen howling voices. They would switch off between howling and crying. In fact, ever since the quake our dog, Yancul, has been different. He is much more affectionate and sweet whereas before he was fairly macho and disinterested in us.

The terremoto caught me in the middle of a dream. I was dreaming that I was halfheartedly playing a game with my brother. He was trying to jump over my room. ¨You´re going to break the window,¨I told him. But then suddenly I woke up and became aware of the fact that I didn´t have a brother so something else was causing my window to violently thrash. It looked like a jumping bean had reincarnated as my glass window but had forgotten that in it´s new life it wasn´t supposed to jump. I ran to the doorframe and paused. ¨Ëarthquake, earthquake, earthquake¨ I thought. ¨What the hell do you do for an earthquake?¨ As the roof rumbled over me it hit me that inside is not where you want to be. So I ran. I ran down the hall and outside. And from there I ran across the grass. The moon was full that night and shined so bright it was as if god had set up a spot light. It was a short time before I realized that it was freezing. I looked down at what I was wearing. My powder blue shorts, an oversized shirt, and bare feet. In the wet grass they turned to ice. I stood hugging Adriana, the owner of the avocado farm, until the shaking stopped.

In the days since, after seeing all the destruction and sadness the earthquake caused I feel slightly sick to say this about this but at the time there was a small part of me that was loving what was happening. It is an incredible thing to feel the earth move beneath your feet. I was in complete awe. I watched as the moonlit water slopped out of the pool. ¨Yes!¨I wanted to yell, ¨you are earth and you are all powerful! We can´t hold you back! Roar!!¨ Now I wish I´d kept that part of me quiter.

At the time it wasn´t scary. Three factors account for that. One is that your mind due to adreneline or whatever shuts down so that the trauma isn´t as tramatic. Two is that I felt safe being in the countryside. The city is the most dangerous place to be for an earthquake because you´re in danger of broken glass or whatever else falling on your head. And third is that earlier that day we worked hard. I mean hard. Pulling weeds, moving barrels, lugging branches, digging holes, etc so that by the time I put my head on the pillow I was no longer Lissie Perkal, but rather, a rock. In some ways I´m surprised I even woke up. The scariest part though was our ignorance. We didn´t know where the epicenter was and if our loved ones were okay. To hear, the next day that the epicenter was in Concepcion, a city more than 500km south and that we still felt an earthquake 6 was shocking.

It was the days that followed that we´re the worst. We didn´t have electricty or water. Everyone was slightly on edge. Any time there was a tremor we tensed up and had to wait to see if it was just a tremor or a reason to run outside. Many sentences were interupted to listen for the rumbling warning. Any little noise in the house sent my heart racing. There were many times lying in bed where I would hear a noise and my heart would start pounding so hard that I couldn´t tell if it was a tremor shaking my bed or just my throbbing lifesource. Two or three times the replicas (do we call them that in English? Aftershocks) were so strong that I had my jacket on and was running out the door again before they stopped. The thing about tremors is that you just never know. It could be the start of another quake or it could be nothing. For the last earthquake Chile had in the 80´s there were tremors all day long and then in the evening the earthquake hit. But for people who live down here tremors are like raindrops, they happen sometimes but it´s not really a big deal.

Thankfully now, over a week later, our water is back on and the elecricity too. The replicas continue but each time it´s less and less scary. And I´m here on the farm for another week until I head up north to La Serena to visit Nora. It will be nice to have a change of scenery.