Mexico City Earthquake – 2

Posted on January 22, 2003 in Vacations

We didn’t feel a thing. At the time the ground shake drove the citizens of Mexico City out of their homes, I was enjoying a chat with a fellow named Ray who was sitting across the aisle of the LA-bound Continental 767. The first either of us heard about it was when Lynn arrived at the Catholic Worker House in Santa Ana this morning. She came home to find an anxious message from her father on our voicemail. She called him. Then I called my mother who believed we’d been in New Orleans. Right after that, Lynn phoned her mother. She hadn’t heard.

A weird thought crosses the mind of those who have narrowly averted being an eyewitness to catastrophe: you feel disappointed. I could have been there, live on the scene, feverishly making notes about the rumbling of the steel frames of the skyscrapers; the swell of the ground; the tilt of the floor; the cries of the people as they rushed from their homes; the looks on their faces as they scried the buildings which they’d just left for cracks, leanings, and pancaking of the floors.

The day before I’d been comparing notes with a couple of businesswomen from Santa Cruz. It was the usual “where were you when the Big One hit?” talk that eyewitnesses of a shared disaster like to engage in when they want to impress New Yorkers and others in the car who have never felt such things.

The tilt of the earth, the bowing and bending of telephone poles over our heads, the splash of swimming pools, and similar things had become nothing more unsettling than the memory of an amusement park ride. We laughed because we had survived unharmed. And we thanked the universe for our safety.

My story about this earthquake will be this: I was talking with a guy named Ray on a flight to Los Angeles. We hit an air pocket once. And we landed safely in Los Angeles. I missed the big event by five hours. And yet, like all but 24 of the Earth’s people, I survived it.

I’m back in Orange County, where the temperature is ten to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it is in Mexico City and where the winds whip the silver-gray clouds of evening into bubbled wafers and fluted snakes, like the churros that the vendors were selling last Saturday in Chapultepec Park.