Where were you, shortly after 5pm Pacific Time, on October 17, 1989?
For most Americans, the answer is probably "I was about to watch the World Series" or "I had just sat down for dinner when I turned on the news..."
But for thousands of Bay Area residents, and people all throughout California, that day was a day of destruction, danger, and in some cases, death. For me, it was a day of confusion, fear and anger- anger that something had intruded into my happy little world. In contrast to the horror stories of that day, my experience was relatively trivial.
I was seven years old. My childhood friend and I were in my backyard playing. It was warm outside, and we were siting on the edge of a sandbox. When the ground started shaking, I thought she was playing a joke, but then I saw the large crab apple tree start to sway in front of me. Leaves and apples fell, and I knew that something was wrong. We both ran to the steps of my house, but my older sister screamed at us from inside to stay away from two-story building until the shaking stopped.
I'm guessing that I had heard the word "earthquake" before that day, but I had never experienced one.
The next hours seemed to go on forever. I shook uncontrollably even when there weren't any aftershocks going on. After sunset, my parents and sisters sat listening to the radio and scrambling to find candles. We huddled together around the house and around the block, talking to the other people who sat outside and exchanged stories. My next door neighbor was laughing with some other adults, and I kept thinking, "why are they laughing? There's no lights on, and I can't flush the toilet!" It was the wost day ever (in seven long years.)
I cried for the burning, leaning houses, the collapsed bay bridge and freeways, and for the old stone church that sat next to my school. Those visuals haunted me. It felt like the end of the world to me, and yet I didn't understand the full impact of what had happened to other people, or rather, to other people. (It would be years before my parents would tell me about how they drove around Oakland in the following days, looked at the cars still trapped under rubble of the Cypress freeway, and literally smelled the death in the air.)
It was one of the few times in my early childhood that I realized that bad, unexpected things happened in the world, and that no amount of coddling and reassurance from adults would change that reality. I felt helpless, and yet I was one of the extremely lucky ones, along with the rest of my family (no injuries, job losses or property damage.) As an adult, I wondered how seven year old New Yorkers felt on 9/11, or how 2nd graders in Louisiana reacted to seeing their houses sink.
Hard to believe that it has been 20 years already. So where were you that day? In Norther CA, or across the country? Were you affected?
-JP