Origin Story: Une Petite Pensée

Pantry in the aftermath

I've been patiently waiting for an extinction level natural event ever since I was 8 years old.

This feeling was first aroused in me after the Northridge Earthquake, which erupted from the San Andreas Fault. At the time, my family lived not more than 5 miles away from the epicenter, and so we experienced the full force of that disaster.

The earthquake shook awake the Dawn, starting at 4:31AM. It lasted 8 seconds and measured 6.7 on the Richter Scale, releasing 70 trillion joules of energy, the equivalent of 11 simultaneous Hiroshima atomic explosions.

We lived in a duplex at the time, and I had my own bedroom. My father ran to my room as the ground shook, with everything falling down around him. The TV flew off the oak entertainment center and crashed into his shoulder. By the time he got to my room, and the shaking ceased, I finally woke up, having slept through the violent affair. He was, of course, concerned with my safety, but my reaction was simply to sit up in my bed and say to him, "Did we just have an earthquake?"

My entire room was in shambles. Thankfully my bed was in the center of the room, as everything on the walls from the picture frames, shelving, and the like, had fallen all around me. It was as if my bed was the final bastion of the Apocalypse, with terror and ruin all around me; that is, my books and such.

After the earth settled, everybody from the neighborhood meandered into the streets in a quiet daze. My mother was meant to commute to work in Los Angeles that morning, as many others, but instead they were left asking each other, "Is everything alright?" Even as a kid, I distinctly recall a collective sense of bewilderment, but also care, and this extended for weeks after the event.

The sense of smell is intrinsically tied to memory, it's said, and there are two odors that I could never erase from my mind, even after the 32 years since the earthquake.

The first was found in our pantry, and the bottle of white vinegar that shattered on the ground, with the powder from a tin of Nesquik mixed in it. A scoop of that chocolate with milk was my favorite drink growing up, and to smell it joined with the vinegar was an assault on my juvenile senses.

The second was the odor of a thousand spirits. That afternoon, my father went out to find water. The grocery stores were closed, the water lines were cut off, power was dead, and the only place he could find that was open was the neighborhood liquor store. I still remember walking inside and my nose being overwhelmed with the vodka, rum, whiskey, gin, and wines -- drinks I had no familiarity with -- which were spilled out in a cacophonous mess on the floor.

He had no water to sell, but thankfully Miller Brewing Company set up a center for distributing bottles for the public, so that we could drink.

The days that followed the earthquake were equally unsettling. Our neighbor in the duplex smelled a gas leak, which my father confirmed, and so he decided that we would stay with my Aunt and Uncle down in Orange County, where the damage was significantly less.

A drive that took an hour and a half on a good day was now more than twelve hours, and not just from the damaged roads and freeways. With the overpasses that did survive, people would stop before driving beneath them, afraid that a new aftershock would bring them down.

One of my cousins told me that she slept through the earthquake, too, but that she also had a dream. In it, an angry and giant Donald Duck stampeded across the desert, stomping his webbed feet along the way.

There is a solid literature that says the experience of a violent event, whether it's war, or a natural disaster, or something more personal, isn't traumatic in itself, but rather it's the narrative that "one has been harmed" that begets trauma.

The only feelings that remain residual from the Northridge Earthquake are positive in my mind, even as I read now, many years after, about the deaths, the injured, and the economic loss. Perhaps most "big happenings" are like this, which makes me wonder about what kind of stories are told about them.