An entire mountain shifted, a new one arose

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By Victor Paul Borg (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-23 07:28

I was having an afternoon nap, and that's how the earthquake found me in bed. I was jolted awake: the wardrobe door was banging, the walls were shaking, and the whole building was wobbling. I found my frenzied girlfriend in the living room. Outside we could hear screaming and glass shattering.

Momentarily, I thought of diving out of the window, then remembered we're on the fifth floor and decided to take my chance down the stairs. We reached the willow tree in the middle of courtyard and stood there, transfixed, as the ground convulsed, the building swayed and rattled, and bits of concrete spewed out. I could smell dust. And as the ground juddered, for five minutes or more, the thought that I was going to die became more distinct.

Then it was over, and we ran outside the building to the swathe of greenery - a strip of lawns, flowerbeds, and weeping willows - that borders the riverfront where we live in Deyang. It was full of people, and the atmosphere was slightly festive, perhaps fueled by a mixture of adrenalin and relief.

We met some friends; one suggested that we get some beers and settle on the grass. I thought it was a bad joke; but like her I also felt a sense of bravado - a boyish conceit that I had conquered a new experience by surviving a strong earthquake. But I didn't know then that it was only the beginning of a long ordeal.

I live in Deyang, the capital of a county that's home to 3 million inhabitants sprawling along part of the mountain-hemmed Sichuan basin. The mountains to the west are among the highest and most spectacular in the world, holding the richest temperate ecological habitats on earth. It's in those mountains, about 150km from my house, where the earthquake had its epicenter in the geologic fault-lines that divide the mountains from the plain.

But now we couldn't see any collapsed buildings, and intimations of the widespread devastation reached us is scraps: the telephone network was down, the sirens of emergency vehicles rose to a din, and transistor radios brought news of destruction about places we knew but couldn't see.

In Mianzhu, only 60km away, where the mountains loom suddenly out of the plain, the verdant slopes I often visited for hiking had been razed (when I went back, after the quake, the lovely traditional farmers' houses no longer stood, the fruit orchards looked forlorn, and the slopes were slashed with landslides).

Deeper into the mountains, two 4,000-m mountains had collapsed, and further off an entire mountain had shifted and a new mountain arose out of the ground to take its place.

This was how the mountains formed over millions of years. Fault lines crunching one another, chunks of land pushing up or sideways, gravity pulling down, and tension building up, all leading to this moment - a massive earthquake, and geography rearranged.

The preceding 1976-earthquake had been weaker; thirty years on, the tension erupted into a big one. And the landscape was in the process of being reshuffled and reborn: fallen mountains had blocked a river, creating a new lake; the river would eventually forge a new course; and the new mountain that had sprouted out of the ground was bald and tentative. Geologists would be studying these upheavals for years.

Nature is essentially in a state of flux, but that's the anti-thesis of the human condition: humans seek safety in organized stability. And here in Deyang, any sense of safety had been shattered on that fateful day.

At first I thought that after a few hours lingering outdoors, we would return home, and I would write e-mails to friends bragging about surviving one of the largest earthquakes of our time. How foolishly boyish those thoughts seem now that I know that steadiness, once lost, isn't easily restored. In any case, the tremors that continued throughout the day kept us on an edge. I call them tremors, because they made the ground shudder briefly, but somewhere in the mountains that are visible on a clear day these were massive convulsions that could fling you off the ground.

We could philosophize, but then we often relapse to the animal condition. And in the riverfront park, people were marking out their territory by spreading out sheets - a territory that, in the subsequent days, would grow and grow. We also staked our patch.

But it started raining, and we walked down the street to an open-air restaurant where we built our nest: a couple of umbrellas placed against the wind, and chairs set in that concave of umbrellas. I couldn't sleep. I went to gaze at the dark river, leaning on a lamp-post, and I felt quivers rippling up through the lamp-post. The land was alive, the landscape was being reborn, and I didn't have to imagine it - I could feel it palpitating. I wanted to marvel at the way the land had become alive; I was experiencing something few others do.

But the human condition dragged me down again. I felt clammy; I needed to brush my teeth and shave; I wanted a warm, dry place, and a soft bed. Yet the next day, more than 24 hours after the earthquake, when we contemplated returning home, we balked. Our home - a cocoon of safety and comfort a day earlier - had now become, in our minds, a death trap.

We did eventually go home, but a few minutes after we arrived the building wobbled and rattled again, so we grabbed some more clothes and duvets, and my computer, and went out again, back to the tent settlement.

The tents, made of plastic sheets affixed to flimsy wooden frames, were getting bigger and denser. Our neighbors were putting in sofas and beds and tables and gas canisters and portable burners. We, a friend lent us his company car, and we parked it among the tents. Otherwise we killed the time like everyone else; watching TV in teashops, snoozing, eating, and mostly dawdling. Idleness made us new acquaintances; we had spontaneous conversations with neighbors we had never spoken to before.

One afternoon we loitered outside the guardhouse at our apartment block, and one of the guards fetched me a chair. He smiled sweetly, and he was curious about the foreigner who lived in a town few others foreigners visit. But I felt coyly ashamed; this was the same man I had gotten angry with a few weeks earlier, threatening to withhold my administration payment after he had failed to deliver a letter addressed to me.

These outpourings of kindness were everywhere. One taxi driver didn't want any money for a ride. He said he was doing his bit to help. I told him I wasn't injured, my house was standing, and I still had work. "It doesn't matter," he maintained. "Everyone rides for free."

Effusive generosities and camaraderie gave us some hope. Still, by the third day, everything appeared in a trance-like state. People walking down the street looked dazed. The relentless tremors kept our fear and anxiety concentrated, and so did the awareness that thousands had died in our county. We couldn't see them, but we knew them vicariously: everyone had relatives, or relatives of friends, or friends of friends, who had perished.

For us, our survival was a matter of geology. Our houses had cracks, broken glass, toppled wardrobes or vases, chipped stucco, cabinet drawers on the floor - but otherwise they were intact.

The Sichuan basin, a fertile plain fed by rivers coursing out of the mountains and shielded from wind by the mountains, had now shielded us partly thanks to its thick solid bedrock.

Shockwaves surge along fault-lines or cracks most strongly - in this manner they had rocked towns further from the epicenter than Deyang, and razed towns at the edge of the plain, where the mountains rise. But the bedrock of the plain had subdued the waves before they reached us, and our buildings had held.

So our condition wasn't bad, relatively speaking. But we had lost something dear: a sense of safety, and that causes emotional disconnect. We felt estranged from our home in the same way you become frigid in a broken relationship. We regarded our house with cold pity. And that causes confusion and emotional frailty - in that state, people turn to religion, superstitions, rumors, allegories, or anything else that offers an answer, however tenuous.

Heroism from the police and army, and reassurance from a caring government - which everyone all over the world has praised - filled some of that emotional void and bolstered our confidence. The government roused us, in our moment of weakness, and as a foreigner I felt more intimately attached to China than ever before. Yet everyone wanted to know: is it safe to go home?

No one dared go home. The tent city swelled by refugees from worst-hit towns, and it became a parallel city, complete with stalls of groceries and fast noodles. Then there was the other city, made up of ghostly, empty apartment blocks that were wholly intact but wholly desolate. Everyone feared there would be another big shake, one that would topple buildings this time, and the recurrent tremors made that fear plausible - in the past week we've had several 6-scale quakes.

Days passed, and we got into a routine. Sleeping in the car, going home only to shower and change, and I started working out of a teahouse, the reasoning being that I could run out faster of a ground floor teahouse than a 5th floor apartment. And this is how I began to understand the anatomy of an earthquake: surviving the initial big bang is just the beginning. A week has passed now; the tremors have diminished to a handful daily.

Sometimes I feel the ground quiver and then wonder afterwards if it was my imagination. Now I understand better: there's one thing we take for granted in life, a solid ground under our feet, and an earthquake takes that certainty away from you.

The author is a Maltese travel journalist

(China Daily 05/23/2008 page9)