You know those people who somehow seem to skate through situations unaware of what’s going down? For instance, I’ll be in a tense meeting. There’s a fight burbling right under the thin veneer of professionalism. Everyone’s keeping their cool, but just barely — a look here, a slightly snarky comment there reveals conflict.
But, this person somehow won’t have a clue. I imagine him or her buffered by circus music. Or, this time of year, it’s nice to imagine the Nutcracker soundtrack playing as the world goes to hell while this person — we all know them — just goes about their (genuinely) merry way.
I was that person the morning of Nov. 30. But I was listening to Rihanna, and I wasn’t in a meeting. I was running. As Southcentral Alaska literally quaked beneath us, I suppose I trotted to the beat of my own drum.
That beat got mixed up as I ran a section of trail on the Old Glenn Highway, and I was momentarily furious and confused by the ground. Why was it suddenly lurching beneath me? I had such a good cadence going.
As that flash of fury wore off, so did the realization that the ground wasn’t heaving around to screw with my run. In fact, the world has more going on than just messing with me (hard to believe). I slowed to a walk and then a standstill as I took in the earthquake.
The confusing thing about an earthquake is it’s difficult to tell, especially outside and in the dark, how much things are actually moving. I was a part of the churning and had no objective point of reference. I registered that trees and utility poles were swaying, and the ground hadn’t stopped moving. Then, abruptly the ground stopped being a wave. I watched the treetops continue to move as though there was a breeze (there wasn’t).
I shrugged it off and kept running.
Perhaps you hear the “how are you so unaware?” Tchaikovsky swelling at this point, but I think it’s difficult to gauge an earthquake’s strength while outside. There were no plates flying out of cabinets, no ceiling tiles falling, and an entire floor of a building was not swaying underneath me. Never mind an entire on-ramp crumbling like a layer cake. No, the trail just kept going and the world calmed, at least for a second.
Then, as I was running, I felt wobbly again and slightly nauseated. I wondered if the quake had thrown off my balance. I slowed again as I realized it was an aftershock. Not long after, the emergency alert screeched through my headphones. Tsunami warning.
Wow, I thought. Must have been a pretty good one. I quickly called my husband to check in on him with the remaining battery in my phone, which had drained quickly because of the cold. The phone shut down a few minutes later.
I ran home, plugged my phone in, showered as quickly as I could, and sat down to go to work.
Our log home had wobbled (my husband attested to it), a clock fell over and some frames fell off the shelf. But the wine glasses that sit on an open shelf next to the sink, where they are very easy to grab when we need them? Didn’t move.
Lucky is an understatement, I know. I don’t know why we were affected so little when many of our friends spent the rest of their weekend sweeping up glass, calming their kids and pups, and dealing with rattled nerves through the many aftershocks. But my initial experience meant that the magnitude didn’t sink in for me until about an hour afterward.
At that point, I’d checked initial reports about the quake and answered 10 texts that I was A-OK. I was trying to focus on my day job. But even that spiraled into earthquake territory as everyone was checking in on me, and I checked the news again. And there were the photos.
Oh, I realized. OH. I need to go.
I don’t need to tell anybody here that the earthquake was a sobering reminder for many of us about emergency preparedness, and both the resilience and fragility of much of our Alaska infrastructure. I consider myself lucky to have the lessons learned from the quake without the trauma. Humans, as we know, function better without that underlying fear.
Still. The blissful ignorance music plays, insidiously, in my mind. There’s something haunting about knowing that I just ran right through a major tectonic event. It feels as though I missed an entire collective experience, an important memo or the most obvious thing in the world — the ground shaking with enough force to destroy. I feel humbled, with a dose of shame for not grasping the magnitude quickly, and I feel awe at the very Earth underneath us.
And apparently it’s less terrifying to be outside during an earthquake. I’ll add that to my emergency preparedness to-do list: “Remember to be on a run when the next quake strikes.”
Alli Harvey lives in Palmer and plays in Southcentral Alaska.