What went running through your mind when the earth shook last week?
I’ll tell you what went though mine, as our old house in Baltimore leaped up and down, pictures came down off the walls, and the floors groaned:
Why is the dog still sleeping?
There she was, stretched out on the sofa, snuffling softly, as the living room threatened to shake itself to pieces.
During the worst of it, before I had the presence of mind to drag her downstairs and out the front door, her tail may have twitched. Oh, and she may have adjusted her tongue behind those droopy basset jowls of hers. But that’s about it.
Whatever happened to the preternatural sensitivity of animals? I thought they were supposed to predict earthquakes, not snooze right through them.
In the days following last Tuesday’s 5.8 magnitude tremblor, I overheard learned opinions like this one:
“Elephants, you know, African elephants, when they get into a, uh, stress situation, they get right in a line and they link their, what do you call those things, their tails and their, uh, trunks, and they just circle around like wagons. Well, I’m telling you, that’s exactly what happened down at the zoo.”
And this one:
“They said that at the National Zoo, the lemurs absolutely went berserk about fifteen minutes before it happened. Screaming, jumping around, making their alert calls. And the orangutans were acting funny, too.”
Animals — at least the exotic ones — were doing their part to warn us. So what was up with our basset hound? It’s true that she’s getting on in years, but the sound of a single nugget of kibble hitting her food bowl two floors away is enough to wake her from the sleep of the dead and galvanize her into an all-out sprint.
As it turns out, the idea that animals can predict quakes is very old. Helike, an important city in ancient Geece, was wiped out by a combination of earthquake and tsunami in 373 B.C. This was a great disaster, and thus fodder for local writers, who discussed it for centuries, speculating on the juicy details and cheerfully recreating the horrors for a paying audience. The Helike Disaster was an old chestnut by the second century A.D., when the Roman writer Aelian tarted it up by adding animals to mix:
“For five days before Helike disappeared, all the mice and martens and snakes and centipedes and beetles and every other creature of that kind in the city left in a body by the road that leads to Keryneia. And the people of Helike, seeing this happening, were filled with amazement, but were unable to guess the reason. But after these creatures had departed, an earthquake occurred in the night; the city subsided; an immense wave flooded and Helike disappeared…”
The lesson being, I suppose, that if you happen to see a mass exodus of vermin, it might be a good idea to avoid rickety stone temples and head to higher ground.
But speaking of rickety stone temples, you may have read that one of the few buildings affected by the quake was Washington National Cathedral, which lost three of the four pinnacles atop its central tower. To most people, this was probably just a curious news story, but to those of us who grew up on the Cathedral Close — I was a choirboy there in the late Seventies, and spent my school years in the shadow of that great Gothic structure — it was personal.
It took most of a century to build the Cathedral. The foundation stone was laid in the presence of Teddy Roosevelt in 1907; the last finial was set in the presence of George H.W. Bush in 1990. I knew it as an endlessly fascinating construction site. When the massive steel cranes finally came down, I couldn’t help feeling that something was out place. The main tower looked bare and lonely.
Someday soon those cranes will be back, once the money has been raised for the repair, which is expected to run into millions.
Another stone building that took a hit was the Washington Monument. The damage there is still being assessed. I find it interesting that the structures that fared the worst in the quake were homages to obsolete architectural forms: an Egyptian obelisk and a Gothic cathedral. Whereas the apparatus of modern city living — municipal water, sewer, electricity, natural gas, and internet — came through relatively unscathed.
It’s true that cell phone networks were overwhelmed in the immediate aftermath of the quake. This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed, if only in preparation for the next natural — or manmade — disaster.
But overall, I thought we did pretty well.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 01 September 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
