The Sniper

The Loma Prieta earthquake (aka The World Series Earthquake) happened 20 years ago today… and I was there. I was studying Russian in Monterey at the time and I had never been in an earthquake. It hit just as I was leaning over my desk in my barracks room trying to grab a picture off the wall so I could show it to a girl that was standing there with me. I was standing on one leg when the first shock wave started rolling in. I began to wobble and the first thing that popped into my head (and out of my mouth, by the way) was “Damn, my equilibrium is shot.” My friend corrected me with “um, I think we’re having an earthquake.” Then the wall lockers started to teeter-totter back and forth, the mirror on the wall fell and chipped, and my alarm clock fell off whatever it was on. My room mate was taking a nap at the time and yelled out angrily “who the hell is shaking my bed?!?” We brought him up to speed pretty quickly and we all headed for the door frame for shelter. One guy was running up and down the hall screaming “EARTHQUAKE!!! EARTHQUAKE!!!” as if nobody else had caught on to the particulars of the situation yet. The major shock eventually stopped and we lost power but did our best to go about our business and get estimates of the damage.

My room mate swore up and down that this one was one of the minor earthquakes that California experiences every day while I swore up and down that I thought it was a pretty big one. When we turned on the radio we found out how wrong he was. A section of the Bay Bridge had collapsed, houses were caved in, highways buckled… generally not good stuff. We were told that classes were cancelled the next day and ergo we decided  to drink beer to celebrate because we had no power and we could all use a good drink anyway after going through the first major shock and all the little aftershocks all evening. The beer, as it turned out, was half off because the stores couldn’t keep it cold without power so the guys were running down to the store in droves and scooping up premium beer at discount prices by the armfuls. The women both in town and on base were doing the same thing except with ice cream. That day the guys drank themselves down five full IQ points while the ladies gorged themselves up three dress sizes.

I’ve been in a couple of earthquakes since, but they seemed almost unnoticable compared to the Loma Prieta. Oh, and the alarm clock that fell down? Well, it broke and froze on the exact time the earthquake hit. I kept that alarm clock until about six or seven years ago when I got sick of toting it around with me. I did dismantle it and traced the hands that were synchronously frozen in the time with the crescendo of the first shock wave. I wrote the date on that paper clock face and I still keep it to this day. I probably always will. As for the mirror, I left it at DLI when I left for some other guy to use. When I returned to DLI six years later they assigned me a room in a different barracks on the other side of the hill. When I opened up my wall locker to stow my stuff, I found that mirror staring back at me… chip and all. I guess it’s a small world.