Year Seven from 12/28/1988 to 12/28/1989
The Year of the Quake
Baseball fans and Northern Californians know well this date, October 17, 1989. At exactly 5:04 p.m., the earth shook for 20 seconds to a magnitude of 6.9, delaying the Oakland As and S.F. Giants World Series game, destroying sections of bridges, toppling houses, devastating lives. The earthquake reached the Monterey-Salinas area as well. We felt it. We lived through it. Here is our story.
That day, my physical science classes made ice cream, gallons and gallons of it, as part of the thermodynamics unit, while Nana Eva watched our girls. We made a variety of flavors from super rich vanilla, rivaling Häagen Daz, to cookies and cream diet version and everything between. High school students possess creative imaginations and mammoth appetites. We used over a dozen ice cream makers, hand crank of course, and by the end of the day, the metal tubs of ice cream firmed in the science and home economics freezers. Dale taught his usual schedule of biology, and then he rushed to the gym for a volleyball game against Salinas High.
At 4:00 p.m., I took Allie to her 1 ½ year old checkup, which included a multitude of shots. We left the doctors’ office, returned to the high school to watch the play against the number one girls’ seed. Meghan, meanwhile, frolicked beneath the wooden bleachers as Dale called plays from the sidelines, and I watched the game with Allie. Just as the team’s leading server threw up the ball, the quake struck. I saw the waves travel through the floorboards, across the gym floor, not sure, at first what I was really seeing. The lights went out. People dashed down the bleachers. I ran out the door carrying Allie and calling for Meghan. At least Meghan was inside with her daddy.
Swimmers, dripping from their workout, described huge waves while the pool lost a foot of water. The football team sprinted back from practice; many said the shaker knocked them off their feet. All of the sports fields, in fact, the entire school were built on sand dunes, trembled. Since this happened before cell phones, we heard about the epicenter, the magnitude, the disaster by car radio. Every few minutes another aftershock occurred and the school cleared out quickly. With the power out, I thought to rescue some ice cream out of the gallons and gallons we churned, so I ran to my classroom and grabbed what I could. That evening, we celebrated our neighbor’s birthday by candlelight and consumed copious amounts of ice cream.
Around 10 p.m., our sweet Allie was crying and miserable. Highly unusual for her, when it dawned on me, I never gave her any Tylenol after her shots as the doctor suggested. Poor little thing, she eventually fell asleep. I got into bed around 11 p.m., with the second floor of our house shaking like a cheap vibrating bed. So unnerving when you are trying to sleep. My eyes would drift and my thoughts float away, nearing sleep, when more quakes of varying intensities and durations rattled the house and me. One problem is you could never tell if a quake would subside or increase. I was ready to sleep in the car. The car might drop into an abyss, but nothing would fall on me. Dale’s solution, “Hey, if we are rolling around, let me rock your world.” What a man.
I am sure there were other significant events that year, but none shook my world as much as the earthquake in 1989 or none that I recall with as much vivid detail.
Love is Complicated 