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We were heading to the cinema, the disaster feature just newly out in theaters in Lima. Hila was combing my hair with her usual no-nonsense rigor when it came to dealing with our young, wild manes. Her movements with the comb were exact and tight, aided by much-too-much Gomina (the ever-present, translucent pink or turquoise gel) to make sure her efforts in achieving my taut, high ponytail would last all day. Her skills usually yielded an unmoving, cardboard-textured shell of hair that withstood all my running around and play.
It was a Sunday afternoon, May 31, 1970. The skies outside were the harmless but impermeable light gray of a typical Limeño nearly-winter day. No rain but no sun, the permanent wishy-washiness of the seasonal weather in this arid, coastal flipside to the Amazon – the western rain shadow of the Andes.
The violent shaking begun as Hila had just finished her task, with me seated on the lid of the toilet seat in the little bathroom by the front door of our home. She yanked my hand and flew us out of the house, the earthquake seeming to shake forever, in those eerie, extended, never-ending seconds that are familiar only to those who have been through earthquakes. But in reality, it wasn’t just my perception. The Ancash Earthquake was long and intense and harrowing – lasting a whopping 45 seconds, an eternity in earthquake time, and registering at a magnitude 7.9 on the Richter scale. It lasted so long that my family and neighbors had the chance to run and gather at the very center of our little residential street and stand there, holding hands in a circle – some crying in shock, some managing desperate prayers through the panic.
I remember marveling at the idea that grown ups were deliberately standing in the middle of the pavement, when we kids were constantly being told to be careful when playing fútbol or having a game of tag on the street. Watching out for the cars in the roadway seemed our main job description in Life. That and knowing how to react in the event of an earthquake.
We four siblings spent a childhood of being “ushered” because of our lives at this precarious edge of the infamous Ring of Fire: roused and ushered down the stairs in the middle of the night; ushered out to the safety of the yard; ushered out of the danger of our home’s brick and mortar construction, finding an open space where the skies could be our safe mantle above, assured never to collapse.
Far in the mountains, a different story unfolded.
El Callejón de Huaylas is nestled between two ranges in the Andes: La Cordillera Negra, with its telltale volcanic dusting of darkness and La Cordillera Blanca, a white-capped, snowy majesty. The two are a stark Yin and Yang to each other – a hauntingly beautiful conversation of opposites. In the Valley, the rich soil of the “Callejón,” the figurative alleyway between these two ranges, has embraced thriving communities for centuries. My grandmother was from Huaraz, the nearby capital of the Ancash District, and she was a survivor of the great earthquake. Huaraz was partially destroyed, and the village of Yungay, in the heart of El Callejón de Huaylas, was hit the hardest…decimated, literally erased.
I remember a decade later, when I was already in high school in the EEUU, that I would read that the Ancash Earthquake had made it onto a book of world records. This, of course, has been superseded due to humanity’s game of Russian roulette with the environment and current super-sized storms. But still, the juxtaposition between our family’s personal loss in this tragedy and a mainstream piece of data always makes my skin crawl. This beautiful area in the Andes – 400 kilometers N. of Lima – ended up holding the worst global natural disaster record for years. It wasn’t only about the quake.
That Sunday, the earthquake shook the region, unhinging a massive area of the north face of the Huascarán, the highest mountain peak in the Cordillera Blanca and in all of Perú. The Huascarán stands at 6768 meters (22, 205 feet). Sources note that the ensuing landslide generated 80 million cubic meters of debris: glacial blocks, water, mud, stones. Yungay was pummeled. My abuelita Victoria, told that the mountain fell onto a lake perched on high up above the town, combining into a landslide that covered the Valley with horrific force. She painted a picture of people trying, but unable to get to high ground.
Aluvión was the word used that would terrify me as a child. I think I always fully expected one to happen from one moment to the next throughout childhood, a massive river of muck coming around the corner of my street, even if logically it would be less likely in our orderly, concrete-laden, metropolitan city of Lima. Water and debris are never a mixture to be messed with.
Our house in Lima fared well, without damage, but the nights were difficult those days after the 1970 quake. My mother sitting motionless so as not to make a sound, intently listening to the drone male voice of the radio announcer reciting the names of the fallen victims and survivors – people displaced and people looking for their families. When the radio station would break for commercial, she would wring her hands – fingers pale in the over-squeeze of tension – and look up with desolate eyes, then quickly immerse herself back to her breathless listening.
I think we found out through a phone call.
Nothing shakes the roots of a family tree like losing your youngest child, Victoria’s youngest. This memory is so ancient to me and far removed from my immediate experience that there is a sepia-toned shroud over it, but still, my whole Life, when remembering how my aunt Isabel perished in the earthquake, I have been in that room in Huaraz, watched her movements in the candlelight by her bedside – a small wooden table, covered with an ecru doily and the statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary upon it. Next to her, a little boy, her nephew and my first cousin, also lost his Life among the rubble.
Isabel. She decided to stay and pray. Stay in the room, in the place she felt safe. My mother would mourn her deeply – the youngest of her siblings – of an angelic nature that I heard described would not have been long of this world anyway. I remember her pretty round face with the rosy, flushed cheeks that sea-level Limeños find curious of those living at high altitudes.
This Monday. 6:49am. Our 1920s Berkeley Mediterranean Revival little home trembles madly with the over-dramatic and loud rumble of the tectonic plates doing their thing and rubbing and getting in each other’s geologic way. A reminder that, here in the San Francisco Bay, we are all just guests of the temperamental Hayward Fault. It turns out to only be a 4.0, its epicenter 3 miles away from us. By Peruvian standards, it would not really qualify as an earthquake but more of a Temblor, a tremor or a rumbling maybe. I guess in a country that is at the mercy of the Ring of Fire, there would be many designations for seismic events, like I have heard there are names for types of snow for Eskimos. A large stack of still-to-be-filed-back-in-their-jewel-cases CDs are thrown from one of our shelves in the living room, highlighting how we need to be more respectful of our music collection or just become more organized and put the darned things away. But otherwise, not much to report.
But this little one conjures up the others: 1970, 1974, and 1989…the vivid Loma Prieta memory.
On a daily basis, I am conscious that I am involved in the most misguided practice of our human dominance and rootedness in this planet: architecture. It is the utmost vote of confidence, or maybe we should say, the biggest enabling to our denial about our species’ temporary status here – well, compared to geologic time. It is a presumptuous notion that architecture is here to stay. The ground beneath us is more plastic than we allow ourselves to believe. Breathtaking sea cliffs and mountaintops have come into being because of enormous shifts and movements, erratic carvings by oceans, but yet, once we plop a structure on them, we want them to stay put. Don’t move. You will ruin my well-chosen vista! Architecture is humanity’s middle finger to natural forces: erosion, gravity, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
I used to stand sometimes in front of the kitchen cabinet after I unloaded the dishwasher – the pretty cabinet that gets the glory to have glass fronts instead of solid wood doors because its contents are display-worthy. I would mock-speak to the showy, hand-blown, red champagne flutes and the delicate Pisco shot glasses with the etched, gilded little depictions of llamas on them and say, “Some day you’ll break, but you are here now!” That is the basis of Life. In our ashes-to-ashiness and fragile balance with our bodies and our health, there is no assurance of how long we have. There could be a devastating tectonic event in our near tomorrow – or the symbolic or literal aluvión of all aluviones to end us.
We are the ephemeral art here. Our lives are destructed and reconstructed endlessly. My husband Jimmy used to joke, “I am just happy to be anywhere.” Yes. Let’s be happy. We are here.
Canto A Huaraz - by Los Hermanos del Ande
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IneyYpaR5NY
El Huascarán - by El Jilgero del Huascarán
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G8NAkOjoTQ
Featured Photo: Abuelita Victoria, her six children and two sisters. Baby Isabel on her lap; my mother Virginia: bottom right. Circa 1925