When the earth moves
Every once in a while, the earth decides to tell us what it thinks of all the stuff we’ve done to it. The earthquake in Turkey and Syria – back to back 7-plus Richter Scale monsters – has taken down more than 6,000 buildings in Turkey alone, according to NBC News. Here is a photograph of just one of them. Two rescuers appear to be standing in the rubble comforting each other, in shock at what has happened.
The rubble appears to have been an apartment building similar to the one in the background. There is a heat-pump unit visible at the lower left. The rest of the rubble is unidentifiable with the exception of chunks of concrete and what appears to be the lacy metal base of a lamp in the lower left hand corner.
All that’s there is a pile of destruction. It's hard to believe people lived there. It’s even harder to believe that all that stuff lying on the ground was once someone’s idea, that a company bought the land and decided, “let’s put up an apartment building there on that empty lot.” They hired an architect to draw the plans – it’s hard to know for sure, but it might have been 20 stories high with small balconies like the one in the background. Then hundreds of people spent months constructing the building – truck after truck driving up to the site, huge funnels filled with concrete lifted by crane to be poured for floors and exterior walls, then plumbers and electricians arriving to install wiring and sinks and bathtubs and kitchens, followed by the sheetrock guys with their screw-guns and tape and spackle, and then the painters, and maybe wood floor people laying strips of oak and then sanding and finishing the floors. Then came the renters walking through apartments, marveling at the view, walking out on the tiny balconies and imagining themselves in the evenings watching the sun go down as the kids watch TV in the living room. Then came shopping for furnishings, trucks driving up and unloading couches and tables and chairs and mattresses, and finally the families arriving with movers unloading boxes of the kids’ clothes and kitchen implements and china and pots and pans.
And then came people living their lives, the couples who had rented or bought the apartments with their arguments over the household budget and kids doing homework and love making in darkened rooms as the kids slept.
The first quake hit at 4:17 in the afternoon. Maybe the kids had just gotten home from school. Their mother was already in the kitchen readying dinner as the family did what families do – the younger son sneak-attacking the older boy as he manipulated the controller for his video game; a daughter on her phone texting friends about a guy they had seen in the halls of the school that afternoon, all of them waiting to eat dinner and watch TV until bedtime.
Now at least some of them are probably under that rubble – the mother and the kids, perhaps – and the father, who was still at work when the earthquake hit, grieving, wondering what he will do for the rest of his life without the family he loved.
All because this lovely blue orb with its mountains and rivers and fields of crops and cities and oceans we have seen in photographs from space decided, 11 miles below the surface, to shift a few plates and remind everyone up there in those apartments and stores and theaters and schools how fragile everything is, how their lives are lived at the mercy of a force far greater than the construction cranes and concrete trucks and electrical wire and faucets and overhead light fixtures and sofas and all the material human beings had decided they wanted to put there.
In Turkey and Syria, more than 5,000 of those people who built those apartments and lived in them are gone. The Guardian reported this morning that the World Health Organization predicts that more than 20,000 may have died in the series of quakes.
And now snow is falling on the destruction, and freezing temperatures imperil rescue and recovery operations. Tragedy has struck the human beings who call mother earth their home, and it will happen again. Spring is on the way, bringing tornado season across the Midwest and South, followed by hurricane season with flooding to the coasts and river valleys, and then California and the west with its forest fires and barren hillsides.
We live at the mercy of the earth we call home.
What an excellent thoughtful article, describing the idea of, the construction of, and then living in the apartment building. The death, the grief, the insecurity.
We have to appreciate each precious day. Because....
I recall somewhere in my teens watching a documentary on PBS that made the point that without things like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the planet's stresses would tear it apart. That... made an impression. That was my realization that the planet has no use for us. We're just hitching a ride. Be nice if more people realized that and stopped trying to slash the tires...