Off The Record

by Pat Thomas

I was apprehensive while traveling the road in Chile from the Colchagua Valley to Valparaiso. It wasn’t because of the wrong way I was turning down on a one-way street or the scary cliffs we took above the Pacific, or even the Chilean dogs that barked at me while I drove in and out of the harrowing turns in the crowded streets of Santiago.

It was a small street-sign that worried me.

My wife and I spotted it to our right at a stoplight a few blocks from the ocean near San Antonio. The sign showed a person running from four increasingly bigger waves, with an arrow pointing to higher ground up the steep street. “Via de Escape,” it stated. “Escuela N1” was stenciled into the largest wave.

It was no doubt a warning about a tsunami, a huge wave that can result after an earthquake. A few days after one of the strongest earthquakes in history rocked Chile, I was looking at the picture we took of that sign, safe at home. After some brief research on the Internet, I came across a Web site that explained that Escuela N1 was the first school in San Antonio, and it collapsed in a 1986 earthquake.

News about earthquakes is nothing new in Chile. The country’s colorful 200 years have been marred by as many shaky fault lines and geological catastrophes as there have been political cataclysms. According to “The History of Chile,” by John L. Rector, there have been 12 or more major earthquakes to hit the country each century. Earthquakes destroyed Chilean cities in 1906, 1938 and 1960. In 1906, the same year an earthquake devastated San Francisco, another quake destroyed Valparaiso, one of South America’s most unique towns, which is located about four hours up the coast from the latest earthquake.

Charles Darwin once visited Valdivia in 1835 when an earthquake shook the land for two minutes. The earth shook “like a thin sheet floating on a liquid,” Darwin reported. When he visited Concepcion, Darwin came across heaps of ruins and the devastation of neighboring Talcahuano, which was leveled by a tsunami. If damage to those towns sounds familiar, be certain that history repeats itself.

While trying to thaw out from another Chicago winter, I was thinking about my incredible trip through Chile. I was relieved my wife and I avoided the earthquake that happened a few weeks after our departure, but not surprised to hear the news. We knew the risks Chileans faced. We just never felt the consequences. Now, hundreds are dead; thousands are without homes; and the psyches of millions have been damaged.

NASA experts said the earthquake was so strong that it changed the earth’s axis and shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. If that’s not enough to scare people about their homeland, then I don’t know what is. But Chileans seem not to sweat the feeling of uncertainty and devastation of earthquakes.

Perhaps after centuries of quakes, they are immune. Haiti’s quake, which was astronomically more deadly, showed how less prepared they were than Chile was. Haitians didn’t have a sign with a little stick-figure running from waves, nor did they have Chile’s glaciers, 30 active volcanoes, vast desert, beautiful freshwater lakes, rivers and, of course, those Andes—a rough terrain that reeks of earthquake.

Shortly after the catastrophe, I wrote an email to a friend we met in Patagonia and told him we were keeping him in our prayers. He instantly responded that his family was fine, but they had lost communication with his sister, who was living with her husband not far from the epicenter. But he didn’t seem the least bit frazzled. He wanted to know how we were braving the cold, and when I was finally going to write something about Chile.

I told him now was the perfect time.

Chileans deserve our support and attention, as well as prayers and a pat on the back. We in Chicago think we are intrepid. We brave the cold, but rarely do we worry about earthquakes or about when our homes will tumble down or when our friends will go missing.

I can’t imagine ever getting used to that Chile situation.

This is part of the March 10, 2010 online edition of The Beverly Review.

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