Last Tuesday, Debbie Muraoka was in the middle of that quintessential California act-the pursuit of the perfect tan-when the health spa she was in shuddered violently from that quintessential California phenomenon-an earthquake.
Tossed from the tanning bed, the 35-year old resident of Gilroy, Calif., giggles now as she remembers that she had just one thing on her mind while the ground shook: ”I have to get my clothes on before somebody finds me here like this. That`s what I was thinking.”
In the aftermath of the second strongest earthquake to hit the U.S. in this century, she`s out of her bookkeeper`s job for an office supply store in nearby Hollister. The building she worked in has been condemned due to earthquake damage.
The earthquake also caused damage at her house, about 25 miles from the quake`s epicenter, although it was relatively minor. A TV and grandfather clock were dashed to the floor, wine glasses and bric-a-brac were broken, the contents of cupboards and cabinets were askew and bits of the ceiling came loose.
But the native Californian was in good spirits as she talked with a caller from back East. ”I`m alive and healthy and our house is still standing,” she said. Furthermore, she and her husband, Keith, haven`t once talked of abandoning the Golden State.
”When you`re born and raised in a place, I guess you don`t consider moving,” she said.
Though the great earthquake gave Californians a severe jolt physically and psychically (some who endured past quakes with aplomb said this one truly scared them), it seems it did little to shake their love for the place they call home. California dreaming, though interrupted by last week`s sudden nightmare, is alive and well.
That feeling is partly born of a fatalism that when your number`s up, there`s nothing much you can do, especially if you`re caught in the middle of one of nature`s most awesome displays of power. But, ever the optimists, Californians also feel that if they build on solid rock and keep earthquake kits handy, they`ll survive the worst. They`re not totally powerless.
Muraoka says much of her family is in California and that the weather is splendid. And though California`s geography can be a curse, as demonstrated last week, it is also a blessing. From where she lives, ocean beaches, lakes for water skiing and mountains for downhill skiing are all within striking distance, she said.
Natural disasters don`t discriminate geographically, she pointed out. ”I would never want to go through a hurricane, and the Midwest gets tornadoes. It just so happens our ground moves,” said Muraoka with a ”so what” in her voice.
As it turns out, her resolve to face the future, whatever it is, in California, seems to be the prevailing attitude among native Californians, transplants and even wanna-be Californians.
Dan Fingerman`s Berkeley home sits a scant 50 feet from the Hayward fault, but he doesn`t worry about it much.
”We knew that when we bought the house,” said Fingerman, a computer consultant who was raised in the Twin Cities and lived in Boston before he moved to the Bay area 11 years ago.
Dwelling on the prospect of an earthquake hitting his backyard would drive him crazy, he said. He likens it to worrying every time you take a flight that your plane will crash or that every time you drive a Chicago expressway you`ll be in a fatal car wreck. Instead, the Fingermans enjoy their life. In fact, the neighbors were planning to celebrate their community and their survival a few nights after the quake with a big pizza party.
”We all care about each other,” he explained. ”We are all one big family and we`ll ride it out (together) whatever it is.”
The night of the quake Fingerman saw firsthand how that family pulls together in times of crisis. Just after the quake hit, he was sardined with many others onto a bus, trying to get home. But he knew it might take hours and that his wife would be frantic.
So he thrust a crumpled piece of paper at a stranger getting off the bus. ”Please,” he said, ”please call my wife and tell her I`m okay.”
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The woman called. ”It was a small thing,” said Fingerman. ”But it happened a real lot that night.”
Finally entrenched
It took the earthquake for Jane Marcus to realize she had truly become a Californian.
Marcus, who grew up in New York and moved to California a dozen yeas ago, was deathly afraid of earthquakes. In fact, she and her husband have considered moving several times for that reason. But instead, they grew more entrenched in their California life, pursuing careers, raising two children, owning a home in Palo Alto.
Yet it wasn`t until the quake, until Marcus`s family in the East asked the inevitable, ”Are you moving back now?” question that she realized how much her attitude had changed.
Her answer was a resounding, ”No!” Her immediate family emerged unscathed, and now, Marcus said, ”I don`t have that great fear to make me move back home. We`re not packing our bags and leaving. This is where we are and we like it.”
In fact, Marcus said, the only people desperate to get out of town after the quake were the tourists. The Californians, she said, were just trying to get on with things as best they could,. ”The earthquake rolled off our backs,” she said.
But she acknowledged, ”We hope Los Angeles gets the big one.”
If the big one does hit L.A. ”maybe we`ll be gone,” said Chicago native Rick Toman, a lawyer for Digital Equipment Corp. who lives near Los Angeles in Mission Viejo with his wife Maryavis and their two young children.
Becase of a transfer, his family moved to the coast in April from Chicago`s North Side after he and his wife weighed the relative advantages and disadvantages of the California lifestyle. Earthquakes were one of the California shortcomings they pondered. ”But it wasn`t a deal breaker,” he said.
Since April, the Tomans have felt the rumbles of two southern California earthquakes far less powerful than the one that just rocked Northern California. Californians, he`s noticed, are ”very blase” about earthquakes. ”Their attitude is that if it`s going to happen, it`s going to happen. It`s the same attitude you have if you live in Aurora about tornados. There`s a possibility, so you have your earthquake kit with water and batteries.”
As evidence of the Californian`s acceptance of earthquakes, Toman recalls a converstation he had with an insurance man. ”He said people who move out here buy earthquake insurance, but after about two years they let it lapse. So I bought earthquake insurance.”
Sure, the San Francisco earthquake was like a ”kick in the rear end,”
he said. But on the other hand, ”it`s really hard not to like a place when you wake up in the morning and know it`s going to be 80 degrees and sunny with little humidity and no mosquitos.
”I love Chicago and think it`s the best-kept secret in the world,” he continued. ”But I hear the weather`s kind of bad there today,” he said on the day Chicago got its first snow of the season. ”And for children, there`s no better place (than California). The schools are terrific. I miss the ethnicity and I can`t walk to the supermarket or the liquor store,” he added, but he`s getting accustomed to driving everywhere.
A pause amid packing
Californians say that if they do anything differently after last week`s earthquake, it will be to pay more attention to where they build their homes. Wendy Wall, a 27-year old graduate history student at Stanford University, grew up in Malibu, next door to Los Angeles.
When the earthquake hit she was in a university research library in Palo Alto. As the building shook, tens of thousands of books crashed to the floor and shelves toppled.
”The real lesson is the kind of soil you`re built on,” said Wall who noted that although Palo Alto is closer to the epicenter of last week`s earthquake, it suffered less damage because of its rocky underpinnings than the softer landfill footing of San Francisco`s Marina district.
As for the risks of living in an earthquake zone, the former Chicagoan said there are tradeoffs wherever you live. ”When I lived in Chicago, I had my wallet stolen twice and my purse stolen once. I was held up at gunpoint. I could get killed by a burglar. I would never leave California because of earthquakes.”
David Cottingham, an insurance marketer, paused to talk about the quake as he supervised packers last week in preparation to move to San Francisco over the weekend. He said he found out about the earthquake on Tuesday as friends toasted him farewell in a Chicago restaurant. A waitress bore the bad news, exaggerating it greatly. ”She said, `Oh, did you hear about the earthquake in San Francisco. The Bay bridge and the Transamerica building fell down.` The conversation went down the toilet after that.”
When he got home, he learned the damage, though horrible, wasn`t as widespread as he had initially believed. Even so, ”I did think about canceling for about an hour, but then I thought, when your number`s up, it`s up,” he said laughing. ”I am trying to be as optimistic as I can be. For what it`s worth, I`d much rather deal with a little shaking than $250 heating bills three times a year.”
Jim and Janice Hagman are also San Francisco bound. She`s a registered nurse, he`s a microbiologist finishing up research at the University of Chicago. They`ve lived in the Bay area before and love it for the friends they have there and the recreational pursuits. Also, said Jim, for ”biomedical research it`s still the best place in the country.”
Jim is from San Diego, so he has experienced earthquakes before. Janice is from Boston. Whether it`s wishful thinking or denial, he says, ”The odds of having the big one while we`re out there are pretty poor.” And in case he`s wrong, the University of California at San Francisco where he`ll be is built on rock.
Janice says it will be awhile before she works up the courage to traverse the Bay bridge and to use Bay Area Rapid Transit or BART, the communter train with a subway tube that runs under the bay.
But she has another fear, too. ”I don`t know how I`m going to get my family to come out to California,” she says. ”Chicago was a tough sell because of the temperature and their perception of crime. Now I don`t know how many people will take us up on our offer when we say `Hey, come out and visit us in California.` ”