The Earthquake and the Cardigan

On Friday night, I felt a quake. Or maybe I didn't. It's harder to tell than one might think.

The first time I felt an earthquake, I was in Toluca, Mexico, on the top bunk of a bunk bed. My host brother, Ignacio, was on the lower bunk, and he started shaking the whole bed frame, in some goofball attempt to keep me from sleeping. I told him to stop shaking the bed, but of course he couldn't, because he wasn't.

The whole dang planet was.

That was years ago, and I didn't feel another until my first year in Japan. It woke me up in the night. I was sleeping on a futon on the floor, the way most folks here do. Things started moving.

What struck me about it was that I didn't get thrown up and down, cartoon-like. Everything I felt and saw was moving side to side, as if a crew of indecisive moving men couldn't figure out which way to push the furniture.

Since then, I dream earthquakes often. Mathematically, nearly a third of all tremors happen when I sleep, which confuses things. The day after a tremor, we all ask each other, was there a quake last night?

Some people feel them and some people don't. A few months ago, one hit while I was in the office, just enough to jiggle the notebooks on the shelf. The quake came up in conversation later in the day, and the man who sits across from me asked what we were talking about.

He hadn't felt a thing.

I, on the other hand, am of the camp that feels earthquakes all the time, even when there are none. I wake in the night, scanning the shelves around me for objects that might fall and crush me. Only to realize that I'm lying on my arm funny, and the shaking is quite literally my very own heart, pumping just as it should, pulsing against my scrawny biceps enough to set off my overly sensitive internal alarms.

"Reality was one step out of line, a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong." It's a line from the Haruki Murakami novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, and it's how I feel in the mornings after a tremor, not quite sure it happened, if something is wrong or I'm just imagining things. Murakami's line also describes the feeling I like best when traveling.

When you visit a new place, and folks put on costumes and dance at a festival, it's exotic and new and fun, but it's easy, like an action movie or a summer jam. Good things, but, adrenaline rush or not, you're getting exactly what you expected. 

The travel I live for is those slipped-cardigan moments: At work, your sneeze goes unblessed in a crowded room.  On a quiet walk through a garden, you look up to realize you're the only one not wearing a surgical mask. In the dark, the earth moves sideways instead of up. 

And you're not even sure if last night's natural disaster even happened.

Comments

Posted on 2/24/2009 by

Turner Wright

I slept through two earthquakes in Japan. Nice. Good to have you on board. Tell me about the quality of onsen in Kumamoto.

Posted on 2/26/2009 by

Saleem Reshamwala

The Quality: It is high. Very high. We have Mt. Aso, which has the world's largest caldera on an active volcano. It spews sulfur. It heats earth. It forces lovely baths to pop up all around town.

Posted on 2/27/2009 by

Jason Ho

Gosh, this is eerie to know others suffer from could-be-tremor, tremors. Dude, I can't imagine how many times I woke up in the night and ran under my kitchen table (the big white one in my old kitchen) because I thought it was an earthquake. I was very groggy, and my heart was beating fast. Usually, it was just a really really large and heavy truck passing by.

Post a Comment

• Email
• Password
• Comment

Login & Post Comment