Trial by fire

It must be said that while there are few benefits to the earthquakes that have been going on recently,  they have offered something of an opportunity for some measure of self-assessment in the "How would I go when it all turned to custard?" department. Like a lot of people around these parts I suppose, my pre-September 2010 excursions into such territory were mostly limited to completing online quizzes with names like "How long would you last in the zombie apocalypse?", or working out hypothetically which branch of the armed forces I'll be signing up for when WWIII kicks off (answer: airforce / hovercraft cavalry) or what my best possible use to a post-apocalyptic world would be (answer: food source). Sizable earthquakes, however, move these questions rather sharply from the theoretical realm to the practical, and having experienced every damned one of the seismic events we've had in these parts since September, I am starting, through self-observation, to get something of a picture of what my "Danger Mode" looks like. Broadly it can be stated like this:

I don't appear to be someone who panics.

I am yet to scream, dive under a desk, spring madly for a doorway, or elbow small children aside and run outside flailing my arms like Kermit the Frog. My "nerves", as we use this term I guess, are generally pretty settled soon after the shaking stops, whereas I have seen lots of people in tears, etc. And it sounds like such a good rugged-as male-stereotype Kiwi-blokism kind of statement to say that, doesn't it? That Ben, he's a man for a crisis. Solid. Stoic. The boy stood on the burning deck / Whence all but he had fled, etc. But wait. Let's analyse this further. For when earthquakes are actually occurring:

I don't really take any sensible precautions, either.

Why shouldn't I dive under a desk, spring for a doorway, or elbow small children aside? They are all perfectly sensible precautions, which have actually saved lives here and plenty of times before in other places. OK, maybe elbowing small children aside fails to qualify as "sensible". But it is an entirely sensible idea to get under a desk and hey, no-one will even think you less stoic for doing it. The boy who stood on the burning deck would surely have received no fewer props had he stood on the burning deck operating a fire hose. But in all these earthquakes, I haven't sought cover yet. Not once. So perhaps I'm not really not-panicking...in fact, I'm panicking so much that I've frozen up?

Nope, I don't freeze up.

While I haven't sought cover personally, I've done a number of things during these wobbles to indicate I'm still thinking. On Boxing Day I grabbed Theo off the floor into the middle of the room with me. A couple of times I reached out to steady the television (although I wasn't around to save it on February 22). When a big aftershock hit us on the 3rd floor at work (when I still had a job), I pushed my office chair back from the light fitting on the ceiling that had fallen down in the September one. I'm alert during these things. So I don't stop thinking and lose the capacity to act. Instead, I just sort of decide that I probably don't need to, even though I could, because:

I'm sort of somehow satisfied that nothing that bad will happen.

So I don't really know how to explain this (I gave it a go here). I think it probably has a lot to do with the locations I've been in, but basically, I haven't been able to contemplate anything seriously disastrous happening exactly where I am. If there's any conscious thinking going on, it's sort of like "this building is certainly shaking a lot currently, but I expect it will soon stop", almost as if having the whole building I am sitting in heave violently side to side is to be regarded from a position of scientific detachment. Oh sure, I agree with you, the building is definitely shaking, but it's not like it's going to fall down. It's like being in one's cozy bathysphere behind an inch of steel and looking out the viewing window to watch a giant squid fighting a sperm whale. Note the way these two titans of the deep rend each other horribly within mere metres of our own position. Mmm, fascinating. Let me take some notes. And this can surely only be because:

I'm dumb.

Seriously. Because when these things aren't actually happening right this minute, I know bad things can happen. I have been looking at the pictures and hearing the stories about the bad things that can happen for two months. You can't build an earthquake-proof building, and even the ones designed to be as earthquake-resistant as is humanly possible are relatively few and far between - not the random pizza place or flat you happen to be in. The reason people jump under desks and head for doorways is because those things increase your chances of not dying. I know all these things, so therefore I can't blame ignorance for not doing them. And as we established, it's not because I'm frozen in panic either. So essentially it's because I more or less go: "She'll be right."

She'll be right?! Seriously? The city fell down! "She'll be right"? That, people, is dumb.

That's why it would be good for these aftershocks to come to a halt. Sure, businesses are at the end of their financial tether and repairs are being undone and more liquefaction and flooding has apparently come up in the Eastern suburbs and new buildings are in danger of toppling and people are strung out and grumpy - but much more importantly, every time we have a reasonably large one, I saunter casually through it, then stop afterwards to think about what my casual sauntering actually implies, and am thus reminded of just exactly how stupid I am.

Hmm, being this much of an idiot doesn't offer me much hope for the zombie apocalypse.