2/22/11
I woke up on Tuesday morning to my radio alarm playing audio of the quake in Christchurch and was about to get up to hit snooze when I remembered that my dad was in New Zealand, and supposed to spend at least a night in Christchurch, although I wasn’t sure when. He travels a lot and it is sometimes hard to keep track of exactly where he is in the world, but I knew he was definitely in New Zealand because I’d gotten an email from him a day earlier saying he was in the north, four hours south of Auckland, and mentioning that the whole of the country has only 4.7 million people and is small but not quite as small as he thought.
It is strange how a news story that would otherwise be one of many you heard over the course of a day can become important so quickly, and how a part of the world you’d only roughly be able to find on a map can become so abruptly real. My dad was fine, though. I emailed him and he wrote back to say that he was still in the north, and that this was lucky, since he was supposed to fly into Christchurch the next day and had been booked to stay at one of the hotel’s in the earthquake zone.
Today he emailed again to say he had passed through Christchurch and found much of the city fine with little damage. The main problem, he said, seemed to be that much of the infrastructure was down—the power lines, the gas lines, the grocery stores with all the food in the aisles. But of course without all that stuff we are almost completely incapable. A few summers ago Matt and I got completely lost on a camping trip in a remote national park in Utah, and at one point, after we’d run out of water, I remember looking at all the identical looking cliffs around us and thinking that we might actually die out there, and how crazy it was that left to our own devices we couldn’t make it more than a few days when meanwhile Native Americans had lived there for centuries. But we did, of course, end up surviving.
