While scrolling through the “Free” section on Craigslist today, I saw this ad:

There’s nothing particularly special about it. It’s just a cassette tape of the old Animaniacs television show soundtrack. I probably wouldn’t have even paused on it, except that yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The one or the other wouldn’t ordinarily grab my attention, but put them together, and I’m taken right back to 4:30 a.m. on January 17, 1994.

An Ordinary Three-Day Weekend

The night before, January 16th, was a Sunday. It was the best kind of Sunday night because I didn’t have school the next day, so it was like a bonus Saturday night. I had spent the weekend at my dad’s house, and we were sitting around his kitchen table, eating dinner, before he took me home. During dinner, the topic of earthquakes came up. I think it was my stepmom who brought it up. I don’t remember what was said exactly, but I remember the tone of the evening changed with the subject.  

If You Speak It, It Will Come

The mere mention of earthquakes always made me nervous. I grew up northwest of Los Angeles in the 1980s, so I was no stranger to them. I remember earthquakes being as common as bank holidays back then. We felt them at school during the day, at home in the evening, and I’ve even been in a movie theater during an earthquake on three separate occasions. (I don’t know if that can be chalked up to the frequency of earthquakes or how often I used to go to the movies.)

They were never very big, but they were a part of life, and they were always unsettling; probably more unsettling than they needed to be due to the looming threat of the proverbial “big one” that was always said to be overdue and expected at any moment. The “little” ones that I grew up with were terrifying enough without someone constantly telling you you think that’s bad; wait until “the big one” hits, and the whole state sluffs off into the Pacific Ocean.

Here’s a parenting tip: don’t tell children about hypothetical, impending, major catastrophic disasters over which they have absolutely no control, can’t predict, and cannot effectively prepare for. All it does is cause unnecessary trauma and anxiety. Despite years of earthquake drills, warnings of the “big one,” and TV specials about preparing for the worst, every earthquake I’ve ever experienced has caught me as off guard as the first one I ever felt. So, the mere discussion of earthquakes always gave me pause, and I’ll admit I did have a bit of a superstition that talking about earthquakes would summon one. Nothing that happened over the next 24 hours, by the way, would do anything to disprove that superstition.

As such, there was a pall over the rest of the evening. Strangely, about that same time, across town, my friend Dave and his family were having their own conversation about earthquakes. They lived across the street from me and my mom. They were Mormon, and, as Mormons do, they had a one-year supply of food stored for emergencies. Earlier that day, they had received an order of supplies to freshen their larder, and they were labeling it and rotating their stock. Dave’s older brother was complaining. “What do we need all of this for?” he griped.

“It’s for emergencies, like an earthquake.” Said his older sister. 

“We’re not going to have an earthquake,” the brother retorted, “we don’t need all this food.” 

“We could have an earthquake tonight.” his sister replied. A chill would run down my spine as Dave recounted this conversation to me the next day. His sister always seemed to be in touch with dark forces.

The Last Normal Night

The house was dark and quiet when my dad dropped me off after dinner. My mom wasn’t home yet. I went up to my room and turned on my stereo. For Christmas, I had received the new Paul Simon box set, and I was still thoroughly enjoying it. I rotated the tray in my 5-disc CD changer until it reached the third disc and turned the volume way up since nobody was home to complain.

The disc in that slot was Disc 2 from Paul Simon’s box set. It was a compilation of his 1970s post-breakup era hits; all of those songs with the electric piano and the gospel and Dixieland influences that flavored his music before Graceland in 1986. There were a few songs on that disc that I had never heard before, and I was really into them. One was “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” and another was “Rene And Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After The War.” They were both slow and reflective. One might even call them sad, but soon, I would grow to call them depressing, even triggering.

Eventually, my mom came home, and I stopped the music to talk to her. I told her about my weekend with my dad, showered, and went to bed. It was the last normal night I would have for a long time, and even though I had no reason to suspect what happened next, something didn’t feel right. I went to bed thinking the night just felt off.

4:30:55 am, January 17, 1994

You might be expecting me to say that I woke up with a jolt. I didn’t. In fact, I don’t know how long the house was shaking before I woke up, but I remain convinced to this day that I may have slept through the whole thing had my mom not been running through the house screaming my name. “Richard! Richard!” she shouted as she made her way down the hall to my bedroom, throwing the door open as I sat up straight, forced to take in what was happening. It was pitch black, loud, and terrifying. Everything was falling off shelves and furniture. I wasn’t sure that we would make it out of the house alive.

The worst of the shaking had stopped by the time we made our way downstairs. We were in shock. We walked through the kitchen and looked out into the backyard. There was nothing to see, but we could hear the water in the swimming pool sloshing about and spilling onto the deck. The kitchen was a mess. The contents of every cupboard were deposited into a pile on the floor.

We quickly turned to make our way to the front door before the shaking started again, pausing briefly when we saw that the picture window in the living room had shattered. As my young mind tried to process the large shards of plate glass I saw hanging in the window frame, I blurted out, “Holy shit.” I had never cussed in front of my mom. I felt bad, but she didn’t react; she just said, “Come on, let’s go.” 

We walked outside, across our driveway, and over the short wall that divided our driveway from our neighbor’s lawn. There was a half-moon in the clear sky, and the Santa Ana winds were blowing strong from the northeast. Hollywood has given the Santa Ana winds a reputation for being a majestic, magical force that makes anything possible, but the reality is that they just muss your hair, knock down trees, and make Southern California unseasonably warm in the winter. Before dawn in January, however, the Santa Ana winds blow cold.

We crossed our neighbor’s lawn in our pajamas and knocked on their door. I don’t remember who opened the door, but they let us in, and we all gathered in their family room, talking about what had just happened. As a kid, I was grateful to have someplace familiar to go that felt safer than my own home at that moment. As an adult, though, I look back at my mom and me seeking refuge from our next-door neighbors and cringe.

I would, of course, graciously offer succor to my neighbors if they found themselves in a similar situation, but I also see my parent’s divorce and subsequent reliance on our neighbors, friends, and family as a failure on their part to handle their own business, and not be a burden to others by making their problems, someone else’s. But that’s a story for another time. After a few minutes, we decided nobody was going back to sleep, so we might as well get comfortable. Since it was cold and there was no heat, my mom and I went back home to get dressed. 

I hustled upstairs and rummaged through my ransacked bedroom to find warm clothes to wear. My biggest concern at that moment was not to be naked when the house started shaking again – this would be a significant, recurring concern for the rest of the year. I dressed as fast as I could, but it wasn’t fast enough. As I was pulling my pants up, the shaking started again. It was a small aftershock, but it was enough to kick me into high gear. I put my socks and shoes on, grabbed a sweatshirt, and ran down the hall. When I got to my mom’s room, I called to see if she was ready. She told me to go on without her. She didn’t have to tell me twice. I ran downstairs and out the door.

Since earthquakes are a part of life in California, they spend a day every year in school teaching kids what to do when the ground starts moving. At an assembly earlier in the school year, they told us that if we lose power during an earthquake, we shouldn’t light any candles because if there were a gas leak, we could blow ourselves up. It was an interesting bit of info that I filed away in my fun fact reserves, but I didn’t give it any more thought until I walked back through my neighbor’s front door just as she struck a match to light a candle. I stopped dead in my tracks and said, “Well, at least we know you don’t have a gas leak.”

“Oh my god,” she said, “I didn’t even think about that.”

Of course, now I know that had there been a gas leak that was big enough to blow us up, we would have smelled it long before enough gas had accumulated to be any sort of danger, so I’m not really sure what the emphasis on “never light a candle after an earthquake” was all about. 

My mom showed up a few moments later, and the five of us sat in our neighbor’s family room, talking and riding out the aftershocks until dawn. It was only a couple of hours, but it felt like dawn would never come. I learned that day that in mid-January, the sun sleeps in until 7 a.m. Waiting for the sun to rise can be a lonely and desperate eternity, even in a familiar house with four other people. I suppose that’s why horror movies tend to end when the sun comes up.

There’s something reassuring about the light of dawn that breaks the tension of the unknown darkness of the night and promises that everything will, in fact, be all right. Sunrise has the power to completely change your mind. Things that were terrifying just an hour ago are suddenly inconsequential when the sun comes up. But in those intervening hours between being rattled out of bed and the start of a new day, we had no choice but to wait for something, anything, good or bad.

Sunrise

When the sun finally came up, we went back home. In the dim light of dawn, we explored the house, assessing the damage. There was nothing left unaffected inside or outside of our house. Inside the house, everything that was in or on anything else was now on the floor. We already knew the state of the kitchen, but it was even worse than we thought. What, in the dark, had been an amorphous heap in the middle of the kitchen floor was now, in the light, a huge pile of many, many objects that would all have to be sorted through. Meanwhile, outside the house, every wall in the backyard was damaged in part or entirely. Eventually, we would discover that the whole house had shifted, causing the east side of the house to rise three or four inches. 

My parents bought this house, new in 1967. The street was cut into the side of a hill. The houses on the south side of the street were built into the cut, but to build houses on the north side of the street – the lower side of the hill – the developers brought in fill dirt; a lot of fill dirt; 25 feet of fill dirt to be precise. My childhood home sat on 25 feet of uncompacted earth. The earthquake sent a wave underneath our house from east to west that vibrated that 25 feet of soil like a Magic Fingers. That’s why there was so much destruction on our side of the street. Meanwhile, across the street at Dave’s house, the extent of the damage was a single picture frame that was knocked askew. Bedrock, apparently, absorbs a lot of the trauma of an earthquake. 

We spent the day cleaning up the mess. We had no water, no electricity, and no gas. I had never experienced anything like it before. Blackouts were a semi-regular occurrence when I was growing up, but I had never lived without running water before. It fascinated me that the phones still worked, though. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around that. Losing power back then wasn’t like losing power now.

A transformer in my neighborhood blew a few months ago, and we lost power for 13 hours. It felt like we were cut off from civilization and sent back to the stone age. In almost every driveway, people were sitting in their cars with their engines running, presumably charging their phones. Back then, it just meant no TV, music, or video games. It was boring, but newspapers were still delivered, and if you had a battery-powered radio, which everyone did, there was no reason to feel cut off from the world.

The aftershocks continued throughout the day, and by late afternoon, my nerves were frazzled. Just before the sun went down, Dave came over to see how we were doing. We sat at my dining room table, exchanging stories about our experiences that morning when a decent-sized aftershock interrupted our conversation. I tensed up, expecting another jolt like the one that shattered my house before dawn, but this one was nowhere near as strong and passed after a few seconds. “I hate the shaking!” I said, “I just want it to stop!” Dave looked visibly confused by my statement. He wasn’t bothered by what happened at all, and so he couldn’t understand why I was so shaken. Nobody understood. I didn’t even understand.

I would quietly and privately deal with the trauma for the next year or so. For most of 1994, I slept on the floor of my mom’s room. Later that summer, a friend would see my makeshift bed and ask if I slept on her floor. I, of course, denied it. During the daylight hours, I was okay, but at night, I was a nervous wreck just waiting for the ground to start moving again. I dreaded being home alone at night for the rest of 1994, but alone I was most nights.

A Latchkey Kid In A Broken Home

Being home alone had become my new normal during those post-divorce years. My mom distracted herself with extracurricular activities after my parents divorced, so she was rarely home. Almost every night of the week, she had one commitment or another, five, six, even seven nights per week. Sunday was softball with her church team. On Wednesday nights, she was in a bowling league. She worked with developmentally delayed athletes, so the rest of the week was walleyball, baseball practice, track and field, fundraisers, dances, and other social activities. I don’t even know what all.

Most nights I had no idea where she was or when she would be home. These were the days before everyone was constantly connected everywhere they went. If you wanted to get ahold of someone, you had to know where they were if you stood any chance of reaching them. If you didn’t know where they were, all you could do was wait for them to reach out to you or come home. Nighttime was lonely after the divorce, but after the earthquake, it was downright scary. I didn’t want to be home alone when the house started shaking again, so I looked for any excuse to avoid it.

On Wednesday nights, I tagged along with my mom to the bowling alley. I liked it there for several reasons. One was because it was familiar. I had been going there with her since I was a little kid. The first time I remember going with her was when I was in kindergarten or maybe even preschool. There must have been a snafu with my school schedule or something, and she had no choice but to take me with her because the bowling alley back then was not a place for children. It was made very clear in the parking lot that I was to be on my best behavior. I was to sit down, be quiet, and not give anyone any reason to throw my mom out of the place. 

By the early 90s, though, it was a very different sort of bowling alley, one that encouraged whole families to come bowl. They doubled the lanes, replaced the drab, smokey, brown and orange decor with blue and white, and they brightened up the whole place. That was another reason I liked going to the bowling alley on Wednesday nights. It was well-lit. Even with every light on, our house was never what anyone might consider bright. The walls were yellow, but a dark, sad yellow, except for one wall in the living room that was dark brown wood paneling; the carpet was dark brown and gold; the furniture was all brown and dark wood tones. Actually, now that I think about it, it was not unlike the bowling alley before the remodel. It was not a place for a child to be left alone.

At home alone, I would spend my nights on edge that the ground would start shaking again, hesitant to even go to the bathroom because I didn’t want to get caught in an earthquake with my pants down. Plus, it was lonely in our big, dark house. There were lots of people at the bowling alley, so it felt safe. I always ate dinner in the coffee shop on Wednesday nights.

Every week, the guy who ran the diner would ask me why I always came to the bowling alley and if I found it boring. I didn’t. I actually really enjoyed it. It was almost like being on vacation. I would bring my Discman and a bunch of CDs and hang out in the arcade until it was time to go home. When I ran out of quarters, I would crawl around and look under all of the machines, looking for loose change that people dropped but were too lazy to look for so I could keep playing. A skill I would later teach my boys.

The bowling alley was only a respite from my fear and loneliness one night a week, though. The rest of the week, I was stuck by myself in our big, dark, lonely house. Twice a week, I went to a tutoring group after school. It was over by about 8 p.m. My mom couldn’t pick me up one night, so she arranged for me to get a ride home from someone else in the group. When we left, I asked them if I could go home with them. They agreed, albeit reluctantly and somewhat bemused. I spent 45 minutes sitting by myself at their dining room table, waiting for my mom to pick me up.

Nobody understood why I didn’t want to go home, not even my mom. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I was afraid to have to ride out another major earthquake at home alone. Especially since everyone else seemed to either be over it or totally unaffected. 

Coping

I turned, as so many people do, to television to distract me from my brain. I rented movies as often as possible and found that light-hearted comedies worked best to transport me away from my dark, lonely house. There were two movies in particular that I watched repeatedly: My Blue Heaven and Captain Ron. I liked them because visually, they’re both rather bright with many sunny daytime scenes. Both also have very upbeat and tropical soundtracks, which can’t help but lift spirits. I watched them over and over and over again. Even now, 30 years later, I still watch each of them once a year.

I didn’t, however, continue listening to my Paul Simon boxed set that I had enjoyed so much the month before the quake. It was cursed with bad juju, as far as I was concerned. I had been listening to it one night, and the next thing I knew, my whole world was being shaken apart. Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War and The Late Great Johnny Ace left me with a deep, suffocating despair. It would be years before I could hear those songs again without anxiety.

As winter turned to spring and spring to summer, the days got longer, and the distance from that awful morning grew. It became easier to be at home alone because the sun stayed up longer and the aftershocks diminished. I found myself spending more time outside. By the fall, things had returned more or less to normal. And by winter, I cautiously gave Paul Simon another chance. But that was still a year away. 

Back To…Normal?

After we recapped the morning’s excitement, Dave returned home for dinner, and my mom set up a camping stove on the patio table on the back porch to cook some frozen vegetables and chicken that had been thawing all day in the powerless freezer. It would be another couple of days before power was restored. The days were short, making the nights spent in the house lit by candles and flashlights feel interminable. So you can imagine our relief and excitement when our power was restored at approximately 6 p.m. on Wednesday. We were eating dinner at our dining room table when the lights came on. Suddenly, fans were humming, lights were blinking, and oh-so-many clocks needed resetting.

When the power comes on, some appliances like refrigerators just start working again. You might not even notice them come on. But more complex devices such as stereos take longer. First, the amplifier has to power up and run through its processes to ensure there are no shorts that might overload itself or any attached components. Once it determines that everything is good to go, a relay clicks, which allows an amplified single to leave the amplifier and go to the speakers.

At the same time, the 5-disc CD changer is also running through its processes to ensure everything is operating smoothly and to see if it has anything to play. It rotates its turntable, stopping at each of its 5 CD slots to see what, if anything, is in each one. Once it has taken stock of the CDs it has onboard, it cycles back to the disc in tray #1, and with confirmation from the amplifier that everything is good on its end, it begins to play the disc. The whole process takes probably 20 to 30 seconds. 

If the stereo were in the same room you were sitting in, you would hear the CD changer rotating its turntable, and you would hear relays clicking in the amplifier, and you would know something was about to happen. If the volume were turned up loud enough, you might also hear a hum from the speakers shortly after you heard the click from the relay. Of course, if the stereo were in another room, say, upstairs in your bedroom, and you were downstairs in the dining room, then you might not even notice that the stereo was coming to life.

And with everything that had happened in the past few days, you might have completely forgotten that 72 hours ago, you had the volume on that amp cranked all the way up while you had the house to yourself. And so both you and your mom would be caught completely off guard when, twenty to thirty seconds after the power was restored, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot begin singing the Animaniac’s opening theme at concert-level volume. IT’S TIME FOR A-NIMA-NIAC’S 🎶🎵 … A sudden start that I assure you, after all of the surprises and shaking over the past three days, your frazzled nerves do not need.

It took me a second to process what was happening, but once I did, I ran upstairs and shut it off as quickly as I could. Once we realized we weren’t under siege or at risk of the roof collapsing on us, we laughed about it, and I felt at that moment that life was finally getting back on track. Thirty years later, though, I can see that it hadn’t been on track for a long time before the ground started moving. I just couldn’t feel it yet.