The Unexpected

   As a general rule, I turn my cell phone off at night almost as a comfort from unexpected calls; it might be something as simple as someone forgetting the time zone changes (something that even I've occasionally forgotten especially when on vacation, the excitement or loneliness seeming to override my once-clear thinking which comes back rather harshly when I ask the silly question to the person answering, "did I wake you?"); or it could be my mother simply being disoriented with the time (much as in a casino without clocks, such things as night or day can slip away in a room where lights are constantly on and little changes)...or it could be an emergency.  My wife and I have had all three, and nothing is worse than that dreaded call after midnight, the phone ringing with seemingly extra loudness as it pierces the quiet and silence of night and sleep.  That happened last night...but my phone was off.

   Somehow I related this to a recent reflection in the London Review of Books about the October 30th earthquakes that hit Norcia in Italy.  Said the author Thomas Mann: One of the strangest things about being in an earthquake – apart from the feeling of being at the top of a thirty-foot birch tree in a thirty-mile-an-hour wind when you’re actually crouching on the floor of your house – is how eerily quiet it is.  I’d have expected a shockwave rippling along the surface of the earth to make a lot of noise, like the roar of surf or a howling gale.  But the only sound I remember was the plates rattling in the sideboard as the first shudders began.  For the next twenty seconds or so the house felt as though it was shaking rapidly from side to side, but after those motions subsided it rocked slowly front to back a few times like a pendulum.  For a few long seconds it seemed possible that, instead of returning to equilibrium after the end of a swing, the house would just keep going and topple over...It took less than thirty seconds for the shockwaves to reach us, another thirty seconds for them to pass by.  Half a minute is a long time to wait for your house not to fall down.

The medieval basilica of St Benedict in Norcia; Photo from BBC News

   The author lives some 50 miles west of Norcia, an area close enough to feel the ripples of land moving under him like gentle waves, but not near enough to do actual damage.  The seismologists said that the land had dropped a half a meter or about 20 inches.  Think about that, half a meter being about the distance from the tips of your fingers to your elbow; the report also added that land dropping is far more damaging than land rising.  The result of this "piece of land eleven miles long, six miles wide and five miles deep" dropping that half meter was strong as shown by this photo from a BBC report, a report that added: We have now seen three magnitude-6 tremors in Italy's Apennines region in just three months.  The big picture is reasonably well understood.  Wider tectonic forces in the Earth's crust have led to the Apennines being pulled apart at a rate of roughly 3mm per year - about a 10th of the speed at which your fingernails grow.  But this stress is then spread across a multitude of different faults that cut through the mountains.  And this network is fiendishly complicated...It does now look as though August's event broke two neighbouring faults, starting on one known as the Laga and then jumping across to one called the Vettore.  The mid-week tremors appear to have further broken the northern end of the Vettore.  But both in August and mid-week, it seems only the top portions of the faults have gone, and the big question is whether the deeper segments have now failed in the latest event.

 
     Jumping back, I turned my phone on in the wee hours of the next morning and was surprised to receive a message that my mother had again fallen and been taken to a nearby hospital (the call came in after midnight, the facility calling my cell phone but not my land line).  A scan had been taken of her head and no injury other than bruising and a small cut were noted; and by the time of my call, she was already back in her room where she was staying.  By the time I visited her the next day, her eye had blackened and her bruise had increased to almost ghastly proportions (or so one always thinks when it's one's mother, the nurse even telling me that the bruising "would look worse than it actually is").  But she was speaking clearly and had only a small headache.  She was lucky.  But it was the breaking of routine --the unexpected-- that was perhaps the most shocking,  those few seconds of receiving the call to finding out more information leaving me stunned as if I had caught my brain taking a break and I had shocked it awake.  Now true, sometimes the unexpected can prove beneficial such as the side trip during a vacation that leads to a new destination or to the making of new friends.  But often it is not what we expect, as with my friend getting a call from a co-worker, someone he had known for over 20 years.  "I'd like you to speak at my funeral," were his opening words.  The unexpected.

   As it turned out, the quakes that hit Norcia, Italy that late October day were an almost expected event with many of the area residents evacuated earlier (no lives were lost), all perhaps due to a quake some weeks earlier in the area that had killed 330 people, a quake which was expected to happen someday, maybe not this year or next year, but due to hit one of these days in the near future (as if hearing an echo, our home is located almost directly on a fault line, one now overdue for "the big one" say historical geologic records).  But even predictions done with sensitive scientific instruments can turn into just that, predictions.  Land slips, bodies give way, phones ring.  Imagine those receiving terrible news...your daughter's been kidnapped; your wife has collapsed; your home was destroyed in a fire; that lump is malignant.  Many of the people in the Italian town of Norcia were lucky.  Indeed, I was lucky.  Things had proved shocking and unexpected but things were okay or at least not as bad as they could have been.  But I did realize that once again I had been served a reminder to not get too comfortable, told to be ready for anything, even a phone call after midnight.  And once again I had been lucky.  It was all so unexpected.