An entire mountain shifted, a new one arose

BEIJING, May 23 -- I was having an afternoon nap, and that's how the earthquake found me in bed. I was jolted awake: the wardrobe door was banging, the walls were shaking, and the whole building was wobbling. I found my frenzied girlfriend in the living room. Outside we could hear screaming and glass shattering.

Momentarily, I thought of diving out of the window, then remembered we're on the fifth floor and decided to take my chance down the stairs. We reached the willow tree in the middle of courtyard and stood there, transfixed, as the ground convulsed, the building swayed and rattled, and bits of concrete spewed out. I could smell dust. And as the ground juddered, for five minutes or more, the thought that I was going to die became more distinct.

Then it was over, and we ran outside the building to the swathe of greenery - a strip of lawns, flowerbeds, and weeping willows - that borders the riverfront where we live in Deyang. It was full of people, and the atmosphere was slightly festive, perhaps fueled by a mixture of adrenalin and relief.

We met some friends; one suggested that we get some beers and settle on the grass. I thought it was a bad joke; but like her I also felt a sense of bravado - a boyish conceit that I had conquered a new experience by surviving a strong earthquake. But I didn't know then that it was only the beginning of a long ordeal.

I live in Deyang, the capital of a county that's home to 3 million inhabitants sprawling along part of the mountain-hemmed Sichuan basin. The mountains to the west are among the highest and most spectacular in the world, holding the richest temperate ecological habitats on earth. It's in those mountains, about 150km from my house, where the earthquake had its epicenter in the geologic fault-lines that divide the mountains from the plain.

But now we couldn't see any collapsed buildings, and intimations of the widespread devastation reached us is scraps: the telephone network was down, the sirens of emergency vehicles rose to a din, and transistor radios brought news of destruction about places we knew but couldn't see.

In Mianzhu, only 60km away, where the mountains loom suddenly out of the plain, the verdant slopes I often visited for hiking had been razed (when I went back, after the quake, the lovely traditional farmers' houses no longer stood, the fruit orchards looked forlorn, and the slopes were slashed with landslides).

Deeper into the mountains, two 4,000-m mountains had collapsed, and further off an entire mountain had shifted and a new mountain arose out of the ground to take its place.

This was how the mountains formed over millions of years. Fault lines crunching one another, chunks of land pushing up or sideways, gravity pulling down, and tension building up, all leading to this moment - a massive earthquake, and geography rearranged.

The preceding 1976-earthquake had been weaker; thirty years on, the tension erupted into a big one. And the landscape was in the process of being reshuffled and reborn: fallen mountains had blocked a river, creating a new lake; the river would eventually forge a new course; and the new mountain that had sprouted out of the ground was bald and tentative. Geologists would be studying these upheavals for years.

Nature is essentially in a state of flux, but that's the anti-thesis of the human condition: humans seek safety in organized stability. And here in Deyang, any sense of safety had been shattered on that fateful day.

At first I thought that after a few hours lingering outdoors, we would return home, and I would write e-mails to friends bragging about surviving one of the largest earthquakes of our time. How foolishly boyish those thoughts seem now that I know that steadiness, once lost, isn't easily restored. In any case, the tremors that continued throughout the day kept us on an edge. I call them tremors, because they made the ground shudder briefly, but somewhere in the mountains that are visible on a clear day these were massive convulsions that could fling you off the ground.

Deeper into the mountains, two 4,000-m mountains had collapsed, and further off an entire mountain had shifted and a new mountain arose out of the ground to take its place.

This was how the mountains formed over millions of years. Fault lines crunching one another, chunks of land pushing up or sideways, gravity pulling down, and tension building up, all leading to this moment - a massive earthquake, and geography rearranged.

The preceding 1976-earthquake had been weaker; thirty years on, the tension erupted into a big one. And the landscape was in the process of being reshuffled and reborn: fallen mountains had blocked a river, creating a new lake; the river would eventually forge a new course; and the new mountain that had sprouted out of the ground was bald and tentative. Geologists would be studying these upheavals for years.

Nature is essentially in a state of flux, but that's the anti-thesis of the human condition: humans seek safety in organized stability. And here in Deyang, any sense of safety had been shattered on that fateful day.

At first I thought that after a few hours lingering outdoors, we would return home, and I would write e-mails to friends bragging about surviving one of the largest earthquakes of our time. How foolishly boyish those thoughts seem now that I know that steadiness, once lost, isn't easily restored. In any case, the tremors that continued throughout the day kept us on an edge. I call them tremors, because they made the ground shudder briefly, but somewhere in the mountains that are visible on a clear day these were massive convulsions that could fling you off the ground.

(Source: chinadaily.com.cn)