MountainMornings

The same night as the earthquake, the August 23rd Virginia once in a hundred year’s event, I heard the first aftershock. I didn’t feel anything, but around 8 pm I heard what sounded like our emergency-back-up generator coming on. That very well used machine sitting next to the heat pump on the north side of the house, always tests itself on Thursday afternoon. It wasn’t Thursday. This had been my first thought when the big one hit earlier in the day, before thinking the house was about to explode from a gas leak. Talking with my MIL, Ada, on the phone, I paused and considered running out of the house…again.

Since then we’ve had more than a dozen. What is the purpose of an aftershock? Is it just a “gotcha” moment, some earthly comedic effect, warning us not to get too comfy with the idea that all is well? Maybe it’s simply a ripple in the fault line. Ada called me on the morning of September 11th to tell me to put the news on; the local channel was gone by that time, so I put on CNN. I called my daughter, who was working in DC for the FTC. A newly hatched graduate of Duke’s Sanford Public Policy program, she walked back to her apartment in Adams Morgan. My son left high school, to sit on the beach with friends and watch the billowing smoke run down the shipping lanes. Bob gathered EMS crews at the marina to wait for patients who never came.

The Bride’s September birthday became the National Day of Mourning.

Our Jersey Shore community lost so many people on that day, a decade ago. We attended our neighbor, Michael Tucker’s funeral; one of many empty caskets. The investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald was set to open a satellite office in the next town; Rumson lost thirteen people, and Middletown over thirty. I was turned away at the blood bank (it was full), so I delivered food, helped to organize a fundraiser. I remember thinking I was glad to have stopped writing a weekly column for the paper, because there were no words. The aftershocks, the effects of that day are felt now whenever I fly, or look up at a plane, when I see flags on bridges or read about first responders who worked on the Pile developing cancer. They are felt in the two wars we have begun, and the many wounded warriors and brave lives lost. And I pray for peace.

“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” – John Adams