A vivid reminder we're not in charge of nature

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD

OPINION: To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, we're probably all feeling a bit like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis.

Having lived most of my life in Wellington, expecting to cope with a massive earthquake and constantly being told it's imminent, I've felt a bit foolish for believing it until now. To have Christchurch beat this famously vulnerable city to it would be annoying if it weren't for the sheer awfulness of the reality.

I'm relieved that a Readers and Writers Week I was due to appear at there last week was cancelled. Earthquakes, however small, make me jittery.

I've pictured tidal waves engulfing the Hutt Valley, central Wellington, the airport and the suburbs that were thrust up from the sea in that huge 19th-century quake.

The way I imagine it, it'll be like one of those Hokusai woodcuts of little Japanese people and monster curls of foaming water. My rather eccentric mother once advised me to float to safety on my cello if the worst came to the worst. That was most reassuring.

A lot of downtown Wellington is reclaimed land, and I wouldn't want to be there for the big one, not even with a cello readily at hand. It'll revert to soup, surely, when the monster quake hits, while Te Papa, on its impacted earth and rubbery foundations, could yet prove that man proposes but God disposes.

Maybe it's safer on a hill, but I guess they will crumble like so much of the city will, since we build on dubious-looking rock.

I can't believe the Wellington houses that cantilever off cliffs, or whose sole access is by dinky little cable cars, and nothing would make me buy a brick house.

We take in fear of earthquakes with our mother's milk, and my mother remembered the 1942 Wairarapa earthquake - about the same size as Christchurch's one - so vividly that I experienced it by proxy. She leapt as if on springs at the slightest wobble in the house, terrified at what might happen to the Royal Albert china.

My father's family farm had big trees uprooted in that quake, and the swing bridge across the Ruamahanga River that bisected the property came down, never to be replaced.

My great-grandparents famously lost everything in another quake because they'd built a new brick house. My great-grandfather, being English, would have thought that was right and proper. They had to watch it fall down, just grabbing one of my uncles, a sleeping baby, in the nick of time. I expect such family legends are common, and Christchurch will be creating more of them.

No wonder we're a nation of gamblers - we know we live on a network of fault lines, yet we don't live in a state of constant alert, and we're told that many of us don't even have emergency kits ready for The Big One. We face catastrophe with a degree of insouciance that makes me feel perversely proud.

Wimps couldn't survive in a seismic basket case of a country like this, and maybe that eternal threat compensates for miseries other countries endure, such as wars and revolutions.

Natural disasters are a vivid reminder that we're not in charge of the world, however much we pretend we are. An example of that is Sir Miles Warren's historic home in Governor's Bay, outside Christchurch, which he says may now have to be demolished.

His famous garden has suffered, too. I've been there; it was beautiful. Gardens are our way of taming nature, but our successes are fleeting, and his would have been undone in heartbreaking seconds.

I hope Christchurch takes this chance to build something memorable where each old building was lost. The one good thing to come out of the Napier earthquake was the many art deco buildings that eventually proved to be a drawcard for the town.

City planners, architects and builders hopefully won't have an opportunity like this again. It would be a shame to waste it on predictable, dreary, new tat.

- © Fairfax NZ News