After disaster, people sail calmly on

BY JOE BENNETT

OPINION: In times of trouble people's true colours emerge. Mine are a fetching shade of yellow. With a thick varnish of selfishness.

At 4.35 on Saturday morning, along with every sentient creature in Canterbury, I woke up.

The dog slunk into the bedroom. He addressed the earthquake problem by taking shelter under the bed. Being his intellectual superior I chose to take shelter under a pillow. As it happened both techniques worked well and the quake soon stopped.

There was silence. I turned on the light. Nothing happened.

I groped down the corridor, turned into the kitchen and stubbed my toe. A bottle skidded across the floor. My foot came down in something wet. It didn't feel like water. It was soy sauce. The bottle was intact but the cap had come off. It was the only thing that had been dislodged.

I went outside. Silence. No screaming neighbours. No sounds of falling masonry. All was calm. I sat and smoked a cigarette, while the dog licked the soy from my foot and soothed my toe. There seemed nothing that needed doing. I went back to bed.

I woke three hours later to the loveliest of spring mornings. The world is good at irony. The power was still off. The dog had obligingly cleaned the kitchen floor. Reason told me that perhaps I ought to check on elderly neighbours or at least inspect my house for damage, but everything felt normal. And besides, instinct had kicked in by then. It was screaming for coffee.

A previous owner of this house had gone to great trouble to build a dinky wood-fired barbecue complete with chimney. I have never used it, because I own a stove. It took half an hour to get the barbecue going and half a tree to boil a billy. But rarely has coffee tasted so good.

When the power came back on, the first I knew of it was the phone ringing. It was a friend in England. He wanted to know if I was all right. Christchurch, he said, had been flattened. He knew more about it from the other side of the world than I did from the other side of the hill.

I looked out over Lyttelton. It didn't look flattened. I made a mental list of things I needed to do. Top of the list was a bit of panic shopping. Followed by rubbernecking.

The car radio was alive with the earthquake. Under no circumstances was anyone to come into town to rubberneck. I decided on balance that this probably applied to me, so I contented myself with Lyttelton's main street. It was thronged.

The chip shop had opened and was doing a fine trade. There was a queue in the dairy for ice-creams. Someone said that all the milking sheds in Canterbury had been destroyed so milk would soon run out but I doubted that and bought only essentials. Having stashed the cigarettes in my car, I joined the crowds.

Much of the road was blocked with "Do Not Cross" emergency tape.

People constantly ducked under it to get a better look at the teetering facade of the Empire Hotel. Everyone was talking in the sunshine. There was a lot of laughter. It didn't seem to be the nervous laughter of survivors. It was cheerful, convivial. It felt like a holiday.

People swapped stories. A few had lost chimneys or old retaining walls but most had suffered only a fright. Everyone wanted to tell their own waking-up story. I told several people about my soy sauce. The details got a little neater each time.

Seagulls screamed for morsels of fish and chips. Stories were coming in from the other side of the hill. Most were later proved wrong.

Back home an hour later I found emails from various parts of the world asking how things were. I replied jokily. Yet I knew that people had lost homes. I don't pretend it's admirable.

In the short term there is great distress. In the long term the disaster will stimulate the city, and not just economically. It is good to be reminded of vulnerability. But what kept recurring to me throughout the day was an Auden poem.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance; how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster;

And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- © Fairfax NZ News