Earthquake Aftermath

I mentioned in my last post that the February 22nd earthquake had driven us from our home. The full story remains to be told…

You remember when you were a teenager and you discovered parties? And then alcohol? And one morning you woke up and you couldn't remember anything, but oh boy was there a mess to clean up?

That was our house, except we didn't get to enjoy the hangover.

We could have dealt with the debris, but a few parts were worrisome.

It was easier to move out. I have a distant cousin who lives nearby, so we politely asked whether he could put us up for the night. In other words, we showed up at his door unannounced.

Tom is one of the most wonderful people in the universe, so of course he welcomed us. The only problem was that earlier in the day, he came across Barbara, a young German woman who made the tiny mistake of arriving in New Zealand for a bicycle tour the day before the earthquake. When the road beneath her collapsed into a yawning chasm, Tom dove in, yanked her out of the boiling magma, and offered her shelter. So by the time we arrived, we were left with a choice between the shed, the barn, and the field.

We decided Barbara would do best in the field, and Tom and his wife could sleep in the shed. We took his bed and got cozy.

After a few days of this, though, we started picking up on vague hints that we might be wearing out our welcome. Like finding our laptops—and ourselves—in the dumpster. (I think my four-hour shower, which I took right after Tom told us there was a water shortage, might have had something to do with it.) So we called some friends in Wellington, which is comfortably far away on a different island, and asked if they had space. “Sure!” they replied, “Just drive on up!”

New Zealand is an interesting place. For example, the main route between the South and North Islands is State Highway 1. All you have to do is drive north from Christchurch:

View Larger Map

Of course, it helps if you duct-tape your car doors shut first so they don't leak quite so much. It took us about three hours to float to the other island.

As soon as we got to our friends' house, the weather turned nasty. The wind was blowing at about 90 (you pick the units), the rain was coming down so hard that the ocean was drier than the land, and the temperature was Antarctic. So naturally we decided that this would be a nice place to live. But since we're short-timers, we needed a furnished house.

The first place we looked at was such a dump that we seriously considered moving back to the destroyed house. The second was gorgeous, except it was built on stilts about a thousand feet tall, and we're just a teeny bit nervous about earthquakes right now. And it was out of our price range anyway. We were about to give up and set up a tent on the beach when we found the third place, which is perfectly wonderful (if you ignore the 17 flights of steps you have to climb to get to the front door, and the 12 more flights to the mailbox).

The only remaining problem was that we hadn't driven up with the expectation of moving, so our stuff was now spread throughout the country. A bit of luggage was with us, more was at Tom's, and a few things had been left in the earthquake house when we fled. Somebody had to collect it all.

Road trip!

My daughter wanted to be involved because she didn't trust us to get all the important stuff. She figured that if it were left up to the adults, we'd grab something dumb like our passports and forget about her collection of hotel business cards. “Fine,” I told her, “here are the car keys. Make sure you get everything.”

Since she's only twelve, that didn't go over so well with the wife. And I suppose she's right; the kid's too lightweight to close a suitcase by sitting on it. But that meant somebody else had to drive. And my wife wasn't about to enter the collapsing house, even at gunpoint. I didn't trust my daughter's aim enough to let her do the herding, so I'd have to go along. In the end, we decided to limit it to the two of us so we'd have more room in the car.

The trip down was fairly uneventful. Three hours in the house let us retrieve everything (or so we thought—a month later we know better); then we went off to Tom's for the night. The next morning we planned to run a few important errands in town before loading the car and driving part of the way back north. That's where we hit the first snag: the errands took almost all day. Snag #2 was that all our stuff didn't fit in the station wagon, not by a long shot. We had bins of food, a microwave we didn't need, some random furniture, four huge rolling duffel bags, books, linens, a bicycle, and I don't know what-all else. Oh, and a cello. Not the world's smallest musical instrument. Why couldn't I have married a flutist? Or somebody with a tin ear?

Out came the rope. The Sleepy Professor loves tying knots; maybe he's a secret bondage freak. Or just a freak. All the duffels went on the roof and everything else somehow got crammed into the back. (Sorry if your cello sounds a bit…flat, honey.) And away we finally went at 4 PM—straight into rush-hour traffic. About 39 hours later, we finally got out of town.

You can understand that by now, I was feeling a bit harried. Our ferry reservation had already been made; we had to get far enough tonight to make the dock by the next day. And we were both hungry. The roof stuff made some flapping noises, so I pulled over and tightened the ropes. After several tries, the noises were gone. We were eager to get to a hotel; my daughter's favorite TV program would be on soon. So I sped up a bit.

Suddenly there was a thumping noise outside the car. I looked in the mirror; one of our bags was cartwheeling down the road, desperately trying to catch up to us. I slowed down, but it wasn't making very good time. I pulled over and yelled for it to hurry; it ignored me. Must have been a teenager bag. It was in the oncoming lane, and a truck was headed straight for it. Thinking quickly, I grabbed my daughter and tossed her out the window directly into the path of the truck. The driver saw the orange hair waving in the wind (she has pretty awful taste), swerved, and barely missed our bag full of dirty laundry. Whew! Disaster averted. Although it's kind of too bad about the flock of sheep he hit.

After I got everything back on the roof, I tied it down really tight this time. (Good thing the cello wasn't up there. But that laundry? Perfectly pressed; not a wrinkle anywhere.) We got to the motel safely, just in time to catch that TV show, which by the way is called “New Zealand's Stupidest Drivers.”

You get one guess who was featured that night.

Baby Swans

After the latest Christchurch earthquake, we were forced to move out of our house (the landlady seemed to think we had “utterly destroyed” it—I'd be insulted, but moving was easier than arguing). After a road trip from hell that involved a car with luggage flying off the roof (really), we would up renting a new place near Wellington, which is far enough away that we can't feel the frequent aftershocks—except the ones from Japan.

A few days later we started exploring the area, which in my daughter's vocabulary translates to “visiting every library within 200 miles and checking out 50 books from each.” One library was in Whitby, which has one of those fakey man-made ponds that developers dig so they can sell “beachfront” houses at inflated prices. And in the middle of that pond were two big black swans with three little gray babies.

Now I know you've all read “The Ugly Duckling.” I don't want to spoil your illusions, but that story is NOT scientifically accurate. It turns out that baby swans don't speak English. Also, they aren't ugly, they're fluffy. And cute. (Of course, I think anything fluffy is cute. Except tarantulas, which are hairy, not fluffy. And anything with that many legs isn't natural; it should be locked up in Area 51 and dissected. In fact, that's probably where they came from; it's no accident that tarantulas are found in the desert, is it? The damn things are ALIENS.)

Anyway, back to the swans…

We didn't have a camera with us, so I decided to take my fancy expensive model over there the next day and get some cute-baby pictures before the dang things grew up and turned into boringly gorgeous adults. I had a bright idea, too: I would bring some bread so I could trick them into coming close.

Now you'd think I could manage to find some bread on my own. But my wife doesn't trust me in the kitchen. She thinks she has to do everything for me, even if it's finding a can of Coke in the fridge. That might have something to do with the whole war-between-the-sexes thing. Or it might be related to the fact that the last time I tried to make toast (in 1997), I set the teakettle on fire, melted everything in the freezer, and shattered a cast-iron skillet.

Anyway, I told her that I needed a “couple” (that's a direct quote) of slices of bread, just enough to lure the swans into range. But my wife is the sort who will invite a family of two to dinner and present them with a turkey, a ham, a prime rib, six lobsters, a huge salad, a pot of baked beans, mashed potatoes, French fries, peas, carrots, string beans, three loaves of bread, two gallons of ice cream, and a chocolate cake. And that's just the appetizers. So of course she handed me a plastic bag with all the bread we owned, and off I went.

The bread worked. As soon as the swans saw my sack, they swam right over and hung around by the side of the pond, the adults making an odd chirping noise and the kids peeping adorably as if they were about to die of starvation. The only problem was that they were too close to take pictures. And half of the bits of bread that I tossed just bounced off their backs into the water, where they didn't notice them. The papa swan got tired of waiting and started snapping at the grass next to my legs; then he tried a taste of my jeans for good measure.

That was when the ducks decided to get in on the action. And after them, the seagulls. And every species wanted to stop every other one from getting any bread. (Except the ducks, who wanted to stop everybody. Those guys can be NASTY.)

So there I was, surrounded by quacking ducks, snapping swans, seagulls shouting “mine, mine, mine,” and even the occasional sparrow hoping for a dropped crumb. The tiniest hint of tossed bread would cause a riot—and I had several loaves to dispose of. They were getting heavier in my hand. Images of you-know-which-movie swirled in my head. I had to get rid of the bread before I was torn to pieces! In a panic, I drew back my right arm and threw as hard as I could, right into the middle of the pond. Bullseye! The ducks went nuts for it.

Man, that camera sank fast.