A smash of glass and a rumble of boots

Josh Surtees

Shortly after 5.30 pm on Tuesday, Trinidad had a new fear to add to its list.

The low, booming rumble sounded like it was coming from the sea. The quaking felt like the neighbourhood would break apart and houses topple down. While dashing out of the house, I glanced at the sea. It rippled slightly but remained largely unbothered.

A few days before, a gloomy sense of foreboding had urged me to think through an earthquake escape plan. Maybe it had been the intense heat and rain, or the gloom over Venezuela. Something catastrophic was in the air for Trinidad. In the end, seismological good fortune prevented disaster. But what we do with this collective fright, a shared fear, will reveal the character of this nation.

When “the big one” does come, our institutionalised safety measures could, ironically, increase the carnage. Scrambling for keys to unlock the burglar-proofing we live behind will hinder our escapes.

We humans were slow to sense the vibrations, as dogs and cats scampered for safety. In the aftermath, giant snails climbed the walls and biting insects swarmed. Disruption in the earth’s magnetic field perhaps? Within hours, a kundalini yoga teacher was offering post-earthquake meditation to reset our own magnetic fields.

What now? Do we heed the earthquake as a warning and add it to the bucket of hazards propped over our country’s doorway? Or, do we treat that rapidly-filling bucket as a slapstick prank and move on in our happy, go-lucky way?

On Tuesday, after fleeing the house – and there is ongoing confusion as to whether this was advisable – my wife and I called out to our landlady, who emerged saying she’d placed a pillow over her head and waited for death to come. We all laughed.

Then, with phone lines down, we went to check on family nearby. On the car radio we found, instead of news reports, a DJ playing Building Shake by Maximus Dan. Within minutes of Trinidad’s strongest earthquake, somebody was playing the fool. People could have died. The insensitivity reminded me how the Smiths’ song Panic was written after a radio DJ announced the Chernobyl nuclear disaster then cheerily played an upbeat Wham record.

When the dust settled in Port of Spain, it was Prince Buster's song about a metaphorical Earthquake in Orange Street that came to my mind. But the aftermath of the tremor was no time for music or metaphor. Our legs trembled. Electricity was down. An hour later, after dark, or an hour earlier, before workers left their offices, real panic would have ensued. Instead, as dusk fell, people stood outside their homes asking their neighbours if they were ok. The earthquake had triggered a sense of community spirit sadly lacking on any given Tuesday.

Friends and family abroad asked if it was “exciting.” One even expressed jealousy, because they’d always wanted to feel an earthquake.

“It feels like a monster is shaking the earth like in a sci-fi film and you don't know if it's going to calm down or throw the whole city about,” I texted back.

But in all honesty, they can be exciting when mild. My first one, as I sat on the balcony at Little Carib Theatre watching Walcott’s Pantomime in 2013, was exhilarating.

But the truth is, nobody can predict earthquakes. They’re not triggered by Gay Pride parades, as homophobes have claimed. This wasn’t Allah announcing Eid al-Adha. It wasn’t the wrath of Seigonie Mohammed, although, fickle fate, the CNC3 weather anchor – ridiculed 48 hours earlier for wrongly predicting a storm – was suddenly elevated to meteorological messiah.

During CNC3’s excellent extended coverage, trained geologist Dr Keith Rowley was contacted on a scratchy phone line. Or maybe that was just his voice. He calmed the public by explaining that he’d been just about to undress when the quake hit. Early to bed, early to rise? Maybe he had a headache…

TT slept soundly considering the trepidation over picking the safest place to retire. Friends in high places (eg One Woodbrook Place) had every right to feel nervous.

Jokes and memes poured in. A friend criticised the immediacy of the deployment of humour as a sign of Trinis’ inability to process hard realities.

“It’s just one unassuaged trauma after another in Trinidad,” he had remarked recently, on the anniversary of the coup.

With every noise and tremble this week prompting anxiety, it’s hard to imagine how society would cope with the fallout from a major disaster. We would learn what desperation means and what those less fortunate suffer, but would it bring the country together or tear it apart in a torrent of looting, finger-pointing and political point-scoring? The latter hasn’t yet begun. Give it time.