February 19: Poor weather delays our departure from McMurdo Station to Christchurch. We're all exhausted after a ridiculously taxing season and don't mind getting paid for hanging out one more day. Besides, the open water, whales, penguins and seals are enough to keep us entertained during the day.
February 20: A warmish, wind-free day that brings our Australian-manned Airbus to whisk us away in the comfort of business class and incredible views of the open water, ice tongues, tabular icebergs and a mosaic of floating ice bits. We spend the night in the Hotel Grand Chancellor in the city center of Christchurch.
February 21: We leave the city center to travel out to the suburbs to stay in the house of our good ice friends, Christine and Antz. We take a long walk on the beach and start to decompress.
February 22: I take a bus into the city center to get a massage that was to be paid for by the gift certificate Michiel won for winning the Men's 40 years and over marathon at McMurdo. I'm in a small stand-alone home on the north edge of the city center trying to will the giant knot in my right shoulder to dissolve into the hands of my therapist. She's working hard when the quake hits and my wheeled massage table flies across the room. Glass knicknacks on the shelves crash to the floor and my masseuse struggles to stand upright. The shaking is violent and abrupt and seems to go on for minutes. In my relaxed state, it takes me a while to figure out that I should get on the ground and cover my head. I don't remember if I was thinking "this is the worst massage ever." By the time I'm off the table and in the doorway, the shaking has almost finished. I hear a little girl screaming - apparently the daughter of one of the clients and several of the other therapists pop their head in to see if we're ok.
I dress quickly and make my way through the jumble of beauty products to join the other clients and staff in the parking lot where the therapists gather together to say "Fucking Hell" or "Holy Shit" or anything that can even come close to express the enormity of their fear. This was way stronger than the one in September, they tell me. The other clients seem fairly unphased, at least until one beautician realizes that she's left a leg with the wax unremoved. She runs back into the salon to get the tape to remove the wax around her client's kneecap who is busy trying to get cellphone reception. The ladies at Total Body Concept are nothing if not thorough.
They all attempt to reach someone on a cellphone and I am offered a phone to try to call Michiel back at our friend's house, but no one has reception. I thank my massage therapist, who apologizes profusely for cutting things short (again, so very professional) and I head out onto the road to decide what to do next.
The main bus station was back in the city center and for some reason, I turn that direction to start down the street. The scene is something out of a Hollywood movie - crowds of people in business clothes rushing towards me and beyond, gray billows of smoke and an odd smell of fire and other things I can't identify. I stop at a street corner, avoiding a puddle of brown mud (liquefaction). Two young businessmen are discussing what to do and I decide to stop and ask them for advice. They looked, I don't know - nice.
One of them offers to give me a lift out of the city center to see if I can catch a bus further out on the bus line. (OK, we are all still in denial. Of course, there would be no bus service that day - or for the next several days.) He drops me at a bus stop on a main road. Shortly after, a lady tells me that she had been on a bus when the quake happened and was quite sure that no buses were running.
I stick out my thumb and almost immediately get a ride from a former nuclear engineer who had been working towards going to Antarctica to do aging on ice cores. He had never gotten to go and was pretty excited that he had gotten as close to Antarctica as chauffeuring someone who'd just come from there. I probably shouldn't be so "interesting" because it is hard for him to concentrate on his driving which was challenging as it was (deep holes, deep water, huge gridlock, chopped up pavement).
He takes me as far as he can and I trudge through a combination of liquefaction (water churned up through the soil as a result of the earthquake) and probably sewage. A blonde lady runs by with a big bottle of sanitizer and asks everyone "are you ok?" She is running from downtown out to the same suburb I was heading to in order to get her kids. She insists on holding my hand through the deep sludge and I try to oblige except that I am carrying a big bag of cold weather clothing that I was planning on mailing at the CDC later that day.
I take note of the impressive effects of pure adrenaline and keep slogging through the muck. Groups of people are parked on the side of the road and a yound Maori boy yells to me, "Are you okay, ma'am?" "Yes, I'm fine. Are you okay?" His brave efforts cheer me.
I am joined by an older lady who was working very hard at staying clear of the power lines; she laments the fact that she had just yesterday shined her shoes. After chatting for a while, she points out that it is strange that I am smiling. I hadn't realized....
After yet another lift, I run into sanitizer lady again, who drives me the last mile or two towards the house (I thought about the sewage and took a good dose of sanitizer). Michiel is not at home but he is good enough to leave a note on the door telling me that he's out walking.
He had done some cleaning up of broken glass around the house and was checking on things in the neighborhood. He'd viewed water spouting up from under the soil all across the estuary and had been served tea by a neighbor. From this gathering, he started to assemble information about the severity of the damage to the city center and I'm sure he was worrying about me but I'll let him share his perspective in another post (if he wants).
The after shocks that night are strong, frequent and severe. You never do really get used to the feeling of some giant shaking the house from side to side but the home had done beautifully during the quake and sustained very little damage so we felt essentially safe.
Thankfully, our friends had left behind some food, a battery-operated radio (our only link to the outside world), a big bottle of water, and candles.
February 23: We venture out to find a phone to notify the US Antarctic Program and Christine and Antz that we are ok. We ask them to send word to the family, but I'm sure that the prior 24 hours were a hell of waiting and worrying. We're very sorry that they and our family and other friends had to go through that.
February 24: We'd learned the day before that the airport was re-opened and that our Antarctic friends had all been evacuated out to the Antarctic Clothing Distribution Centre (CDC) and we were eager to lay eyes on the people we'd been worrying about. Some of them had horrifying tales to tell of watching people getting crushed by awnings in Cathedral Square and many of them had sad stories of how they'd lost everything in their hotels - passports, clothing, etc. but there were hugs and tears of relief that no one was injured.
We walk over the airport to get onto our scheduled flight to Sydney. Qantas opted to send a much larger aircraft than planned in order to evacuate as many people as possible. We hear more sad stories in the check-in queue that many of them had lost all of their luggage but just wanted to be anywhere other than Christchurch. On the plane, the flight crew acknowledge our difficult days and pour the alcohol freely. The Australian guys sitting next to us are Earthquake Inspectors and they had been doing 3 week stints in New Zealand since September's quake. They are trying to put on a brave face but I think they are shaken up by the damage of February 22nd's quake at least if the amount of booze consumed was any indication. I can't blame them, though. It takes us a couple of glasses of wine (and whiskey for Michiel) before we are able to breathe again.
Feb 25: We're in Perth, Australia. We've put a huge distance between us and the after shocks - at least physically. We're finally seeing photos and videos of the damage and feel, again, that we were so very lucky. You just never know what the results of your seemingly arbitrary decisions will be.
