Things keep changing, moving, adapting. Some changes are disastrous but many only require a little adaptation and some are truly for the better. We’ve got examples all around us.
When I moved to the Bay area, I knew about Earthquakes of course. I grew up in an Earthquake zone too, although much much much milder. My relocation came with many surprises. The biggest quake I ever felt – which was quite intimidating here in San Jose, so close to the epicenter — happened just a couple of months after I settled in the house. Stuff fell from my shelves all around the house!
So, after a few years, you learn to live with the uncertainty… You try to get prepared but you just know that eventually there will be a “big one”, you just hope it won’t cause as much damage as we fear.
Walking in Los Trancos, you get the opportunity to take a step back and see what it is that we are facing. That fence is a reconstructed artifact of the 1906 earthquake I believe. It’s big and it’s small. Impressive to see how far apart the two ends of the fence got over time but in the grand scheme of things we are only taking about a few feet. Oaks show their resilience too: after falling down, side branches take over as the main trunk, et voila!
The educational hike in the Palo Alto park leads us to a nice outlook… literally! From up there, you can see the whole Valley. The fog was, as always, making it difficult to see San Francisco. It would have been the perfect counter-argument though. The 1989 quake did do some good — no disrespect to those that lost loved ones back then. From an SF perspective, it removed a major eye-sore from the landscape and allowed for the Embarcadero area to be re-designed with a more pedestrian focus.
Change is something we don’t control; it could affect us deeply or we may not even notice. The best we can do is acknowledge that it there and get prepared to get back on our feet as fast as we can.
In the meantime, I’ll try to remember that I need to hide under the table when the next quake comes instead of tweeting it!
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