ruido subterraneo

They say whenever their is strange weather the next big earthquake will happen. And by they I mean the Chileans who remember the 1985 earthquake. The weather that day was unseasonably warm, and everything was strange; the clouds, the wind, the heat, none of it made sense. The last two days were exactly like this. Everything about the weather was out of the ordinary, for one, the fact that it reached 30 degrees C (86 Fahrenheit) in the spring was odd. Everywhere I went anyone over the age of 25 was talking about earthquakes.

They talked not just for the weather but for the tremors. Oddly enough, during these two days we had several tremors, a couple fairly strong ones. Only those two days, the ones with the weird weather, then they stopped. There was an earthquake in Japan.

I want to understand what it is like to experience an earthquake. I want to know the sensation that everything is chaos, that the ground is fluid energy. Of course I would never wish for the death and destruction and fear that an earthquake causes. But I still want to understand what it is like. When someone tells me about it, I can't relate to it at all. They ask me what we have in Pennsylvania alone these lines (tornadoes, etc.) I answer that we have nothing remotely dangerous at all. We don't feel any of the tremors in Recreo because it is built on solid rock, and so this hill is more stable and less sensitive to tremors than others. Some hills are much more unstable, especially in Valparaíso, where cerro Yungay is not even a natural hill, but created from artificial materials. It will literally slide in the ocean during a large earthquake. Many of the houses in Valpo are not very stable either. Ironic, as I am the only one that wants to feel them and I can't because my hill is too solid; I only feel the really strong ones, or rather I only felt the one strong one a while ago.

The noise. I want to hear the noise, the subterranean grinding of the earth and the energy waves that flash to the surface. Every natural disaster has a distinct noise, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes. I want to know what it is like to hear that terrible yelling from within the earth and understand why it is so horrifying.