The Unseen Scars of Earthquakes

Jan. 20, 2010 — -- The horrific earthquake in Haiti will claim lives long after the dust has settled and the last of the nameless victims are tossed into the mass graves on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

An earthquake does much more than destroy buildings and snuff out human lives. It carves memories in the brain that cannot be erased. Without warning, Earth itself has become the enemy of life.

I have covered earthquakes for decades, and scenes from years ago are as fresh now as they were when the earth was still trembling.

"A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet; like a thin crust over a fluid. One second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced."

Charles Darwin penned those lines during the voyage of the HMS Beagle, a five-year sojourn through the history of Earth, from the formation of continents to the evolution of humankind.

The great observer saw something that would not become common knowledge for more than a century -- Earth is alive, with giant masses of land drifting over a molten core, building mountains and destroying lives in a relentless reformation of the surface.

But that process also reshapes lives, some for the better, most for the worse. For longer than I care to admit, I covered earthquakes for the Los Angeles Times, forced to witness the upheaval caused by falling buildings and overturned lives.

Earthquakes are terrifying partly because they strike without warning, unlike most natural disasters, and that forces people to take stock of their lives. Mortality has suddenly loomed large.

Following the 1971 San Fernando Valley earthquake, which hit that Los Angeles suburb just as I was beginning my journalistic career, psychologists studying the emotional impact of the quake were surprised to find that it probably destroyed more marriages than houses.

When the shaking finally subsided and the world began to return to normal, hundreds of people who had felt the earth move in a way they had never felt before looked inward and were not pleased with what they saw. Many found that while they may have convinced themselves they were happy, they had discovered their lives were profoundly empty.