A little one off put together awhile back-
I guess with the third anniversary of the Great Seacouver quake coming up, I’ll go ahead and tell you our story.
It was a simple summer workday like any other. I was in town picking up some groceries at the new market down by the waterfront. My husband was down the coast by the city teaching a class when the first quake came.
I had already checked out and was putting my bags in the cart while chatting with the cashier about her calico cat. The whole building began to tremble and shake. I grew up in Southern California and I know an earthquake when I feel it, but this one felt different than any I had felt before; bigger, longer and gave me a real bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I guess a 9.2 Richter scale quake will do that. The building creaked and groaned, some shelves emptied themselves and the lights went out then the shaking stopped. With the light coming in the windows, I made my way to the door. I pushed the cart to the car and loaded the bags in the back, all the while; something was nagging in the back of my head. Something still wasn’t right. Finally I realized what it was; I didn’t hear the waves like I did when I drove up. When I looked across the street to the water, it wasn’t where it should be. The water was receding out to sea. I hopped into the car and pulled up to the door of the market where people were gathering.
“You guys need to get in your cars and head out of here right now! Go uphill! It looks like there might be a tsunami!” A tsunami. All those years in the Air Force, the PFE kept telling us that “If you can see the wave of a tsunami, you’re too close!” Now, here I am, wondering if I will prove this axiom true. I remembered all the stories out of Thailand of people walking out onto the newly exposed beach right before the tsunami hit, and all the devastation in Japan from the tsunami. I had to get to high ground. My mind raced to figure how to get past all the elevated roadways and avoid the highways, knowing that these will bottleneck in a heartbeat, even if there are no bridge or roadway failures. I knew if I went north, I could go through some of the residential areas. I’m glad I was in my little Subaru. It’s much more nimble than if I brought the truck, and it was still four-wheel drive and lifted a bit, which would let me get through some potential difficulties. I checked my cell phone, and of course no signal. Crap! At this point, it becomes an “I told you so moment”. My husband always said that in any real disaster, the cellphone would become a paperweight. That is why I kept insisting and harping on getting a small handheld HAM radio unit. They were smaller than our first cellphone and had a great range and battery life. This was great as long as you had it with you, which leads to the thing he always was on and on about, having a bailout bag or an E&E bag with you at all times. It was annoying. He was like a cross between Bear Gryls and Sheldon Cooper. It makes sense for him to carry a bag with him since he still goes to work. I’m retired. He insists, so I made him make the smallest version he could. With another excuse to spend money, he built me a small butt pack with a few items. It has a water purification straw, a space blanket, fire starter, multitool, ranger rag, tourniquet, battle dressing, roll of tape, compass, knife, mirror, safety pins, and some other stuff I don’t remember, and that’s where I keep the radio. The butt pack is a pain in the ass, but I promised him I would take it with me whenever I left the house without him. If I’m with him, he has all this in his pockets, plus who knows what else. All of this is in addition to the survival bag and medical kit in the car. With all this, I knew I would be fine as long as I could get enough distance and altitude from the shore. I still remember the skills and techniques from Survival School, and our house was a good 20 miles from the coast, and a couple thousand feet higher. My main concern was getting word to my husband that I saw the water go out and the Tsunami was eminent. If I could get him on the radio, all would be workable.
He was in the city teaching. He teaches Tactical Combat Casualty Care and a bunch of other combat and medical courses. He uses this as an excuse to buy a bunch of survival gear, combat gear and any other shiny toy that catches his eye. His latest toy is the one he drove to work today. He convinced me that the price for the BMW Enduro he found used was now low enough to be affordable. A 7.9-gallon tank had tons of range and the giant aluminum panniers would swallow all the normal gear he has to drag with him. He even added a sound system to combine GPS, IPod and Shortwave radio audio and pipe it to the helmet like his Goldwing. He spent a week figuring out all the stuff he would pack in the bike. Tools, Basha, survival shelter, rain gear, extra ammo, food, water, 550 cord, road flares, medical kit, the list goes on and on. This doesn’t count his every day carry bag. When he got this new motorcycle, he “had” to get a new bag. This time it was a monstrously large hunting butt pack with shoulder straps. I don’t even know what all is in that “go to work” bag; axe, tent, wood burning stove, Ark of the Covenant, there’s no telling. One of these days I’m going to make him pull it all out and show me.
I powered up the radio and made sure it was on the right frequency. I won’t bore you with call signs, frequencies and such; no one wants to read radio talk. I finally hear his reply. I tell him I’m safe and headed back to the house via the north residential area. This is after I tell him to get the hell out of the city the tsunami is coming! He tells me he will head out in 2 minutes, and work to the south and come in via the National Forest to the east of the house. It may take 3 hours, or three days. He said he would call in when he gets free of the city into the woods. He reminds me that he will be coming in from the woods, not the road and reminds me to shut and lock the gate when I get to the house.
I head north and inland, angling for the older residential neighborhood. It has a bunch of older brick homes and old trees. The trees were my main concern. Most of the people should be in the city since it was a weekday. I keep looking over to my left out to sea every now and then, trying to gauge when and how bad the wave will be. It doesn’t take too long before I lose sight of it though since I was moving up through the tree lined streets. The stoplights at the intersections were out, and evidently no one learns in driver’s education what to do in this event (hint: it turns into a four way stop). There were several small fender benders at some of the intersections. I was able to bypass them and only had to drive down the wrong side of the street two or three times. I was more worried with a couple of tree branches in the road. I crawled over them slowly and kept working my way upward and away from the sea. My biggest roadblock, wait, let me rephrase, my biggest inanimate obstacle turned out to be a tree that fell into the road, crushing a little hybrid. I had to jump the curb and skitter across a lawn to get around it. The other roadblock I ran into was a large group of people gathering in the streets. I wasn’t sure why they were in the street, and I didn’t know why they wanted me to stop. I wasn’t going to find out. My husband was in Southern California for the Rodney King/Reginald Denny events and we had discussed this several times. Stopping was not an option. I made sure my legally concealed handgun was available and accessible, but I realized my best defense was distance and horsepower. I nimbly slid around a few clumps of individuals and kept moving up and inland. I finally made it up to the old state road. Once I hit that, I breathed a little easier. I was now able to put the town and the coastline behind me. I pulled over at one of the scenic pullouts and looked at the town below. The sight I saw was stunning. The wave had hit while I was clawing up backstreets. It looked like some of the YouTube’s videos from Japan, with boats and cars floating inland between houses and buildings. I grabbed my rangefinder and snapped some pictures, then climbed back into my faithful little Subaru and headed toward the house. Twenty miles inland and four thousand feet above sea level, I knew I should be safe.
I finally roll up to the gate to the house. I know it’s not what many would suspect as the road to a house, but it’s designed that way. A small turnoff from the road was labeled with an old rusty sign- “Cephalopod Inc. Industrial Park Medical Coding Trng Center”. A strange sign for a house but once you know the why, it works. From the highway, all you see is the sign and a small industrial building sitting on an expanse of overgrown lawn. With the sign advertising what it did, there should be nothing to entice break-ins. This little bit of subterfuge is the classic camouflage in plain sight that works best. We found the property shortly after the real estate crash. A speculator from Southern California had bought a huge plot of land next to the National Forest. They were planning a high-end subdivision like the kinds they were making outside of L.A. They had put a building for all the equipment to build the infrastructure. It was at least 100’ long and 60’ wide, with a big roll up door at one end, an overhead lift, and a generator. A small bank of offices was off on one side. Because the building would also house the offices for the realtor selling properties here, it was modeled on the outside to look like a small two story office building. This was off to one side of the property to not spoil the view. The rest of the subdivision was already laid out, with streets and lots designated. They were large lots. The entire subdivision covered about 200 acres. It had been let go, weeds grew up, the company defaulted, and we picked it up at county auction for back taxes. It slipped through the cracks because it was just across county lines. We looked at the lay of the land for a while and began making plans. It took six months to figure which plot for our house and how to design it. The lot we chose was in the back of the subdivision, out of site from the road and backed up against the National Forest. In that time, my husband retired from the military and I got orders to England. We came to a decision. I would take the orders while he built the house. We burned up the Internet during the whole year. He lived in an Airstream trailer on site while he built and supervised the building of our house. We put in an absolutely huge basement. That was where we had all the support and utility functions that take up a lot of room in a house. We had a walk in deep freeze at one end, next to a separate root cellar. Some absolutely huge water cisterns were down there as well as the wellhead. A battery room holds all the batteries and electrical equipment for the solar power system. The furnace and all the in-floor heating system equipment and the AC equipment are down there as well. With the iffy weather, there is a large long-term larder. Another room in the basement is the workshop for all the little tinkering with firearms, cameras, fly tying, pinball machines and such. This room also has a small potbellied stove. Off this room is a small walk in safe for the camera gear and so forth. The main level of the house is the one actually visible above ground. The house is a log cabin in appearance, blended with Spanish Mission architecture. The hacienda walls surround the house, with a shed down the left side holding 4-6 cord of wood. The right hand wall has an extended carport. The windows have huge wooden shutters more suitable to protect from marauding Indians out West of the Pecos. The roof is covered in real red clay tiles for long-term durability and fire resistance for forest fires. The main floor of the house had a huge combined great room and kitchen. The kitchen had a wood cook stove and a gas cook stove as well as electric induction burners in the island. The great room has a fireplace made to heat the whole house if need be. Two master suites with their own fireplaces make up most of the back of the house, separated by a pantry and a laundry room/linen closet. Four cats rule the house; we are just their staff.
I drove through the outer gate. Everything looked normal. I stopped and closed the gate. I then put the chain and padlock on the gate. We left it out at the gate so it would look old and uninteresting. It was another leftover from our military career, the classic “try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo” also known as don’t look expensive or valuable or attract undue attention. My car is an example of this principal. It’s over 10 years old, but it’s a rock solid little 4x4 Subaru SUV. It can get places most people wouldn’t believe yet it doesn’t draw a single extra look. I’ve seen plenty of outdoors people with all the stickers on the typical jacked 4x4 jeep who also have it broken into several times a year, all their stuff stolen. No one would suspect I have, courtesy of my husband’s OCD, a full camping kit with water, food, tools, compass, maps, aid bag, sleeping bag, tarps, axe, rope, repelling gear, and who knows what else. This is addition to the small kit he insists I take with me wherever I go. The car also has maps, compass and GPS up front for standard navigation. GPS can fail, and electronics loose power, but a map and compass is good as long as you can read it, a skill I was trained in at survival school. There are two map books in the car, a standard roadmap type and a topographical map book of the state.
I drove around the hill to the house. The gates of the Hacienda wall still worked from the opener, so I drove up to the carport to unload the groceries. I went into the house and put the groceries on the island in the kitchen so I could go through the house looking for any damage. Fortunately my husband’s ridiculous over engineering came through again. There were a few things knocked down on shelves but that could have been the rampaging kittens as well. I put all the groceries away and then had to find the next thing to do. I was too amped up with the events to just sit and do a crossword puzzle. I started by sitting down and going through the butt pack to remind myself of all the stuff in it. I then fired up the radio to catch the husband’s call. I then tried the web. The Internet was down. Well, at least the TV would work with satellite. All I could do is trudge along and wait.
I ended up waiting several days. My husband called late the first evening to let me know he made it out and he was trying to make it far enough to cut up into the National Forest but he was still moving through roadway issues and stopped cars. He said he was pulling off and hiding for a quick nap and would be back on the bike in the morning. The next time he called in was evening the next night. He said he couldn’t talk long, had to conserve battery power, but he should be deep enough into the forest to be away from people by midday the next day. The final radio call was early the next morning. He told me to expect him by dark, he was pushing hard in the forest. He rolled in just around sunset, bone tired and dirty, but in one piece. Perhaps I can convince him to write his story of those four days but it took most of these three years for me to get the bits and pieces out of him so I doubt it. The important thing was that he had food, water, fuel, ammo and shelter for his four days of travel. It all came down to having thought about such things before they happen, planning for solutions, and actually executing the plan.
