What would you take?
Family members and pets aside, what would I wish I had rescued from my sinking house?
Yesterday there was a landslide of historic dimension in central Norway, a few hours north of Oslo, in a place called Ask. “Ask” means “ash” as in the tree and as in the remains of a fire. On an aerial map it appears to be in the middle of an expansive green area of hills and fields. Apparently, this area was once the ocean floor. Now it is the location of many a little hamlet. One of them is Ask.
In the space of a few minutes around four in the morning, fourteen buildings (single family homes and small 4 or 8 family structures) disappeared from the center of town into a crater three hundred meters wide and seven hundred meters long. When I started watching the news coverage at about 8 a.m. it was still dark out and even though all possible emergency relief and rescue workers were in place, no one quite could see what had happened. They only knew it was in the middle of the small village, and a retirement home was teetering on the edge and needed evacuating. By the end of the day a thousand people had been evacuated, and as I write they are evacuating forty-six more people. The area is a former ocean floor, apparently, and consists of what they call “quick-clay”, like quicksand but slimier.
People described hearing helicopters overhead ordering them to evacuate, and as they ran from the living room to the front door the house fell away around them and the front door was no longer there. It’s been harrowing to watch the houses teetering on the edge then falling into the abyss, stunned by how mere inches separate the fates of people whose houses still stand and those whose houses fell, and even worse: those who fell with them. How can we, in the solidity of our living room, watch this thing and possibly understand? There half a house hangs over empty space, but the family car is still neatly parked before the garage as if nothing has happened. There a roof juts out of the mud at the bottom of what can only be described as a crater. There a hospital helicopter circles, a rescue worker dangling on an indiscernible line, looking for movement, helpless to help on the still moving ground. There are still ten people unaccounted for above ground. The search is on to find them alive in the rubble.
The news coverage focused on the evacuation of the area. For the first few hours fewer than fifty people had been removed, but by evening it was a thousand. As we watched this slow, massive migration my wife turned to me and asked, “What would you take?”
I knew she meant if we had to do that.
She didn’t ask (but I wondered to myself) if our house was built on solid ground. I found myself being very aware of our house’s structure as I watched the news. How straight were our walls! How firmly they attached to the roof! The house was unmovable, wasn’t it? We just moved here, out in the country, the house is isolated in an area we call “the meadow” but the locals call “the big marsh”. Can there be a landslide on an island? Coincidentally our island is also named “Ask” but that can’t mean anything, can it? My wild and crazy thoughts were diverted by her practical question: what would I take?
I am a person for whom things matter. There is a story, many of them going back generations, belonging to every item of furniture and decor. I mean, I can tell you where each stone came from and probably the year I brought it home. Yes, I have stones decorating the house. I am nothing if not materialistic. So what would I take?
“Your computer?” she suggested, knowing my writing is important, but I told her no, these days it’s all backed up on the cloud. “What would you take?” I asked her. She is an artist, equally materialistic and a fellow lover of stones, but she couldn’t think of anything either. “My phone?” she said at last, and I nodded, thinking it’s not a bad habit to always have that handy and not have to go looking for it.
A day later I am still aware that I cannot answer the question. I look around my writing room which is a literal shrine of things Rasma-esque. Everything in here is precious, and meaningful, and yet, what would I throw out the window if the house was burning? What would I grab if the police were at the door saying I had to evacuate? There is a little snuff box that was in my grandfather’s family. I have always loved its beauty and it is about two hundred years old. I’d like to save that, but would I go out of my way to?
I realize as I write this that I am a person of privilege, indulging in the luxury of cataloging sentimentality. I can only hope that if I were to ever have to evacuate I’d be sensible enough to think of grabbing something practical, like shoes. And whatever sentimental item I happened to grab would be the one thing I saved. It would survive and take on a new story. As each of these items I so cherish will long after I am gone. For now, they all matter, and none of them matter. A landslide far away across the country, the final tragedy in a year of tragedies, has made me reconsider my attachment to the things I have accumulated in my life. I see how dear each is, and I see how clearly I will separate from them one day. I think I’m attached to them, but no — I am just living among them. And in that statement, only the “living” matters.
