Nothing about cows turning upside-down

By Editor | October 13, 2022

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

When I was about four years old, I received a lexicon as a gift and learned all about foreign countries and their cultures, and one of the images that stuck in my mind for decades was of Japanese houses that are designed to withstand earthquakes.

Apparently, the Japanese people decided to live on islands that are frequently shaken by terrible quakes, and rather than just go somewhere else (I don’t know; Belgium?), they built their homes out of things that would either move with the ground in the event of little tremors or not hurt the people inside if things became really turbulent.

For years, I carried around with me the idea of those little paper houses sliding down hillsides and the people inside them looking altogether quite pleased with themselves.

Pictures in my lexicon didn’t show hordes of mud-splattered rescue workers and civilians clawing through rubble, men and women collapsing in grief, vital systems interrupted, or lines of people waiting for food and water.

Other chapters showed disasters like monsoon floods in which children seemed content to wade through waist-high water on their way to school; and even a volcanic eruption after which farmers happily plowed the fertile earth and planted grapes, of all things.

Even taking into consideration that my lexicon was German and one might query its authors’ motives in presenting such a peculiar view of the world to impressionable children, I must say that I came to believe that any manner of calamity might be overcome through ingenuity, at the very least sheer sensibility.

A few years later, again in Germany, I watched in horror as an evening newscast repeatedly ran images of flooded farms near Hamburg, where roads and railway lines were entirely submerged and the only elevated ground contained clusters of bloated cows lying on their backs with their legs pointing straight up into the air.

Clearly quite dead.

How long could it have taken those farms to flood? I went to bed thinking someone should have saved the cows.

There was nothing in my lexicon about cows turning upside-down. In fact, the chapter on Germany only showed spotless factories producing shiny little Beetle cars, happy families sharing enormous sausages, and men in Lederhosen spanking their knees on a mountain.

Shattered, I turned to the chapter on England and found out that all the men wore bowler hats and carried umbrellas and all the women wore miniskirts and appeared to go shopping a lot outside medieval castles.

The chapter on Scotland left me very confused indeed.

A chapter on America took up as much space as the one on Denmark, which prompted questions over proportional representation, but I learned that there was an awful lot of wheat growing in the middle, everybody surfed and made films in the west or spent all day looking up at skyscrapers and moon rockets in the east.

There was nothing at all about how Americans build their houses (or how the Danes do it, either), and I had no idea how all those plaid-shirted people must prepare for the outrageous acts that Mother Nature might perpetrate at will.

Eventually, of course, I came here and found out that people really don’t know how to do that. They build houses out of sticks next to the ocean. If they don’t have cows, they abandon all sorts of other valuables outdoors when the sky turns dark. They still send electricity to homes through wires suspended from poles, quite often near trees, and the whole lot comes crashing down at the first hint of a gale.

Meanwhile, they’ve invented the most marvelous gadgets, cured diseases, sent men to the moon, thrown robots at Mars, won the Cold War and a few others, drilled for oil just about everywhere, built highways that go on forever, and saved canyons and forests from the bulldozer.

But when the earth shakes, when the hillsides light up in flames, when the sea roils and surges, when the rivers crest, and when the wind comes down like the finger of God, everybody goes completely berserk and everything is lost.

How very odd.

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