Hi ho, silver lining

Today the country fell silent at 12.51pm, one week since the earthquake split Christchurch history into Before and After. Except it didn't, really - fall silent, that is. Watching it on TV I could hear, outside and in the places shown on screen, camera shutters clicking, mobile phones going off, cars driving past, the guy next door continuing to clear out his garage. Tch. It would have been nice if someone had thought to ring our church bell to join in with the others around the country. At least the school over the road was quiet.

So it could have been more solemn. I'm sure it was in Christchurch, aftershocks permitting. There was a surprise there today, a pleasant one: the discovery, in the broken-off plinth of Godley's statue, of a broken glass bottle containing a rolled parchment, and a sealed copper cylinder. Time capsules! Always fun, and especially welcome at the moment. The great hope is that it will be a kind of message from John Robert himself, an inspiration from the original founder to those now faced with starting Christchurch over again. Hopefully not a laundry list.

The Museum people must be feeling the buzz. Not only did their building come through relatively unscathed, but they now have their hands on, literally, a piece of history that promises to be of enormous symbolic value to the city.

That top photo wasn't taken in the Botanical Gardens, by the way, or at a private house: it was outside a factory. Christchurch is The Garden City, and Christchurch people like things to be neat and pretty. Sigh.

Thank goodness!

So relieved. My friend at The Press got back to me today: he'd just stepped out of the building a few minutes earlier to have lunch next door. "Chaos" he said, succinctly. Now he's down in Timaru, having to work from there till who knows when. I think it's wonderful that the paper hasn't missed an edition through all of this.

The death toll is now up to 147, but the names are trickling out very slowly. Today was the first funeral, of one of the two babies known so far to have died: a little boy, only 5 months old. So sad.

Another of the dead is one of our Travcom members, Rhys Brookbanks, who was only weeks into his first job at the CTV building, having just graduated, like my Firstborn, from journalism school. He was a poet, and is an entrant in our Awards, the New Writer category. The Gala Dinner evening is just over three weeks away. How will his people feel if he wins? The prize is money but even better, a travel assignment and a guarantee of publication in NZ's highest-circulation magazine. How bitter-sweet that would be.

But although there are still bits falling off the Port Hills, and the first 10 pages or so of the newspaper are still devoted to earthquake coverage, the radio is still interviewing people about quakes (not just ours - San Francisco is providing comfort and advice) and it's still big on TV, the rest of the world is creeping back into focus again. It's the start of the process of getting on with life, which must seem harsh to those in Christchurch holding vigils for bodies as yet unrecovered; but tomorrow at 12.51pm, one week after the disaster, there will be a two-minute silence across the country, and that will be a raw business.

What if...

The newspapers are hard reading this morning: full of images, personal accounts and overviews of the current situation in Christchurch and already predictions about the city's future. It's heavy going, though also of course morbidly fascinating, impossible to read without wondering "What if I'd been there? Is that cute little hotel I stayed in last time still standing? Did I even think then to check where the stairs were?"

They're required reading, though, if only because there are still so many unanswered questions, personal ones about people and places I know; so I'm seizing on snippets buried in the pages of type - a casual mention that my old school, Avonside Girls' High, was badly damaged; a reference to the person killed at The Press as "she", which makes me feel more comfortable about Ken.

Some of it's unbearably sad: trapped students phoning and texting their parents back home in Japan and the Philippines. Imagine being on the receiving end of that - and then the messages stopping. People who escaped, but went back inside to help someone, and then the building collapsed. Having to lift a dead woman to rescue the baby underneath who she'd protected. Awful, awful details.

One photo that was mentioned but not printed apparently showed a boy on a skateboard getting air after using the ruptured road as a ramp. That would have been good to see, as a bit of relief. And there have been lots of heart-warming accounts of community spirit out in the beleaguered suburbs. Even all those good-news stories are just blips, though: nowhere near enough to balance out the tragedy and the loss.

There was a mobile phone clip I've seen several times on TV that showed a red dome upside down on the road surrounded by broken bricks and concrete and glass and dust, and the man going past filming says "My God! Was there anyone inside?" It looked so familiar, but I couldn't place it. I've just found this photo from my visit in November:

Carpe diem

A hot sunny Saturday, all the now-scattered family free at once, so off together to Waiheke Island again to remind ourselves in one afternoon of what it used to be like for a week. The ferry was chokka: not just with locals but lots of tourists from today's cruise ship and elsewhere, so it was standing room only on the top deck with the views of harbour, bridge, skyscrapers, yachts big and little, volcanic cones, Devonport, Rangitoto, Bean Rock... all the usual much-loved elements of a trip out on the Waitemata.

There were Russians next to me on the bus to Palm Beach after our brunch at Wai, new to us with its fancy deck overlooking the turquoise water of the bay. "Tropical!" the gift shop lady and I agreed. "Who needs to go to Thailand?" we asked each other smugly.

Anyway, the Russians: their spoiled little boy sulkily gave me his seat on the crowded bus and I asked where they lived. "Central America," his mother said, and as I was thinking "Panama? Guatemala? Honduras?" she went on to clarify "Nebraska". That certainly explained their excitement at going to the beach. I didn't see them there, but I did wallow in the perfectly warm water and watched as a young man walked down the sand into the little waves, cool and confident right up to the moment he stepped into a hole and fell flat on his face, emerging spluttering and embarrassed, looking around to see if he'd been observed. "I saw," I called out cheerily, and he had the grace to grin.

It was a lovely day of simple summer pleasures, and when we took the ferry back again the water was sparkling pewter as we headed into the west, silhouetted yachts heeled over as they skimmed back to the marina. And beyond and behind them all, on top of the Harbour Bridge, the flags were flying at half-mast for the people dead in Christchurch, lying in the rubble, still waiting to be recovered.

Taking heart

Would I live in Christchurch again? It's a good question. Before Tuesday the answer would have been yes: it's where my roots are, my father's house is still there (I hope), it's a pretty, neat, historic place where people have good manners and take pride in their gardens, it has the Avon and its ducks, the Court Theatre and the Cathedral, Hagley Park and the Botanic Gardens, the Port Hills and the Southern Alps, the Waimakariri and the patchwork plains.

Now I'm not so sure. So many of the buildings I love have been destroyed or badly damaged, the tidy suburbs are devastated, awash in silt, the roads are wrecked, there are cracks in everything. The thought of all the work that has to be done on unglamorous but essential things like sewage pipes and water mains is just exhausting; then there's the arguing to come over how to rebuild. That's all going to be so wearing.

But mainly there's the loss of trust. I don't blame the people leaving the city, saying they'll never return. They've been taught, the hardest way, that they can't rely on being safe anywhere in Christchurch any more. Who knows when the next earthquake will happen, and wreck everything again? This afternoon? Next month? In 300 years' time?

It will be an act of faith to rebuild the city; and defiance too. It will be hard. It's good to know that it's been done before.

Two degrees

The names of the dead are beginning to trickle out now. Amongst the first are presenters who worked in the Canterbury TV building that's little more now than a smoking pile of rubble, and where the search for survivors was abandoned yesterday. Many Cantabrians will think they know those TV people, because they've seen them on their screens so often; but the sad fact is that it's unlikely that there will be anybody who has no real connection with at least one of the deceased.

New Zealand is such a small country, 4-point something million, and though Christchurch is our second city, the population is only around 330,000, so here we have pretty much just two degrees of separation between any individuals. None of my family live in ChCh any more and I haven't lived there for 30 years, so I've lost touch with most of my old (first) friends - but I remember their names, they're still part of my personal history, and even if I don't see them in a list, I know that they won't be so lucky. I'm still waiting to hear who died at The Press.

Along with the names are the details of how they died, and the shocking thing is how banal it was. Sitting on a bus in Colombo Street, having a sandwich at their desk, standing waiting for the lift to arrive. We're used to reading about people dying in car crashes on equally mundane errands, but not this. It's so easy to imagine because it's so very, very ordinary: ten to one, waiting to go to lunch, swivelling on your chair with the wonky castor, chatting to a colleague and thinking it's time she got her roots done - and then wham! Everything jerks, the ceiling caves in and you're on the floor with the sharp corner of the filing cabinet gouging a hole in your thigh, choking in the dust, all the alarms are wailing, things are still thumping down on top of your desk but you can't hear any voices, just the crackle of electricity - and then you smell smoke.

It's the 9/11 scenario all over again, but this time it's not terrorism, which gives at least some sort of intelligibility - it's just random nature, balancing out the lakes and mountains, trees and flowers, sunsets and rainbows. We think we own this planet, but we're as vulnerable as the insects we tread on every day without even noticing. Earthquakes, landslides, floods, cyclones, bush fires, eruptions, tsunamis... They're in the news so often, you'd think we'd be more aware.

Broken

This is the statue of John Robert Godley that stands opposite the front of Christchurch Cathedral. Stood. It's now on the ground, broken, covered in dust from the collapse of the cathedral spire which lies in pieces scattered over the steps in front of the building. The cross from the very top lies in the rubble, still attached to part of the tip of the spire, 8 metres of it that was rebuilt in 1888 after an earthquake. Though the copper-green of the replacement was in startling contrast to the grey of the rest of the spire, it was such a familiar sight that people forgot what it signified. They'll remember now.

Godley was the founder of Canterbury and oversaw the establishment of Christchurch in 1850, so it's symbolic that his statue has been toppled from its base. It's not destroyed, though, and it will be restored. It's too soon to think about what will happen to the Cathedral and all the other historic and beautiful buildings that have been wrecked, though it seems inevitable that many of them will have to be removed completely.

At the moment the focus is of course on rescuing the people who are still trapped inside collapsed buildings, and on identifying the dead - 75 so far with 300 reported missing. Then it will be important to shore up the nerves of Christchurch residents, which have been shattered by 4000 aftershocks in the last 6 months, and now this (officially also an aftershock). And of course no-one knows what else may be in store for the city.

It's kind of ironic, but also maybe helpful to think about, that last weekend was the annual Art Deco Weekend celebration in Napier. It was bigger than usual, the 80th anniversary: in 1931 the city was totally destroyed, with 256 deaths, in a 7.8 earthquake, but was rebuilt in the style of the day, Art Deco. Now it's a unique, beautiful and interesting place that tourists flock to and where the earthquake disaster has been turned around into a yearly commemoration that unites the city. One day, I hope that's how it will be for Christchurch.