4 Things You Can Only Learn by Surviving an Earthquake

John and his brother had survived the initial quake, but they still had to climb down from the unstable annex before it collapsed under its own weight. The buildings around them had been sheared away like God gave the Earth a buzz cut, leaving a fairly direct (if utterly terrifying) path down to the street below. The dirt left behind was extremely soft, like it had been churned. John sank to his ankles with every step. This kind of powdery soil is not uncommon after an earthquake. It's known as liquefaction, and it involves the top layer of earth blending with the groundwater during a strong tremor. The muddy concoction that results can feel like quicksand.

Japan National Committee on Earthquake Engineering
It is the diarrhea of Tor, the epileptic earth god.

An aftershock could have come at any moment, sending a two-story building right over like the worst possible game of Red Rover.

When they hit the street, the dust storm kicked up by all that debris led to confusion. "We couldn't see anything for like the first four minutes," John says. "We couldn't see the horizon, to see what was happening. I'd look up, and I couldn't see the sky." Eventually the brothers managed to make out two more people nearby: a housekeeper from the hotel and a photojournalist from Belgium (the one who took all the pictures). "When the dust cleared out," John recalls, "the whole city started to scream. And I mean everyone."

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Tragedy breeds unity.

John was still a bit rattled by his brush with death, followed by the blacked-out sky and a whole city of screams. He wasn't exactly in his happy place when his brother turned to him and asked, "Are you noticing it?"

"What?" John asked.

Presumably accompanied by ominous, swelling music, his brother told him to hold his palm against the ground. That's when John realized that the Earth was vibrating beneath them. From that moment until the day he left the country, he felt that constant buzz every time he stood still. That's because, when it comes to a 7.0-magnitude earthquake like the one in Haiti, the aftershocks can last for upward of a decade. Naturally, the tremors become less perceptible with each passing year, but for those first few days, they are frequent and seemingly endless, every 15 to 20 minutes. It's like the planet itself doesn't want you to forget that it is stone-cold crazy and will jack you up for so much as littering.

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"I see you, motherfucker."

That's when John and his brother first realized that the big quake was just the start. There were the obvious dangers (crumbling structures, aftershocks), and the less obvious: Fires were breaking out en masse because of the compromised electrical grid. The most tragic fallout began nine months later, when a cholera outbreak swept the country. By 2013, it had claimed over 7,800 lives. So what caused it? Damaged sanitation lines? Lack of medical supplies? Pestilence, the Horseman of the Apocalypse, just getting a few cheap shots in while the country was already down? Nope: It was a group of U.N. peacekeepers who accidentally brought the disease from abroad when they arrived in Haiti to aid in the recovery. A plague of irony ravaged the population not long afterward.

The Israeli consulate had been a beautiful and ornate building, but more than half had collapsed. All that was left was a massive, dangerous, uneven pile of debris that the brothers would have to find their way through.

Hey, gamers: Does that setup sound familiar? It's like one ethnic stereotype and a swinging blade away from a Prince of Persia level.

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John didn't say anything about retrieving mysterious relics, but we just kind of assumed.

The realization was not lost on John, and here is where it gets weird for him: He actually remembers the whole experience as though he was playing a video game level. The series of decisions he had to make on the spot were translated into gaming language. The gaping holes he needed to jump over, the unstable rubble he had to maneuver through ... these became obstacles to clear. Archways turned into checkpoints. The ground looked like it could collapse at any second, but John felt only the adrenaline of crossing it, not fear -- even though it had been at least a few decades since his last save point.

"This was the strangest moment for me," John says. "I don't know if what I had was the most appropriate reaction, you know?"

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Curse him for not conforming to our expectations of victimhood!

John's "virtual" experience is actually pretty common: It's an example of depersonalization (when a person feels like they're watching themselves) and derealization (when a person's surroundings suddenly seem unreal). Long before we invented video games, our brains knew that some traumas were just too horrifying for the puny cotton strands of our sanity. It's not uncommon for people to recall traumatic moments as if it was all a movie, and they were the protagonist.

Funny how nobody casts themselves as the red-shirted extra.

When you make it through a catastrophe that decimates an entire country, killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens, it can be hard to process. Harder still when you come home to a lot of possibly unwelcome media coverage. John wants to stay anonymous, so we can't point you to the stories, but there was a lot of attention, and he didn't feel he could shut himself off from the overwhelming goodwill given by his community just because he was still a bit rattled by the time the Earth tried to swallow him whole. Experts have a term for this early stage in post-trauma: It's called the honeymoon phase. It seems like some pretty cynical phrasing on the part of psychiatrists to infer that marriage is some sort of soul-scarring disaster.

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"No, no! The wedding is the disaster in this analogy. The marriage is years of depression and horror afterward!"

Positive attention or not, John couldn't exactly rejoice in the miracle of his own survival. He knew people who had died in the earthquake. He also knew that his survival over theirs came down to nothing more than the most haphazard luck, the help of strangers, and possibly some latent force-bubble powers.

Related Reading: We're all about talking to people with interesting lives, like this Homeland Security agent who went undercover with the cartels. We also talked to a woman who spent her childhood as the accomplice to a mass murder and this big bunch of drug dealers. Have a story to share with Cracked? We're right here.