Landslide

79 REGINA DREXLER LANDSLIDE O f all natural disasters, landslides are more devastating than most people realize. Worse, they are often triggered by other natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Scientists refer to this as the multi-hazard effect. In one of the deadliest landslides of the last century, in the Ancash region of Peru in 1970, the multi-hazard effect was responsible for the burial and death of over fifty thousand people. Of course, in most circumstances, death comes before burial. Where there are multiple hazards occurring nearly simultaneously , however, it is likely that even if you survive the first disaster, there is another on its way to bury you alive. Ten years ago, as I was in my new-motherhood panic with an infant baby boy, I met her. I was taking my son out for a walk in the neighborhood with his baby jogger, doing one of my early impressions of an enthusiastic young mother. I was walking past as she called out, “How old is your baby?” It was the pickup line for the stay-at-home-mommy set, women desperate for any kind of adult interaction. “He’s four months,” I said as I approached. She was holding her son in her arms, standing on her perfectly manicured lawn. He was dressed as a professional golfer. As she explained that her son was six months old, I noticed that she had not allowed herself the personal-hygiene hiatus that most new mothers, including me, had granted themselves. My hair was falling in clumps from my limp ponytail, and I had stains of breast milk and rice cereal drying on my T-shirt. Her shoulder-length light brown hair was neatly combed beneath her wide-brim sun hat, and she appeared to have just come from the dressing room at Anthropologie. After introducing our sons, we stood there, watching them and waiting, as if they were going to exchange pleasantries. Then and suddenly, she invited me and my son to join a play- colorado review 80 group. I accepted the invitation, although I did not seem to have a lot in common with her, or anyone else who had a baby. I was a lawyer. She gardened. Not that those things were mutually exclusive, but I know that only now. At the time, I thought we were quite different; the only way it seemed we were alike was that we enjoyed the same movies—I had seen her before at the video store and we had spoken there a few times. But we were not fast friends. Even after meeting in the same playgroup once a week for several years, we were not friends. At first, if I am honest, for those first several years, she was not interesting to me. She was boring, in fact. Boring in the “My life is perfect, and my son is perfect, and my marriage is perfect, and my house is perfect, and my garden is perfect” way. Boring in the way that only perfect can be, and not worth investing any emotional energy, until one summer—the playgroup’s fifth summer. Her heart had been broken that summer by her lover, an old high school boyfriend who, she had desperately hoped, would help her escape. I could understand what she was hoping to escape from: the idea that this is all there was. This life of wifedom, motherhood, laundry, sex on Saturday mornings (if then), and playing trains on the floor for hours on end. That this was all there was or would be—where time moved so fast that it made us old overnight, but where each day, hour by hour, moved so mind-numbingly slowly. But he would not help her escape. She somehow managed to keep her heartbreak about this fact contained, and thus her marriage intact. But she had to tell someone, if only because a broken heart is too much for anyone to bear alone. We had run into each other unexpectedly one late afternoon in the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery. As soon as she saw me, she broke into writhing sobs, the tears from her eyes and the fluid...