Early one Monday morning, almost four weeks ago now, I moved into my apartment for the summer, and the next evening I evacuated along with everyone else living at Hatfield thanks to a tsunami warning. There are so many tsunami evacuation route signs in Newport that you can’t actually tell where they are telling you to go so my roommates and I decided to drive to Toledo, a tiny town 7 miles inland, and hang out at a dairy queen until the warning passed. Apparently, everyone else who didn’t know much about tsunamis had the same idea. Unfortunately, the dairy queen is the only place that sells food in Toledo, and it was closed. So a good portion of the population of Newport would pull into the Dairy Queen parking lot, pull on the door, realize it was closed and go back and sit in their cars; luring more people to the ice cream shop. Turns out the assigned evacuation route for Hatfield is actually about 100 yards inland at a ‘point’ aka the parking lot of a local hotel. Well, I guess I will know for next time. In the mean time, my mom has completely freaked out about me being washed to sea in a tsunami. Now I realize that I am hard to reach at the coast—up until two days ago I had no phone and now my phone has no answering machine and I am rarely home to answer it (let alone update my blog ;)—but it is much more likely that since Newport decided not to purchase tsunami warning sirens I will be walking on the beach completely unaware of the impending wave. Personally, I would rather die naive watching the sunset on the rocky shore than pedaling as fast as I can on my bicycle down the highway that parallels the coast.
Alright, back to my internship :) I struggled for a long time this school year with the decision of whether or not to return to Hatfield this summer. I finally decided that out of all my other options, it offered the best opportunity to experience first-hand aquatic research and veterinary medicine. However, I questioned that decision a lot the first couple of weeks because sometimes it seems like an easy way out of the tumultuous beginnings of experiencing something completely new.
5 comments:
This was wonderful to read. It is a great chronicle of your time and thoughts during this study. I look forward to reading more. It allows me to read back over it and try to understand it more deeply than when we just talk about it. Although, I may need to keep a scientific dictionary nearby.
P.S. I didn't freak out;) I reacted like any mother would to learning her daughter had no tsunami warning system and lived 100 yards from the bay.
P.P.S. Go to the top of the hill, not the hotel parking lot:)
P.P.P.S. Check out the widget for your dashboard at apple.com. There is one called TremorSkimmer. It tracks all the earthquakes on the planet. There are numerous ones everyday.
Oh my god that was like a novel. A very interesting one though! I told Becca she should see if you could fix Apache after the sketchy vet medicine you did in Mexico. :)
Cool, another post. :)
Yeah, uphill is usually better than a parking lot.
And when you're watching that nice sunset you'll usually have some warning if the water suddenly goes out to sea. Depending on the coastline and circumstances, you may have a few to 15 minutes to get to high ground.
Glad to hear the bright side of unexpected plumbing experiences. :)
Sorry, I love Apache and all, but if she was a goldfish rather than a dog, I would certainly NOT pay $3000 to fix her.
I named my beta fish 'Sushi', I think you can tell my level of attachment from that..
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