Kevin and I drove together to the old city to go bike riding and take advantage of the city shutting it off from cars for the day. While driving over, we talked about the big hurricane approaching the Mexican coast. I told Kevin about how the main natural disaster that always looms in San Francisco is earthquakes. I hadn’t thought about earthquake drills for a while, but as I began to talk about them, I remembered how much I enjoyed them, ducking, covering, and having bag lunches on the big upper field waiting for buildings to be cleared. Kevin reminded me that Lima and much of Peru is also in an earthquake zone and how he grew up with earthquake drills as well. He said they did similar things at his school and asked if we also talked about the triangle rule. Perhaps we did, but I have no recollection of it. Kevin explained how if you had to, teachers told students to duck and cover right next to a bookshelf or something so that if something fell, it would then tilt off and not hit you. We both realized that rule was predicated on something falling on the bookshelf, not directly onto you and laughed. We both felt that ducking and covering under a desk or doorway was the best bet.
Thinking about other school drills, I told Kevin about the bomb threat that happened during finals at Harvard my junior year. Kevin sadly told me that something similar happened at his high school. In both cases, there was no bomb, but both were quite unsettling. In Kevin’s case, because he went to school with many diplomat kids, security was taken extra seriously and he remembered being evacuated and having guards with guns stationed on the roof of the the school.
Having grown up worlds apart, Kevin and I both enjoy uncovering our shared experiences.