It’s an amateur radio. That’s right, I’m a ham. I don’t participate avidly, having a couple of other things to do with my time, but I am part of an emergency communications net that covers our area.

Why ham radio, on top of everything else we’re doing?

Story time.

On January 17, 1994, I was awakened from sleep by a deep noise that filled the air and the ground. I have thought since it is like the sound you hear in your ears when you yawn. The room started to shake. I looked at the clock. It was 4:31 am.

It took a minute to register that this was not a dream but an earthquake. I thought, this is it, this is the Big One at last. I was living on the third floor of an old wood-and-stucco apartment building, the kind that you see all over southern California; and when the ground started to shake, the effect was magnified in a flexible building three stories up in the air.

I had been told the safest place to be in an earthquake is standing in a doorway. I tried to get out of bed, but by this time the room was shaking so violently I could not arise from my bed. I have since thought it was like riding in a shopping cart running over a cattle guard. I fell back into my bed, thinking, Well, this is it, I guess. The room moving so powerfully that I could hear air squeezing in and out of the window panes above my bed, making a hissing sound.

I prayed that I would be okay. And when I did that, a wonderful feeling of peace settled over me. I knew that I had lived square with the Lord, that I kept his commandments, and I knew that live or die, I would be fine. It was a wonderful reassurance to have in the midst of disaster.

And I didn’t die. When the shaking abated, I emerged to assess the damage. It turned out that the worst damage was a crooked picture on the wall. Scores of people died that day, but I was fine.

What does that have to do with ham radio?

I was able to make a phone call shortly after the quake, but within a few minutes it was not possible make a call in or out of the area because the phone lines were tied up. They were undamaged in our area, but they easily could have been. In a major disaster, communication is at once the most crucial service and the most vulnerable.

The dangers on our mountainside are forest fire, blizzard, and earthquake, probably in that order. What about a terrorist attack? We’re much too remote to be a target. Nuclear detonation? We’re in a valley, with hundreds of miles and a trillion tons of granite peaks between us and any significant target. Hurricane or tsunami? Gotta be on the coast. Tornado? Not up here. Flood? Pandemic? What, am I forced to stay home in this self-sufficient paradise?

What about communications? Ah, that’s why we have a radio. And it’s plugged into the generator, so it’s available no matter what.

It’s a nice feeling.