The earthquake that wasn't

Yoichi, Hokkaido

Saturday was a cool, sunny morning in the foothills over Yoichi, a coastal town in the southwest corner of Hokkaido. Pink cosmos waved in stands five feet tall along the road to Nitori fruit farm, a pick-your-own operation popular with Japanese tourists.

If you stood on tiptoe, you could see the Sea of Japan glinting blue-green, and imagine Vladivostok directly west.

But hark! What sound over yonder meadow breaks? It was the eerie mechanical bellows and hisses from a pair of Jurassic-Park-size diplodocus, not to mention a hulking triceratops and a true-to-scale T-Rex.

That was our welcome to the eccentric world of Nitori Tourist Orchard, laid out like a children's board game among idyllic green slopes crisscrossed by arbors and allées. Supplicants trudge with their plastic baskets and scissors down dirt and gravel pathways, in search of trees or grapevines marked with orange tape as ripe for picking. Even the illustrated map handed out at the entrance resembles something out of a storybook.

We wandered for a time under grape arbors built for pickers about my size, 5' 3". I tried some bouncy green grapes before I came upon the day's first treasure: purple grapes so dark they were almost blackish, with the kind of floral finish that had made me fall in love with the Kyoho grape ice cream (more like a smooth, dense gelato) on the Hotel Nikko Kanazawa's breakfast buffet.

No, I am not making that up. The Japanese consider ice cream a suitable breakfast food, and now so do I.

But I digress. There I was, having emerged victorious from the grape arbors, gawking like a rube at red apples the size of my head and green pears the diameter of footballs. ( The Japanese favor fruits the size of state fair champions, so they cultivate and breed accordingly.)

At some point, I lost sight of my companions. Alone on the path, and growing weary, I stopped to rest at a pair of dinosaur benches. Which is a strange sentence to write, and stranger still to experience.

As I lolled in the sun, a squawking noise swelled and crested. A murder of crows flocked past—don't blame me for the portentous name, that's just what a big group of crows is called. They filled the sky overhead, black arrows on their way to who-knows-where. I did not take it as an omen. Perhaps I should have.

When I tried the path again, I trudged past the pear section, assorted plum plots, and finally what I had been assured was the prune-plum quadrant, where there were still powdery-blue fruits for the taking.

Supposedly. I saw none. In the distance, I could hear the friends in my party chattering and laughing. I was convinced they were stuffing themselves with prune-plums. With some difficulty, I trudged up to meet them, dodging small gullies wet from the rains and trees with branches low enough to smack me in the head unless I was careful.

Finally I found my friends, gathered around a small clearing by a deep ditch. "Have you tried the prune-plums?" they chorused with annoying good cheer. "I haven't found any hanging on the trees," I complained. "Look right over there," they advised, pointing at the tree they had just stripped nearly bare.

There was a ladder propped precariously nearby, and a piercingly blue prune-plum dangling high above. Too dangerous, I decided, and scuffed around the tree until I found a puny specimen at eye level. Sako, our guide, emerged from another direction, holding a far superior fruit. "Try this one," she advised.

Just as I popped it into my mouth, a hideous squawking noise shrieked from several cell phones. It sounded like a mortally wounded pterodactyl. "Earthquake alarm!" yipped somebody, I am not sure who, as we clustered around to see the words of doom flashing on our phone screens.

I've been in a pretty big earthquake in Puerto Rico, when my San Juan hotel room literally moved from side to side. And another in Vermont, when the house shook enough that my dad leaped from his bed, certain burglars had broken in. So when the alert said to expect strong tremors within minutes, to stay calm and seek shelter nearby, I was at once scared and oddly amused that our innocent harvest party had turned into a disaster movie.

Readers, I looked around for a place to lie down. There was a grassy, elliptical clearing with no big apple trees around it, ready to pelt our heads with giant fruit. I headed toward it, muttering something like, "let's get away from that ditch."

I remember thinking that this was a pretty fine spot in which to experience a natural disaster. Which is a corollary to "there are worse places to die." Maybe those flocking crows sensed what was coming, I remembered with a jot of dismay.

Just as I found a likely spot in which to duck and cover, our guide, Sako, said that it was probably a false alarm. "They happen," she observed ruefully. It was either that, or, since no big tremors had reached us after a minute or two, an event on the other side of Hokkaido island.

We Houstonians looked around nervously and followed her lead away from our safe spot. We didn't know nothing about no earthquakes.

As we moved through the pear and apple plots--sampling a super-crisp Asian pear, then a juicier and sweeter Western-style one, and finally a tart-sweet red apple the size of a chihuahua—my jitters evened out. The whole scare seemed comical. We were back in a bucolic fantasy-land board game again.

Or at least that's what I told myself.

Later, in the car, we checked our phones to see what the hell had happened. Wait--it was a 9.9 earthquake on the other side of Hokkaido? Really? That seemed impossibly large. Like, larger than Japan's largest earthquake to date.

Wait, it was a 6.9 earthquake and somebody made a mistake? Inverted a numeral? Heads must roll.

Wait, it wasn't a Hokkaido earthquake at all, but tremors way across the Sea of Ohkolsk off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula? Whew.

I am still wondering what the crows knew. Or if they were laughing at the trick that was about to be played on us.