Martin Emanuel was on a seven-week trek in Nepal, in April, when the world split with a loud, low rumble.
It was a noise he had never heard before, sitting outside a tea shop looking at the Himalayas, the sky gorgeously clear. Soon, he saw a part of a nearby mountain slide into the river.
"Then we looked down and saw the break in the earth," Emanuel, 72, of Decatur, said recently in a sit-down with The Atlanta Journal-Constituion.
It was the beginning of an incredibly deadly series of earthquakes and aftershocks which killed more than 8,000 people.
For a few days, Emanuel's family feared he was among them. "It is still very scary and we just want to make sure that there are rescuers going there," Emanuel's son Brooks told the AJC two days after the quake hit.
Still, they remained hopeful for word on the sculptor and former Atlanta College of Art faculty member.
"So as long as they weren't injured in any of the tremors or aftershocks, I really feel like they ought to be just fine," his wife, Anne, told the AJC at the time.
She was right. Though at least four Americans were killed in the earthqauke, Emanuel was not among them. Four days after the disaster struck, Brooks posted on his Facebook page, "Dad texted Mom!!!"
But the trip back home was slow-going and sometimes treacherous, as he explained in a new installment of the AJC's Personal Journeys.
(And there were other complications, such as finding a sober cab driver the night of his flight home to Atlanta.)
"Life's not fair," he told the AJC once he was safe, referring to the thousands of victims. "I could've easily died."
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