One summer evening in Auckland I got the fright of my life. My house groaned, as though its wooden frame was crying out in pain. The sofa I was lying on began sliding back and forth. I looked up, expecting to tell one of my brothers to cut it out. No one was there. All at once I thought: “This is an earthquake. Auckland doesn’t have earthquakes. Auckland has volcanoes.” I ran to the window and jerked the curtain aside, scanning for the glow of fire in the night sky, then turned on the news. I was terrified. It was finally happening.

It wasn’t. (Just an earthquake, after all, a puny 4.5 on the Richter scale.)

Growing up in New Zealand calibrates you to anticipate seismic apocalypse. Auckland, the country’s largest city, is built on a volcanic field, which has erupted more than 50 times. At some point, volcanologists warn us, magma will force its way to the surface again. It’s just a matter of when – and how well we’ll be able to evacuate when it does.

Much of the country is tectonically precarious. As a kid, I visited the Buried Village, a settlement which was entombed in ash and mud, Pompeii-like, after Mount Tarawera blew in 1886. I gazed across Lake Taupō, where two of the most violent eruptions on the planet took place, one of them 26,500 years ago. It has the highest possible rating on the volcanic explosivity index.

In 1996, I watched on television as ash plumes ballooned from the summit of Mount Ruapehu, south of Lake Taupō on New Zealand’s North Island, temporarily interrupting the two ski fields which operate on its flanks. Ruapehu erupted again in 2007. I went snowboarding there two years later, where posters in the ski field bathrooms instruct what to do in case of a lahar, or volcanic mudflow (answer: climb up the side of a valley, because you can’t outrun it).

As an adult, I’ve hiked across Mount Tongariro, another active volcano, on a track so spectacular that about 140,000 people walk it each year to see its moonscapes, mineral lakes and steaming vents. I still live on top of the Auckland Volcanic Field, along with about 1.7 million other people, and when I go for a run up one of the dead cones, looping the bowl of its summit crater, I look out at the other volcanos dotted across the cityscape like slowly melting scoops of ice cream.

It isn’t just volcanoes. Some New Zealand towns and cities sit directly on top of fault lines – from Wellington, the capital, to Franz Josef, a tourist town on the West Coast –but I’m not sure if this is worse or better than living somewhere that isn’t on the edge of a tectonic plate.

In 2010, an earthquake on the South Island’s east coast ripped open a fault where there previously hadn’t been one, and then this ruptured again, in 2011, taking 185 lives and demolishing or condemning much of Christchurch, the country’s third-largest city. Wellington, at least, is seismically strengthened.

All of this means that New Zealanders have a unique sense of risk. They may have lived through hundreds of aftershocks, pushing away anxiety at each one. They may have marvelled at the brand-new coastline thrust out of the sea in 2016, when 25 fault lines snapped near Kaikōura on the South Island; it’s the world record for the most faults breaking in one earthquake.

So why not visit an active volcano when living in this country is already a form of risk? When, during an earthquake, you can lose your life at work, visiting the doctor or having lunch?

We know that something similar will happen when the alpine fault ruptures, when the Auckland volcanic field blows, or when the subduction of the Pacific plate beneath the Australian plate rips the fabric of the Earth again.

Hydrothermal eruptions (the type that tragically occurred on Whakaari on 9 December) could take place on Ruapehu, or Tongariro, or throughout the Taupō volcanic zone, at any time, with no warning. And they do: we’ve had at least 60 of these in the last century.

As an investigation begins into Whakaari, and whether or not its risk was measured properly, it’ll become part of a wider question that New Zealand is constantly grappling with: how to approach the dangerous bits of this country?

None of this lessens the pain of Whakaari’s victims and their families, and the scale of the tragedy. Rather, it adds urgency to our attempts to reach a truce with this restless land, which keeps trying to shrug us off.