If this house is a'rockin' it's an earthquake

I went to college in San Francisco, from 1988 to 1992. That means I was at school the day of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. I had just left an art opening, where I had quaffed a couple of free glasses of wine, and had headed down to the ceramics studio to clean up my tools before waiting for my boyfriend, who was borrowing my VW Beetle that day, to pick me up from school. As I was gathering up my tools the room began to sway then roll. The prof yelled Earthquake, and everyone started diving for doorways and under tables. Then the room really began to move. From my hideout under a table I could see the cement floor roll like ocean swells. I could see a two foot standing wave moving from side to side in the sink. I could see a pot slowly turning on a wheel that its potter had left on. Pots were flying off the shelves as though they had been shot. A large sculpture fell in and out of the kiln. When the shaking stopped we all ran for the doors, I stopped and grabbed my backpack and jacket. Some people thought I was crazy, but they didn't think that 20 minutes later when we were all locked out of the building, some people without so much as a house key, and the sunny warm day began to get chilly.

After the earthquake I read an editorial by a recent transplant from the Midwest, saying that he used to ask people how they would know it was an earthquake, and they would just say, 'you'll know.' After the Loma Prieta temblor, he said, they were right, you JUST KNOW.

In January of 1994 I was temporarily living with my mom and step-father in Van Nuys, just 5 miles from Northridge in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. On MLK Jr. Day I was thrown out of bed at 5 am, and found myself clinging to a door frame, being thrown around like a rag doll while my step-father sat up in his bed yelling "this is it, this is the big one!" The sound of the house moving and breaking glass was deafening. It sounded like the house was being run over by a train. It felt like it too. After we all got out of bed to survey the damage -- broken dishes and glass and overturned furniture everywhere. My mother was very upset, and I kept repeating the mantra, "it's just things". And it was. We were fine, and really that's all that mattered.

When Michael and I were living in San Diego, I was in bed late one night, he was watching TV in the adjacent livingroom. An earthquake hit. Michael dove for the bedroom doorway, clinging for dear life as the house shook. He later said it felt like someone picked up the house, shook it, and slammed it down again. I lifted my head off the pillow, said "Was that an earthquake?"

"Yeah! A big one!"

"Did anything fall off the walls?"

"No."

"Then it wasn't a big one," and I went back to sleep. I have high standards.

This morning we woke up with the bed shaking and I immediately realized "oh, it's an earthquake" then I woke up a little more and thought "but I'm in Indiana." And then I got worried that the house would fall down. It may be a mild rolling quake, and we live in a wood frame house, but they don't build to earthquake code around here, and maybe the chimney would fall down. Then I thought,"gosh, I hope St. Louis is still standing," thinking maybe the quake was along the New Madrid fault (that is pronounced new MAD-drid) that cased the largest quake in U.S history. From watching the news you can tell people around here don't get out much, since most people claim they didn't realize it was an earthquake until they turned on the news. They were looking for tornadoes.

But the girls are just like mommy, they slept through the whole thing.

later: the funniest part to me is how the Indy Star website has an article called "How to survive an earthquake" My advice -- don't be in them.