Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-08-10 - 2:09 p.m.

A Californian Conversation

Via ICQ:

Alice: earthquake

Kath: now?

Alice: it was happening still when i sent the message...

Kath: You ok?

Alice: yes...it was the gentle rocking fun kind, not the scary jolt kind.

A real Californian conversation. And then, of course, we go off to our various sources, Alice to the news and me to the USGS locator site, and then we exchanged info to verify that there WAS a quake. That's what makes us Californians crazy. You don't see Floridians saying to each other, "Was that a hurricane? Did you feel it?" But here, we need confirmation of our natural disasters.

As Californians, we can talk about the "rocking kind" and the "scary jolt kind" and know exactly what those mean. Sometimes the damn things go BANG like someone just threw a medicine ball into your plate-glass window. Sometimes they give a rude harsh shake that knocks things off shelves. Sometimes they rolllllll on through like a sandworm. Sometimes the movement is so slight that you only notice a moment of weird dizzy nausea - a body's reaction to having terra not be so firma - and it takes you a minute to figure out what happened.

Some of the suckers do all of these things, and they seem to do them for about a half-hour.

Loma Prieta was like that here. Loma Prieta was unreal. I think it was seventeen seconds, but normal rules of chronography don't apply when the place is really rocking and rolling. I was at work, and stuff was flying, and I could see the windows rippling, and acoustic ceiling tiles coming down. I could see all this from my vantage point, wedged under my small conference table, keeping a death grip on the tail of the sweater of one of my employees who seemed bent on escaping the table to rescue some test equipment. I ruined her sweater, but at least she wasn't beaned by a flying oscilloscope.

Loma Prieta is probably why I take exception to Alice's use of the word "fun."

My kids also think earthquakes are kind of fun. My kids were not around for Loma Prieta. Well, the older one was, but she was in utero and doesn't seem to have been damaged by the internal natural disaster - the adrenaline tsunami. They've been through a few at school and a few here, all small. Once we were grocery shopping and a BANG! - a few pickle jars flew through the air. The store got very quiet for a moment. Then we all asked each other, "Was that an earthquake? Did you feel it?" and went back to our shopping. Cleanup on aisle 10. The kids yattered about it for hours. Cheaper than Marine World, as entertainment goes.

I really hate the mofos. I don't hate them enough to move away from them, and we don't have a lot. But when you think about it, it's life on the edge. No warnings, no real-life use of the emergency broadcasting system to tell you to vacuum under the kitchen table because you're going to be spending some time under there soon. No earthquake shutters or earthquake rods or earthquake cellars. Just the sense, and an occasional reminder, that we'll all be swimming to the Idaho shores someday.

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