Quakes
The other day a 3.5 magnitude earthquake..er…rocked suburban Maryland, just outside the city of Rockville. I can imagine that those affected by the tremor were shocked. Earthquakes (strong enough for humans to feel, anyway) don’t happen very often in these parts.
I remember my first experience with earthquakes and, looking back, I probably felt the same as those folks did in Montgomery County. I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but I know I was younger than ten years old, for we still lived on Colonial Street in Philadelphia. The quake, a wee one, occurred in the early morning hours I remember the noise more than the shaking. It sounded to me like a huge truck being driven down the middle of our row of houses.
When I joined the Air Force, I spent a year in Monterey, CA, learning Russian. I was standing in my dorm room in a towel, just having gotten out of the shower, when the floor lurched violently under my feet. The shaking continued, knocking a stack of cassette tapes off the shelf above my desk. I was to experience many more quakes in California, so the novelty wore off quickly. There’s nothing that combination of fear, helplessness and wonder one feels when the ground moves under your feet the first time.
After training, I was assigned to Misawa Air Base, Japan. My first six months there, I lived in a house off base. Early one morning, again standing in a towel (maybe I should contact the USGS every time I take a shower), I was watching the pre-game show for Game 3 of the 1989 World Series between the A’s and the Giants when suddenly the picture cut out, then came back on, with Al Michaels saying that he thought they had just experienced an earthquake..which they had: the Loma Prieta quake which killed 42 people in the Bay area.
Not long after that I had what was probably one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. Very early one morning I woke up to the sound of our bedroom door being violently shaken. When I first got up, I didn’t understand what was happening. It sounded like something very big and very powerful was trying to pull that door off its hinges, the kind of thing that happened in movies like The Exorcist. Only when I got out of bed and felt the floor shaking beneath me did I realize we were experiencing an earthquake. It lasted quite awhile…long enough for me to open the door, get across the living room and check on the kids.
That couple seconds between the time I woke up and the time I hit the floor and realized what was happening were probable most scared I’ve been in my entire life. Definitely the wages of an overactive imagination.
I experienced significant earthquakes in Japan over the next three years, though nothing like that night in the house off base. Soon after that night our number came up on the housing list and we moved into a modern, nine story apartment building on base. In Japan, buildings are constructed with earthquakes in mind and our particular building was built on rollers, to help absorb the shock of the moving earth. During an earthquake in one of these buildings felt like being in a boat on the sea. Often, I’d be lying on the sofa reading at night when the chandelier over the dining room table would start to sway back and forth on its own. At those moments we were experiencing an earthquake too weak to feel, but strong enough to set the building rolling back and forth.
The area around Misawa continues to be active. In 2003 an 8.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Hokkaido and was strongly felt in Misawa.
Natural phenomena like earthquakes and heavy weather fascinate me because of their power, power that we are more or less helpless against. As advanced as our civilization has become, we are still at the mercy of nature.
