This morning, one of my new favorite bloggers, a Westerner who has visited and lived in Sri Lanka for many years and the author of the The Wanderlust Gene blog, wrote about having just experienced an earthquake that originated across the Indian Ocean in Indonesia.
I really connected with it.
Having years ago lived in Los Angeles for a time, as I read the post I immediately remembered the terrifying feeling of having the earth move beneath me, and not in that silly, cliché, romantic way.
Earthquakes are so profoundly unsettling. Anyone who has ever experienced motion sickness from being on a boat in open ocean knows how comforting it is to be back on land, and even if you can still feel the motion at first, you know that it’s just residual and that the solid, unmoving earth will eventually make you feel much, much better.
How unnerving, then, to have that dependable foundation move and shake, for the seemingly solid buildings and other structures built upon it to sway and possibly crumble.
How precarious it all becomes for us puny bipeds.
Fish & Bicycles 
I was living in Santa Barbara, California when a 6.4 earthquake struck. I was at home at the time. Although there was no structural damage of concern, it was scary. The refrigerator and all the cupboards in the kitchen opened up and spilled out their contents. A shower door cracked. The lid on the water tank behind the toilet flew off and cracked.
Hi Deb,
Thanks for the comment! Say, nice concept and admirable focus for your blog.
I’ve only ever been one place in Ohio, Cleveland, and so it’s wonderful to see just how beautiful the state is.
Ooh, since you’ve been to Cleveland I have to share my favorite Cleveland-related film clip. It’s from the movie, “Stranger than Paradise”, and the people in the film have driven to the shore of Lake Erie to look at it mid-winter: http://youtu.be/tOhsdXuPjYU
Brrrrrrrrrrr!
It was summertime when I was in Cleveland, and it was 30+ years ago, so even though I don’t remember much, it certainly wasn’t like that! 🙂
i “experienced” the loma prieta quake in san francisco in 1989. i had earthquake dreams for months thereafter. until we moved to minnesota…where the tornado dreams started. apparently i need to live in a secure, undisclosed bunker somewhere.
Every time there’s a tornado or hurricane or major earthquake somewhere, I think about how ridiculous it is that people complain about all the rain we get here in Western Washington.
But, we live on a major fault line and Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier are active, live volcanoes, so I suppose it’s only a matter of time.
Michael, let me know what you find out about those bunkers. I’d like mine to have a hot tub.
One of your new favs, FB? How lovely. And thanks for the pingback. What terror our world has in store for us puny beings! I guess that’s why ‘we’ invented religions back then?
being California transplants (came up in 1995) I can still remember the “feel” of that awful ground moving motion.