Earthquake!
So, this morning I was stuck in some icky dream which I now don’t remember other than the feeling.
And then in a split second, I woke up, heard a loud boom, and the ground started to shake with various items rattling on various surfaces.
I ducked under the covers and stuck my head under a pillow til it stopped.
At first I wondered if it might have been a big truck crash on the highway not too far from here because of the boom… or even an explosion of some sort… but I figured the shaking went back and forth for too long for that, and if it were either of those options there should have been sirens almost immediately since I’m only a few blocks from a fire station.
Instead, there was an eerie silence and a feeling that some bad juju had dissipated.
I got up and grabbed my phone to email myself to Google whether there was an earthquake when I got up. Then got up to go to the washroom and thought, just google it now, and sure enough:
As near as I can figure, it was 10 miles from my house.
I went back to bed, but before I could fall asleep, two things dawned on me:
- Sometimes smaller quakes preceed big ones.
- Wait a minute, some of the rattling I heard were two huge chunks of quartz I had sitting on my windowsill right above the head of the bed.
Not good.
So I fished those out:
and tucked them safely under my bed where they can’t become lethal missiles even if launched by The Big One.
Actually, let’s have a look with my hand for scale:
Granted that they did nothing in the 3.7/3.8 earthquake other than wobble loudly, and they’d most likely be guided by the bamboo blind and the 3 layers of curtains to just fall down behind the headboard, which itself has a quilt draped over it for extra padding, but still. What the Hell was I thinking having those where I had them? LOL…
Mind you, I probably put them there 2 years ago when the house was still being reno’d and I hadn’t moved in yet.
Anyway, so they’re now tucked in a safer spot.
When I got up in the morning/afternoon, I texted my brother and my best friend to see if they’d felt the quake over in Vancouver proper. He hadn’t, though when I told him about the dream thing, he reported he’d also had a really messed up dream about that time of the night.
She had felt it as she’d been up and at her night job and while the shaking was much shorter where she was, it was still pretty violent and she immediately Googled to see if there was a quake.
So, that was that.
Couple things I thought about today, though:
1. The bad dreams and fearful energy in them.
I remembered in 1996 there was a bigger quake (around 5.5?) in Seattle on a Saturday night. My late iguana was around at the time, probably a couple years old, and I was watching TV with her and my parents in our living room in Richmond, BC. Usually the ig would prefer to sit on her own next to us or on the back of the sofa, but all afternoon and evening she was weirdly clingy and hanging onto my arm.
Eventually I had to go to the bathroom and felt weird about going with a lizard on my arm, so I handed her off to my mom (with great difficulty as the iguana was hellbent on latching on).
So, when the earthquake hit, she was still latched onto my mother’s arm for dear life. The quake hit and things shook back and forth for at least a minute.
No damage at our place, being so far from Seattle, but we were all a bit shaken up by it… except the lizard, who let out a big sighing exhale after the quake was over, hopped off my mom’s arm down onto the sofa seat, gave herself a little shake-off of her own, and then went back to being her usual “don’t come too close unless you have bananas or oranges for me” self.
But she’d clearly been afraid of something before then, and they do say other animals like dogs and cats will be spooked before an earthquake, too.
So… I wonder if my and my brother’s creepy dreams this morning are of the same phenomenon with pent up bad energy or a premonition or whatever.
2. The thing with the big boom I swear I heard. And I swear I was awake just before the big boom.
Well, I wondered if maybe earthquakes do make a noise. Especially since the map shows the quake was just the other side of Salt Spring Island, which is maybe 12 miles from my house.
I looked it up, and sure enough, various reports that sometimes you can hear a boom or popping sounds in an earthquake:
UC Berkeley podcast that has a recording (within the first 30 seconds of the podcast). This is what it sounded like this morning! (Maybe slightly more bass on mine? But it would depend on the mics they were using, too, some just don’t capture the low-end.)
