eArTHquAkEs
A California Girl's Ode to Solid Ground
July 8, 2021
I sat at my desk, my fingers on the keys of my laptop, my eyes focused on the larger monitor screen. I was deep in thought, writing, when I felt the desk and keyboard sway ever so slightly under my hands.
It lasted just a moment. I only had time to register one thought. Was that an earthquake or just a heavy truck moving past?
In a moment, it happened again—like I was sitting in a small boat when another boat’s wake rolled underneath the hull, lifting the port side then the starboard side, twice.
Again, only one thought had time to rise in my mind. I think that was an earthquake!
After another brief pause, a third and much larger group of waves rolled underneath me. I gripped the desk’s edge as my anxiety rose. I sat up straight and stiff, holding my breath. Half a dozen distinct waves rolled through the ground beneath me. They came from the south, my left side, and disappeared to the north, my right side. From port to starboard the floor rose and fell beneath me.
The ground re-solidified after a few seconds. But by that time, my PTSD had kicked off a full panic—heart racing, hands shaking, breaths coming fast and shallow—an instantaneous sensory flashback to 1971. It took a while for my brain to clear enough to say out loud for my own ears, “Now that was definitely an earthquake!”
With shaking hands, I typed into Google, “earthquake ca now”.
And Google responded, telling me there’d been a 5.9 near Tahoe and a 5.9 near Oakland. Within minutes it sorted itself out, cancelled both of those explanations, and pinpointed a spot on the California-Nevada border near Highway 395 on the east side of the Sierra Nevada called Smith Valley, Nevada.
Facebook lit up with “Did you feel that?” and “Was that an earthquake?” Still my hands shook.
That was July 8. The quake has since been labeled by the USGS a magnitude 6.3 on the seismic scale. In the week that followed, more than 650 aftershocks have been recorded in and around the same location, including a 3.7 today, and a 2.1 ten minutes ago. Thankfully, I felt none of them.
In honor of this recent series of eArTHquAkEs, I’m re-sharing a portion of a story I wrote some time ago about the 1971 San Fernando-Sylmar quake—the quake that sparked my panicked response ten days ago. It follows:
“Rumble… Rumble… Rumble… BOOM!”
I perked up at the first distant sound. Then was swept by a wave of anxiety as the the sound grew closer and louder — like a locomotive approaching the house across the front lawn — like rolling thunder coming from below my feet.
The deep resonating BOOM was so intense, my bones vibrated.
The light in the bathroom winked out. The room went black.
I leaped to my feet, but before I could process one single thought, the Earth contorted. Like it was made of putty, the ground beneath me bent and twisted.
Reacting on pure instinct, I lurched toward the bathroom door intent on fleeing to safety in Mom and Dad’s adjacent bedroom. The floor rose to meet one foot, jarring me, then fell away from the other, nearly pitching me on my face.
On the bathroom’s threshold, I gripped the doorframe with both hands.
The walls moved.
The floor moved.
Clinging to the house, I struggled to ride along as it writhed atop the bucking Earth. My right hand moved up with the wall on my right, while my left hand moved down with the wall on my left. Then the right was pulled down, while the left was yanked upward. At the same time, my feet rose and fell with the fluid ground, like I stood atop an inner tube surfing a class-four rapid.
There was a momentary pause, barely a second, before it all began again. During that brief pause, I released my death grip on the door jamb and ran from the bathroom, through the open door of my parents’ bedroom, and launched myself onto their king-sized bed alongside them.
The rolling and roiling began anew as I landed. The three of us crawled to the head of the bed and lay staring out the window into the pre-dawn morning. We watched as the water in our swimming pool sloshed back and forth so violently it generated a tidal wave that crashed over the top of the garage, leaving the pool half full. Then the masonry wall surrounding the backyard seemed to faint into rubble.
All the while, the roar continued. In the foreground of sounds, like a high pitched aria, was the crash of falling objects and the tinkle of breaking glass; in the background was the Universe-consuming bellow of the Earth and everything balanced on its thin skin twisting and groaning and ripping and growling in a discordant, deafening din.
My sister, who had miraculously slept through the first half of the tumult, was awakened when her small television dove off its shelf onto her bed. I heard her long frightened wail as she ran to join us on the bed. She landed as the quake slowed and quieted and skidded to a stop.
It was moments after six on the morning of Tuesday, February 9, 1971. I was sixteen and in my junior year at Sylmar High School. I was up early and in the bathroom, as I was every school day morning, because I had an A-period class that began at seven o’clock. When the quake hit at 06:00:41, I’d been fully dressed, fully made-up, sitting at the vanity in the main bathroom arranging the long curls I’d just released from their hot-curlers.
The Sylmar Earthquake occurred on the San Fernando Fault that ran through the San Gabriel Mountains into the northern San Fernando Valley. It measured 6.6 on the Seismic Scale. Its maximum horizontal acceleration, however, was three times what it should have been, more like that of an 8.5 quake. The “Rumble” came from the 6.6. The “Boom!” resulted from the acceleration. They say the ground and everything on it would have been “weightless” for a moment during that acceleration. At the time, the Sylmar Quake was the third largest in modern California history, after the earthquakes in 1906 in San Francisco and 1933 in Long Beach.
You can read the longer, more detailed version of this story from 1971 on my blog website. Just click.
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Wow!
I have yet to feel any of the smaller earthquakes, or at least, register them since we moved here though my husband has. But I do remember an small earthquake in upstate NY when I was a kid. I was watching TV in the basement after school when all of a sudden, the room twisted. I ran upstairs to find my stepmother exhorting us to stand in the doorway of our house. Thankfully, it was over as quickly as it began!