quake

I woke up at 12:03 this morning to an earthquake.

My apartment is creepy at night. There is just enough light from the streetlights outside to create dark shapes that shift and slither in the shadows of my bedroom. By day, my neighborhood is usually packed with lively tourists and beachgoers. They chatter and laugh and carry their boomboxes and beach umbrellas up and down the alleyway behind my house. But after dark, a dense stillness smothers the streets. After I hear the distant thunder of the daily A380 flight from LAX to Sydney at 10:30 p.m. about five miles away, the only sound I hear is the crashing of waves — punctuated by the occasional sharp yelp of a seal. Daytime is muted now and the quarantine pause has compounded the disquiet of nighttime.

All of that is OK, though, because I can pretend not to notice when I’m asleep. And I’m a good sleeper. I went to boarding school from 9th-12th grade and learned the hard way how to sleep through anything. When I’m out, I’m out. I can literally sleep through a birthday party.

But at 12:03, I had the feeling that somebody was urgently shaking my shoulder. The action was gentle but insistent enough that I began to waken and soon discovered myself trapped in that baffling place between realities where it’s hard to distinguish the night from the nightmare. I had a series of terrifying thoughts:

“Wait. Who’s in my apartment?”

“OMG. It’s an earthquake... Is that worse or better than an intruder?”

“Wait. My face is near the window. Don’t they say windows break in an earthquake? I should roll over. Argh. My body feels like it’s in cement. Wake up!”

“I installed a ceiling fan, didn’t I? That would hurt. Maybe I should tuck in my legs.”

“This is still happening. Maybe I should take shelter. There’s all that crap under the bed. Can I get to the kitchen table…?”

And then it stopped.

I didn’t know until I started spending a lot of time in California that there are different types of earthquakes. I come from a part of the country where earthquakes happen rarely and, when they do, they come from deep under the surface and radiate upward through miles of topsoil like muddy, rolling waves. They are all like that: rare and non-threatening. Here, though, they bring a wide variety of threat and I’ve experienced everything from the startling sensation of a sudden drop as tectonic plates clacked across each other, to something more like the bobbing of a rowboat on lake.

I also learned that they are noisy. People always marvel at how dogs and cats provide an early warning system for earthquakes and wonder whether they’ve got a sixth sense. No. It seems obvious to me that what they really have is something we know all about: better hearing. Earthquakes rattle from their epicenters to your location, shaking doors and windows and latches on gates, knocking paint cans off shelves in garages and clinking cutlery together in kitchen drawers. And animals’ sensitive ears pick up the rumble before the shake arrives.

Scientists tell us this was a light, 3.7 magnitude, with an epicenter not far away from my home. The USGS has a fantastic self-reporting feature called “Did You Feel It” that tracks what the earthquake really felt like for people, recording lived experience instead of the cold data of machines. The cumulative reporting by the “Did You Feel It” reporters, including me, indicated it felt more like a 4. I wonder if that has something to do with the absence of the normal hum of city life. Maybe an earthquake stands out that much more against the still of quarantine.

Or, maybe it was just f’ing scary. I struggled to get back to sleep. My heart was pounding and one of the ducks outside in the canal at the foot of my yard would not get over it. It quacked for 30 minutes straight. The last thing I remember before I fell asleep was telling the guy to zip it.“Yes, we hear you, Canard. Yes, we all felt it, too. No, we don’t know if there is another one coming. Please stop. You’re not helping.”

I was desperate for him to shut up because I really needed to get back to sleep fast, before I started thinking big, dark nighttime thoughts. When you’re living one once-in-a-century crisis, the whole idea of another once-in-a-century “big one” feels a little less impossible. But I’m not going to think about that right now, either, because I just... can’t.

Stupid earthquake. Stupid duck. Stupid coronavirus.