Welcome To Quake Country

My wife and I moved to the Bay Area about three-and-a-half years ago. We were sitting around one evening shortly after moving in when we felt a tremendous "thump," as if our house had been lifted a few inches and dropped.

We stopped and waited for the next thing to happen. And waited. And waited. Nothing but that thump. It didn’t even make the news.

Back where I grew up in central Minnesota—where glaciers gave the topsoil a crew-cut right down to the granite crust—the earth just doesn’t move this way. Welcome to quake country.

Back on the Minnesota prairie as a child, we didn’t have earthquakes, but we had tornadoes … twisters. We could always tell when one was coming: hot and muggy days would spur tremendous storms with whipping winds and torrents of rain. It was when the rain ended and calm had returned that you were most careful. More often than not, that’s when the twister would take shape, sometimes way back on the horizon, sometimes right overheard. Either way, it meant trouble. Families would talk about what to do if a twister was spotted. Get a cellar if you could, otherwise jump in a ditch and cover your head. I had a great-great grandfather get caught up in a twister. He was carried a quarter-mile and left on the ground with just a few cuts. Now that made the newspaper.

We didn’t fear tornadoes, but we sure had respect for them and, more importantly, people were ready to come to the relief of those less fortunate than others. Families whose farmsteads and businesses endured twister damage always had their neighbors there to help. It’s that same spirit of selflessness and hope and optimism that fueled the rebuilding of San Francisco, but it’s a spirit that shouldn’t lie dormant until a quake strikes again.