I was sitting at my desk at home early Monday morning working on a couple of news pages when a dump truck roared through my yard.
At least, it sounded like a dump truck.
Martin and Monroe both woke up and started barking and I said to myself: “Man, that dump truck is really hauling.”
It was then that I realized it was an earthquake and not a dump truck, but it took Martin and Monroe quite a bit longer to satisfy themselves that all was ok.
There was no visible damage to the house, other than the earthquake shook the turntable out of its groove in the microwave.
Still, it was unsettling.
I thought the earthquakes had subsided to the point of us not feeling them any more, but, sadly, that appears not to be the case.
Through the years, I have seen more extreme weather than I would have chosen, and I find earthquakes to be the scariest thing.
Way back on Thanksgiving Day 1974, Typhoon Irma plowed through Luzon in the Philippines, where I was doing a 15-month stint for the Air Force.
We’d had plenty of warning that a storm was coming, but the storm started off so slowly that a buddy and I decided to go downtown for lunch before hitting the holiday feast in the mess hall later in the day.
I regretted that action when I saw the first piece of sheet iron flying through the air like a magic carpet. It was zipping, horizontal and maybe 10 feet off the ground.
It was far scary than I would have expected. My buddy and I put our forks down simultaneously and headed out the door and back to base.
And there was the time when a tornado went over our house when I was a kid.
I have never looked it up to see if it was an F-something, but it was enough of a storm to uproot a mulberry tree that was 24 inches across and fling it onto the roof.
We were in the cellar, thanks to early warning on the tv, but we could still hear the storm going over and feel the pulse of the rain.
For the typhoon and the tornado, there was warning.
Earthquakes don’t give you that.
You don’t know when they’re coming, how big they’ll be or how long they’ll last.
I really wish they would go back where they belong.
To California.