Photo by Maria Helena Carey. You know they were totally checking Twitter. (So was I.)
I originally was going to write about how sweet and underrated the back-to-school is as a citywide experience: even those who do not have children or do not seem to have children about them appear to look on in a kind and perhaps reminiscent way as waves of kids of all sizes and ages trot off to their big school adventure, holding on to their parent or guardian for love, support and guidance.
And then, as you may have found out or felt, we had an earthquake! After tweeting about it and whining about it and feeling sad for the Cathedral it became clear to me: a new Thing We Take For Granted was born. Apparently, we take solid and non-moving land that isn’t rumbling or shaking for granted. Despite the West Coast put-downs about the paltriness of the seismic activity, and in spite of our area-wide bonhomie and steadiness of character when it came to evacuating work and dwellings, it’s clear that our area is not meant to have many earthquakes — and that this one and its aftershocks were deep-rumbling doozies that we hope never to experience again.
Those who had never been in an earthquake were especially indignant, grousing about the fact that earthquakes are not “supposed” to happen around here. But lo! Our earthquake has a Wikipedia page, which makes it totally legit. And a cursory look around other US earthquakes in Wikipedia yields an unsettling discovery: the eastern half of the United States has seen some strong and terrifying seismic activity, such as the New Madrid earthquakes, which happened between December, 1812, and February, 1813. They were four earthquakes, and a couple of them were similar in magnitude (between 7.1 and 7.7 in the Richter scale) to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (around 7.9), which leveled half the city back then. Of course, the New Madrid earthquakes happened in sparsely-inhabited areas, therefore not severely affecting a large population at one time, unlike the San Francisco one. But the New Madrid ones, much like our little guy, were felt in a much wider area, therefore affecting a larger section of the country at once — even if it was not such a populous section at the time.
The unsettling truth is that safety and a steady ground under our feet are things we take for granted: while infrequent, earthquakes do happen around here. And as we try to recover from our seismic event, we now start to panic and brace for Hurricane Irene and the lines for milk, water, and toilet paper patiently snake out the store s– the little bit of comfort that we can seek out in the middle of our earth, constantly in turmoil.