Maryland Earthquake

We live just outside Washington, D.C. in Silver Spring, Maryland, and early this morning we experienced an oddity—an earthquake.

Born in Ohio, my husband and I grew up with city sirens warning of tornados each summer and with devastating floods in his hometown, but hurricanes and earthquakes are disasters for coast dwellers. I know to head to the basement if you hear wind like a train whistle, but when the house trembles, where can you go?

We’d had an unusually rough night. We got home late from running errands, then the baby wouldn’t go to sleep until after ten. He woke up again at 3 AM with nightmares, tossing and fussing for another hour and a half. Finally, I gave up and let him sleep with us, and less than ten minutes after he drifted off, the house started shaking.

My friends from L.A. might scoff at a 3.6 on the Richter Scale, but when things started rumbling, I grabbed a hold of the baby. My husband woke, bolt upright with confused, then wide-open eyes.

“What is going on?” he asked, putting an arm around both of us.

“An earthquake?”

The baby, finally was sleeping like, well, a baby. We shared an increasingly common experience as two new parents entirely unsure of what we should do. I mentioned something about standing in the doorway. I think I’d seen that in a movie. We were both too frightened to get out of bed and held tight to one another. I glanced vaguely at the large mirror rattling over our dresser and considered that it might not be wise to be within range of flying glass.

Nothing broke. The picture hanging over our bed stayed on the wall. Our cats might never be the same, but after a few seconds that stretched long, the quake ended. We laughed nervously and turned on the radio to see if our friends on Morning Edition had felt the same.

My husband had seen an earthquake on TV during the 1989 World Series, but otherwise was a novice. When I was in elementary school, Northeast Ohio experienced a small earthquake. I had been sitting at the edge of my bed watching television and my father shouted that I should stop jumping on the bed.

I was reasonably confused and denied that I had been doing anything wrong. He yelled again, “Dammit, stop jumping, you’re shaking the whole house.” I welled up with that child’s sense of absolute injustice and wondered if he was playing a joke on me.

As a kid, the helplessness that earthquake provided had nothing to do with fear of natural disaster and everything to do with an inability to defend myself. I was wrongfully accused and indignant. Later, vindicated by the evening news report of tremors, I was only a little mollified by my father’s laughing apology.

That was a time when my corner of the universe extended not much farther than my toy box. I wasn’t concerned about damage or danger, just the wellbeing of my good name. This morning, in a dramatic, rolling moment, I grabbed hold of my little family. There was no real threat of harm, just a gentle rumbling to shake us into a quiet realization of what matters most.