Shake Appeal

Today at about 5:04 am, Lynn and I were awakened from sleep by a deep rumbling that sounded to me like our house suddenly abutted train tracks, and to Lynn like the weather jokers had again blown a forecast and failed to predict thunder. A few minutes later our cancer-stricken greyhound, Ellie, limpingly padded into our bedroom, as if to ask, what now?

When the radio alarm came on at 6, we had our answer, and it was a thought that had run across Lynn’s and my mind at the time, before we fell back asleep. (Maybe Ellie had speculated similarly, but she never reveals much.) The rumbling had been a 3.6-magnitude earthquake, centered in the Germantown area of Montgomery County maybe 20 miles northwest of us.

A mild geologic occurrence as such things go, obviously, but of course it was the talk of morning radio in a region dying for conversational fodder besides the heat, the Gulf oil spill and the latest congressional nonsense. All-news WTOP quoted seismologists and reported calls from startled listeners. There was the expected quote from a Californian to the effect that a 3.6 quake barely qualifies as background noise. As I donned my running clothes (I had the day off from work), the DJs on the classic rock station mocked our seismic apocalypse with all manner of morning-zoo sound effects, from air-raid sirens to cars screeching to a halt. One of the guys reported that a listener had phoned in and said a decorative plate had tumbled from a shelf in his house during the seconds-long event, conking him on the head. The first known casualty of our natural disaster, the DJ quipped.

While I was out running, my own DJ patter ran through my mind. I could hear myself on air, asking, “Can you imagine if you and your partner were getting busy at around 5 am today? She’s moaning, ‘Omigod, did you just feel the earth move?!’” Which led me to hear in my head that old Carole King song. Hours later, with no one to annoy by my dreadful singing voice other than the beleaguered Ellie and our sacked-out cats, Winnie and Tess, I was belting out, “I feel the earth move under my feet/I feel the sky come tumblin’ down/I feel my heart start tremblin’/Whenever you’re around.” I leaned in to give yawning Winnie an “Ooh baby” for good measure.

Our pre-dawn temblor (love that word) was kind of cool, actually. There’s something to be said for a literal jolt from the ordinary—a wake-up call that doesn’t beep or blare, but, rather, thunders without exactly thundering, threatens without quite unnerving. Unlike most alarms, it proved a welcome way to start the day. It gave people something to talk but not argue about. It was quirky, in retrospect even fun.

And all the more so because, as it happened, nothing came tumblin’ down—except the stray decorative plate, and Carole King’s legacy, courtesy of my off-key “tribute.”