As memorable events go, earthquakes are right up there. Well, we don’t get them often around here, but at 10:23 a.m. yesterday a 4.8 hit about 30 miles east of us, in New Jersey. The whole house was shaking and it took quite a while to calm back down. (Me, not the ground.) The only other time I experienced an earthquake was the Virginia quake of August 23, 2011. Yesterday’s was much closer and therefore felt much stronger. It took a few seconds to believe it was even really happening. Work will do that to you. Such an event, just 3 days ahead of a total solar eclipse, has an almost apocalyptic feel to it. And we’d just come off of a punishing super-soaker storm that left puddles in one of our bedrooms. Those of us out east just don’t get these kinds of things happening very often. It’s a little difficult to process and it kind of makes me wish I’d gone into geology after all.
Since apparently nobody was hurt, this goes into the category of transcendent earthly things. Ironically, confirmation came from social media before any news networks had anything to say about it. Big wheels turn slowly, I guess. The first minutes after it hit were a time of confusion—did it really happen? Was that actually an earthquake? What else could it be? The same was true after the Virginia quake. I don’t want to brag about surviving an earthquake if that’s not what it was. Funny how you want validation, even at a time like that. Such events remind us that we’re small compared to this planet we call home. When the earth moves there’s nothing you can do about it.
Ironically, there are no maps detailing the Ramapo Fault line that was responsible for this quake. At least there aren’t any on the web. At 5:58 p.m. we had a 4.0 magnitude aftershock, much briefer than the main event. An end-of-the-day reminder that we rely on mother earth for just about everything. Earthquakes are times to call certainties to question. Time to ask what we really know. The tri-state area (in this case New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) isn’t particularly susceptible to earthquakes—or isn’t prone to them, in any case. I grew up in Pennsylvania and never felt one, although a bolide shook my childhood house back in January 1987, I believe it was. Such reminders serve a purpose and in that sense they’re signs and portents. We need to listen to the earth. If we don’t, she will get our attention. And then we must ponder.
