Replies

5:04 PM, Tuesday, October 17, 1989

There I was, heading over to my chair to pick up the phone and call Peggy. As I looked at the clock, the house exploded. Well, that's what it felt like. I was immediately face down on the floor and some giant had his foot on my back holding me down. The noise is indescribable: a freight train under the house, crashing and banging, glass breaking, and the house oscillating beneath me.

Being raised in post-war California and having been subjected to the "duck and cover" nuclear drills in grade school, I knew this was IT. We had pissed SOMEBODY off, and they pushed the button. I mean, I really KNEW it. I was SO sure, that I thought I had better apologize to SOMEONE on my way off the planet. So, amid the monsterous noise, I could hear myself screaming, "I'm sorry we did it, I'm sorry we did it." Of course meanwhile, I was expecting the inevitable bright flash and windows imploding as my last vision of this lifetime.

And then

nothing.

Nothing except for the slow, sorrowful chimes of my mantle clock collection, winding down and finally stopping. That, and a music box playing the final line of the song "The Entertainer." Getting slower and slower, and stopping just before the last note.

I turned my head to the left and saw nothing but black. For an instant I thought maybe I was blind. I lifted my head and looked around, realizing I was not blind. But what I saw was ................
What I saw was my house............broken. I looked at the clock and it STILL said 5:04 PM.

How can it still be 5:04?? How could my house be "broken" in less than a minute. It had seemed like the noise and crashing had gone on for an hour at least. As I got up off the floor I realized why my first vision had been black. My antique glass front china cabinet had flown a full eight feet from its spot in the corner, and the black I had seen was the top of the cabinet, which now lay about 3 inches from where my head had been.

I climbed over piles of broken stuff and overturned furniture and went outside, still wondering if it actually HAD been nuclear and perhaps I was really dead and this was sort of an "after-life" dream or some such weirdness. When I had been outside for about 4 minutes, suddenly the trees started shaking and I felt the lawn under my feet quivering and rolling. Oh my God, it was an earthquake! It was an EARTHQUAKE!

As soon as the first aftershock ended, I screamed out loud, to no one in particular, "if this isn't the bloody epicenter, then the whole bay area is GONE."

So, before I realized it was an earthquake, I had spent at least five or six minutes CONVINCED that it had been nuclear!

To this day, I still have bad moments when there is a small shake, a loud noise, or a truck backfiring.

My apologies, Egg, for being a smart-alec. I am sorry for your losses -- antiques and all. Of course you should have secured your china cabinet to the floor and secured the door so it wouldn't fly open -- but it's too late for that now.

My aunt in Aptos was on her honeymoon - second marriage. She came home to a house full of broken china and Waterford (hers and her new hubbies life long collections).

The refrigerator door flew open at my cousin's in Santa Cruz and food and beverages and eggs spewed across the kitchen, breaking and spilling everywhere. Clean up was a mess, but the babies in their high chairs were not injured; and that is what was important. It was days before they could get the water and electricity turned back on, so the food was really dried on by the time they could clean. My cousin and my uncle were both home buiders and designers in the Santa Cruz & Aptos area, and none of their homes suffered any structural damage.

I'm sorry for your trauma.

Yikes, sounds like you used up one of your nine lives.

We spent a very long night watching the news on a little B/W portable TV and listening to the radio in our truck trying to get a handle on the scale of the whole thing. My neighbor's husband was out of town and she spent the night on our sofa. It was a very long, jumpy night. When we were able to check on my parents house, it seemed as though every square inch of floor was covered with broken glass. All their kitchen cupboards had opened up and dumped everything down onto the marble counter tops and into the drawers that had also opened. A house up the street from theirs collapsed into the basement.

Externally we got everything cleaned up pretty quickly, but internally I remember being jumpy for months and months at any sound, shake or bump. It was like reliving it over and over again.