... in response to 4.3 quake shakes Butuan City, posted by Dave H on Jan 15, 2005I have had recurring dreams of earthquakes my whole life.
In the late 70s I was in a bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz, a 100 year old brick building, looking at a book I'd just picked up off the rack. My knees felt the strangest wobbly sensation that I tried to ignore, but finally something made me look up.
The bookstore was completely empty. Everyone had left the building without a sound, except for me and a woman on a second floor balcony. Her hand was over her mouth. The walls were swaying back and forth with a loud creaking sound. My memory of it is that they were being displaced by a foot of so near the top. Maybe that is an exaggeration. I finally came unstuck and ran outside. The street was full of the people who had left the store without screaming or calling out or tapping me on the shoulder or dragging me along. They were silently staring at the building, which had just stopped swaying.
In 1989 I was 80 miles away in the Stockton area when the big one came. It destroyed this same bookstore and every building near it. The beautiful historic Santa Cruz downtown, the "Pacific Garden Mall," was one of the worst victims of the quake that took down an elevated freeway in San Francisco. I felt the 1989 quake and ran outside to see if anyone else had felt it.
The bookstore quake I experienced in about 1978 was a 5.7. If it had been a 5.9 I wouldn't be here to tell this story.
We're having our first ice storm of the season here in the Portland area, the day before I am to get my flight for San Francisco and then Taipei and then Manila and then Davao. Hopefully the rain will melt the frozen rain from last night and then stop raining or get warmer.
