Shake, Rattle and Roll



Famous DC Earthquake Devastation



Last night I woke at 1 AM to another aftershock. Still slightly disconcerting , but certainly not nearly as startling, unexpected or thought provoking as the first event. I have a brother on the west coast who teased my daughter for her "over-reaction".  Frankly, many west coasters who deal with tremors and shakes on a regular basis have weighed in on the stir that the event caused. There is even quite the comical picture circling the Internet circuit highlighting the "massive DC destruction!" As I circled the building yesterday on one of my daily exercise breaks, I thought back over the previous day's events, and decided  I wasn't ashamed of the way I reacted or even the way any of my fellow east coasters had reacted. The west coasters simply had it wrong.

The truth was when I first felt the ground move and my building started to shake, my first thought was that they had fired off a particularly large round of artillery at the nearby Quantico Marine  Base, but as the building shook more violently, my second thought was, a plane has gone down somewhere or something very large has exploded. You see, I like many of the people on the east coast still have a vivid memory of the day that everything changed. The day that started out like any other day, but ended in death and destruction. A day where we couldn't get phone calls in or out, where there was no communication, and it seemed as if the whole world were under attack and particularly our city. A day where I broke down sobbing when my husband finally walked through the door after walking, bicycling and hitchhiking his way home from the pentagon, a little disheveled, but safe, and a day where I began mourning for the ones who never did make it home.

For those of who had a personal connection to 911, we knew that the worst sometimes happened and, so as we slowly came to the conclusion that what we had just felt was an earthquake, we didn't immediately think, all is well, because we knew that bad things happened, and people didn't always make it home. We tried calling our loved ones, but in the absence of communication, we watched the news, and we waited. We waited to hear that the worst hadn't happened this time, and we waited before we breathed our sigh of relief. We tweeted to the world out fears and concerns, because it was our only way to shake the eerie Deja vu.

Now that it is over, we can joke amongst ourselves, and with the rest of the world, but somewhere deep within, we are all still thankful we dodged another bullet.