Feel the Earth Move (Under Your Feet)

There was more damage than expected from the quake yesterday. Most of you felt it, as the rumble emanated from a point three miles under the tiny village of Mineral, Virginia. The tip of the Washington Monument has cracks, and some of the spires of the National Cathedral snapped off an plunged to the well-manicured greensward below.

That did not become apparent until later, and is of some interest to me, since Refuge Farm is located much nearer to the epicenter than it is to the National Capital Region. But maybe I am getting ahead of myself. We were working a proposal review out of the Headquarters- sort of a Sergeant Friday kind of thing, like the Day Watch out of Bunko- and I had wandered back to my real office to pound on the computer and access pearls of wisdom previously written.

I got some salad stuff from the Koreans downstairs, and was sorting through the chaos of the multiple government solicitations that have plopped out on the street as the end of the fiscal year looms next month.

Funny how stuff works. The news from Tripoli was the hot topic of the morning, but we were out of the loop in The War Room, and I punched on the clock radio in the office as soon as I walked in to catch up.

I was lifting a chopstick-load of cucumbers toward my lips when the room began to shake. It is a sad commentary on the times that I thought it might be a blast from a WMD detonated downtown and braced for the boom that would quickly follow the first seismic shock, but it didn’t come.

I realized what it was about five seconds into the rocking of he building. I looked out the window and saw the glass shimmering in the new office tower across the street.

Earthquake, I thought, and in about that much time the shaking peaked and diminished.

I rolled the chair back and ran out in the hall, where all the denizens of the eighth floor suite were congregating, voices rising and arms waving in excitement. Many of us have visited or served in Japan, so this is hardly unusual. I don’t know if there was a continued tremor- people were running down the passage and the vibration from their footfalls might have been what I felt.

Kristi’s eyes were bright with excitement and unease. She had never experienced a quake, and didn’t know how these things play out.

“Maybe aftershocks,” I said. “We used to get these all the time in Japan. I was living on Ma Midway in Yokosuka years ago. I went over to the Blackship Bar at the O Club and was drinking a Kirin Beer when I felt the ship get underway. Then I realized I was ashore. That is exactly what it felt like- an old aircraft carrier shuddering and moving ponderously forward.”

“I never felt anything like that,” she said. And then we all  went back to our desks and I started typing corrections to the proposal. Kojo Nnamdi was interviewing some on WAMU on another scandal in local District politics when he paused and said they had just experienced the quake.

I went out to tell Kristi, and by the time I got down the corridor to pass the word that it was confirmed, everyone was streaming media on their computers and before I got down the hall the magnitude had risen from 5.4 on the Richter scale to 5.8 and then 5.9.

Steve looked up from his computer as I passed his office. “They are evacuating the Pentagon,” he said, and I marveled. The quake had got my attention, for sure, but it hardly seemed that big a deal.

Current intelligence- or at least the open source version of it- has risen likewise to an entirely new level. I realized my old trade- telling people the classified news- had leap-frogged right over me.

I gave up and went back to work for a while. I decided on a smoke break to organize my thoughts on performance metrics and walked out to the elevator. When I arrived in the lobby, I discover the rest of the building, in fact the entire neighborhood, had evacuated. The space was jammed as people tried to get back to their offices, as apparently someone had issued an “all clear.”

Bizarre, I thought. I decided to call my best friend and check in, but the cell phone did not work. It was like 9-11, I recalled. Everyone was trying to get on the network at once, and I ruefully recalled the priority access code I once enjoyed as a bureaucrat that permitted priority access to the circuits during times of emergency.

The fact that this had been the largest quake in seventy years began to penetrate. I got an e-mail from Detroit asking if we felt it- they had- and a prompt to check on the farm.

I called Rosemary down at the Summerduck Barn just up the road from Refuge Farm, and she said they were fine, and the ponies had not minded the shaking. The hamlet of Culpeper had taken some hits, though, with bricks coming off the civil-war era buildings and a few chimneys taking on rakish leans.

At Willow later, talking to Old Jim, he said that his wife was picking up the pet at the Doggy Daycare, and the staff said the canines had suddenly stopped playing and gathered together, fur-to-fur, right before the tremors began. Somehow they knew.

The word this morning is that there was much more to confirm. The schools in Fairfax are all closed for inspection, and the nuclear reactors t Mineral, the epicenter, were shut down briefly for safety.

I didn’t even know there were reactors at Mineral.
Crap.

I didn’t pay any attention, being preoccupied with the proposal nonsense, but apparently there was a historic quake in Colorado, too, in the middle of the night before. And Hurricane Irene, the first big storm of the season, is bearing down on the Carolinas and will soak us, at a minimum.

I thought about the Mayan calendar that ends in 2012, and wondered if the Rapture had happened without us knowing it.

We live in Washington, after all, and none of us would have ascended, so it would be hard to tell.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com