Shake, Rattle and Roll

At just past three in the morning, all those things that you have learned and know by heart about earthquakes don't mean a lot. Being shaken awake by your parents is one thing, but being shaken awake by your house is quite another. My son, who has been putting together a career year in sleep this past year, was sitting straight up in bed when my wife and I made it to the back room to check on him.
But first we endured an endless twenty seconds of tectonic shifting. The walls and floors of our one hundred twenty year old house moved, along with the rest of the neighborhood, on the wave that was sent down the coast to us from Napa. Thanks for sharing, Napa. When my brain cells had aligned effectively enough to reckon with what was happening around me, I considered my options: holding very still and waiting for the unpleasantness to simply pass, leap from the bed and stand in a doorway, or cling to my wife and hope that the ceiling would hold. I would like to tell you that I made some sort of rational decision about what I ended up doing, which was essentially a combination of those three alternatives, but I was in full-on react mode. Objects that I considered solid turned out to be negotiable on that fact.
We have a smoke detector. We have a CO2 sensor. We have lights on the side and back of our house that detect motion. None of these devices enhanced our safety a whit. On the way to the back room to check on my son, whom I expected to wake and explain this natural phenomenon to, I thought about all we had done to prepare for this eventuality. We have supplies and first aid kits and extra clothes and even a tent to camp out in the back yard if the homestead collapsed completely. And yet this caught us unawares. I was gratified not just by the sight of my son and his eyes bleary but open, but also with the news that he had actually made it off his bed and to the doorway to ride out the earth's wobbly moment.
We were joined a few moments later by his mother, and the three of us took stock, describing the event that took less than thirty seconds but would keep all of us awake for another half hour. We had the luxury of going back to sleep. Even as emergency crews scrambled to aid those in need north of us, we were able to put another geological event in our past. We could go back to sleep. We didn't have to put out any fires. We didn't have to rebuild. We could only wait for the next one.