So, Monday night, The Girlfriend and I were at her apartment catching up on the season finale of 24. (Last week was a busy one, so I taped all the season finales; tonight we’re planning to see how Lost wrapped up. And yes, I recorded these shows on good old-fashioned VHS tape. None of them fancy digital video hard-drive doohickeys for this grumpy old curmudgeon!) We were down to the final five tension-filled minutes when we heard something that can only be described using one of those comic-book sound-effect tags: crackBOOOOOM!!!

This was followed by the couch lurching sharply sideways.

Anne and I looked at each other with the same “what the hell was that?” expression, then she asked if I thought we ought to go outside. This seemed a prudent course of action…

Out on her patio, the world looked perfectly normal. No cracks had appeared in the earth or in the apartment building behind us, no flash of eldritch green light was glowing in the sky, nothing at all out of the ordinary. I asked a passing couple if they’d just felt the something odd and they looked at me as if I’d spoken in Swahili.

After a minute or so of nothing happening, Anne and I convinced ourselves that the upstairs neighbor must’ve dropped a particularly heavy piece of furniture or something and we went back to the increasingly unlikely adventures of Jack Bauer.

Turns out that the crackBOOOM was a small earthquake, just as we first assumed.

Utah is seismically active — the local media seems to do a “what will happen when The Big One hits” story about every six or eight months — but the inhabited parts of the state rarely experience any noticeable tremors, and we natives rarely think much about living on top of a major fault line. (That would be the Wasatch Fault, for you out-of-towners.) The last quake I recall feeling occurred a good fifteen years ago; like the one I experienced Monday, it was big enough to get my attention (it woke me up actually) but small enough and over so quickly that I was left wondering if I’d imagined the whole damn thing.

I can tell you this much, if you’ve never felt an honest-to-god earthquake: it’s extremely weird and upsetting to feel the whole world shake beneath you. The one the other night was a mere 2.3 magnitude, and it gave me a severe case of The Willies. I hope I never feel a stronger one. Not because I fear the house coming down around me, although that is a pretty scary thought. No, what I dislike so much about the experience is the utterly helpless feeling of knowing, forcibly and unavoidably, that you have absolutely no control over what’s happening. Even a tiny quake reminds you that you are but a puny insignificance alongside the power and sheer scale of the planet itself…