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Friday night I had a crazy, vivid dream. First I "heard" a series of very loud booms in my sleep--I thought it was thunder, but then it sounded maybe a bit like distant carpet-bombing. I woke up and came into the office to ask Evan if he heard it too; it was so real. But he said no. So I went back to sleep. Then I dreamed that I woke up to a strange silence but for the sound of lapping water. I went out to my window and saw that the entire Sunset district was underwater and the water was swirling up to my front doorstep (which had turned around and was facing the ocean.) The tidal wave had just come in and the water was still greenish/blue. I held my breath and watched to see if the wave would swallow our house or collapse it, but neither of those things happened--it swelled up to our second step and then started to recede. There was this intense quiet; everything that usually makes noise in my neighborhood was covered with water. The wave slowly receded and I could see houses with broken windows and cars lying on their sides in the streets, but no people at all. Evan and I went outside the house to look around at the foundation and the yard. Everything was dripping but there seemed to be no major damage. I started thinking about what we should do if there was another wave--should we try to escape to higher ground? Would the wave be larger the second time? What caused it--did terrorists bomb the ocean to create the wave (the booms I heard in my earlier dream) or was there a huge tectonic plate shift? Then I saw another huge wave rise up at the beach and start to break. The water rose again, brown and muddy this time. I grabbed Blue and we raced to a Twin Peaks-like area (in real life this is a 3/4-mile drive through a valley and back up, but we just ran up the hill in my dream) and stood in the parking lot with a bunch of other people, observing the wave with binoculars like regular tourists. The wave didn't come close to us, so I let Blue wander around the parking lot and followed him around for a bit while the water swirled below. I had been feeling a bit detached, other than the fear about the next wave coming, but now I started to think about the people we knew who might have been caught in the wave. I couldn't really even begin to think about the larger tragedy, the thousands of people who must have died, but I was aware of my avoidance. Evan's dad lives on a mountain in Marin, so he was probably OK. Evan's mom lives up in the Oakland hills, so she was probably OK. But then I thought of some friends who live on lower ground, and it occurred to me that the whole Bay would be affected, not just the western shoreline, and I could clearly imagine the water flowing into the bay, and I started to freak out... then I woke up, feeling terribly disoriented and scared.
Late last night at work, I actually googled for geologic maps of our neighborhood to determine our elevation and then the likely maximum height of a tsunami. We rent a little house very near the top of a hill overlooking the entire Sunset district, which is the westernmost edge of San Francisco. We are about 2.5 miles from the beach, and we can see the shoreline from our living room window. I've often joked that if a tsunami rolled in we would have a great view of the destruction as it happened. So the dream was payback for those comments, I guess. Anyway, it turns out that we are about 650 feet above sea level, and a "regular" tsunami wouldn't even come close to our elevation. But of course, that hasn't quelled my irrational fear. Some of my fear is rational, of course--our particular stretch of coastline is as vulnerable to a tsunami as anywhere. But the irrational part--of a freakishly huge tsunami, or of natural disasters in general when my chances of dying in a car accident blah blah blah--cannot be quieted with fact. This is probably partially due to my morbid fixation/fascination that started around the time of my father's death. And another part is surely due to being raised with apocalyptic beliefs. At the time of the end of the world as we know it, I was taught (and still believe) that natural disasters will be increasingly worse and more frequent. I think that belief is harder to live with now that I have a child who I want to protect from every potential harm on the planet.
On a practical note, we need to do some serious earthquake-proofing. I mean really.
Anyway, it was a crazy dream. I'm still jumpy from it.
Late last night at work, I actually googled for geologic maps of our neighborhood to determine our elevation and then the likely maximum height of a tsunami. We rent a little house very near the top of a hill overlooking the entire Sunset district, which is the westernmost edge of San Francisco. We are about 2.5 miles from the beach, and we can see the shoreline from our living room window. I've often joked that if a tsunami rolled in we would have a great view of the destruction as it happened. So the dream was payback for those comments, I guess. Anyway, it turns out that we are about 650 feet above sea level, and a "regular" tsunami wouldn't even come close to our elevation. But of course, that hasn't quelled my irrational fear. Some of my fear is rational, of course--our particular stretch of coastline is as vulnerable to a tsunami as anywhere. But the irrational part--of a freakishly huge tsunami, or of natural disasters in general when my chances of dying in a car accident blah blah blah--cannot be quieted with fact. This is probably partially due to my morbid fixation/fascination that started around the time of my father's death. And another part is surely due to being raised with apocalyptic beliefs. At the time of the end of the world as we know it, I was taught (and still believe) that natural disasters will be increasingly worse and more frequent. I think that belief is harder to live with now that I have a child who I want to protect from every potential harm on the planet.
On a practical note, we need to do some serious earthquake-proofing. I mean really.
Anyway, it was a crazy dream. I'm still jumpy from it.
