fault lines

The New Madrid Seismic Zone centers around the northwestern corner of Tennessee's parallelogram. It's the part that juts into Arkansas. Though Wikipedia claims that over 4000 earthquakes around the New Madrid fault line have been recorded since the mid-70s, and I've lived in Tennessee for 19 non-consecutive years, I have never once felt one of them. We're in the center of the continent, for heaven's sake. The ground under my feet feels as stable as can be.

But Friday morning, at about 4:30, I was jarred from my sleep. There are these little loopy metal drawer pulls that hang from this enormous chest in the room in which I sleep at my parents' house. Those drawer pulls were rattling fiercely. I sat straight up, trying to orient and identify the disturbance. At first, I thought my dad's insane black mutt was scratching himself outside the door to this guestroom. He's a big dog-- a good scratch can whip up a pretty good reverberation in this house. But it went on for a solid 30 seconds and was just too rhythmic to be explained away with a dog scratchfest.

I'd never actually felt an earthquake before. I didn't really have the frame of reference to name it as such. But it turns out that, indeed, the epicenter was about 175 miles north of here, somewhere in Illinois. And because the bedrock is so close to the surface in these parts, seismic activity is conducted very well-- and very far.

So, this is just to say: why go to California when you can feel the earth move here in little ol' Nashville? I idly wonder... what would it be like if our continent just up and rended itself in two? If the Mississippi River just opened itself in a wild, spastic gasp? If Texarkana fell in? If we became East and West, abandoning, finally, the old, obsolete rift between North and South? If the wound would just scab over as if nothing had ever happened?

I feel like I should go reread some John McPhee now.