Napa Earthquake

Fast asleep at 3 in the morning, vaguely conscious of a dream in my head. Slowly the dream becomes more vivid, until the sense of being in a violently shaking room becomes too real to stay sleeping. I half-wake and realise that I actually am in a room that’s violently shaking. I stay still for a few moments when I am brought fully awake by a piercing scream from my girlfriend lying next to me. I grab hold of her and tell her it’s OK, though I wonder if I am holding her or she me.

The house continues to shake, feeling as if a giant hand has grabbed the building and is toying with it. It’s perhaps the silence that’s eeriest: there’s no sound of rumbling or the earth breaking apart, just constant, uncalm vibration.

That silence is broken by a smash upstairs, but as the house continues to rock that's all we hear. After a while - it feels neverending, but it's probably less than a minute - the rocking stops and we hold each other until we’re sure everything is calm again. Voices emerge from our flatmates upstairs; we get up to join them and share some whiskey. The house is unscathed - it stands on bedrock, meaning that the foundations are on solid rock that moved from side to side during the earthquake without any danger of splitting. There’s just one plate broken on the kitchen floor.

We go back to bed, knocked out by the whiskey (never has Jameson’s tasted so good), thinking that for all the violence of the earthquake it hasn’t done too much damage. We’d got off lucky, though. Waking the next morning, the internet showed us pictures of wrecked buildings, homes and shops a complete mess, and cracked roads (though it’s hard to tell on the Napa highways, they’re full of potholes anyway). My girlfriend’s former landlady had lost an entire outhouse and her home had become a rubbish dump – not a sight for a seventy-five-year-old woman to face. For many, it's the inconvenience the earthquake has caused and the cost and time it will take to clean up after it rather than any long-term damage.

The next day, the centre of the city was calm, residents and tourists walking around inspecting the damage. There's a sense of shock, but also relief that the damage hasn't been far greater. Most of the bars and restaurants are closed, some with boarded-up windows, others cleaning up the broken bottles. Only one street has sustained serious damage - Brown Street, between 2nd and 3rd Streets. Wine bar Carpe Diem is worst affected, the turreted roof caving in on the building.

Carpe Diem wine bar

Brown and 3rd

This was my first ever earthquake; as exciting as it was to experience, it was quite terrifying. The worst is the feeling of complete helplessness, for there is literally nothing you can do apart from hold on to the person next to you. You're at the mercy of nature and the land, if it wants to take you it will. This was the biggest earthquake in California since 1989; luckily, and thankfully, the damage wasn't too bad and everything will get back to normal fairly quickly. The last few weeks visiting Napa, I've been told over and over how Napa Valley has more soils than the whole of France because of the perpetually shifting land: this was living proof of that.