Susan Herndon

There have been at least a half a dozen earthquakes in Oklahoma in the past few weeks. A geology professor here says it's absolutely not from fracking, that the quakes have appeared at depths significantly deeper (approx. 3 miles) than deposits where fracking takes place. But who knows really? Even though he does study the Earth, it's not like he's spokesperson for the Earth. After all, it's all just one big rock that we live on top of ...and he does work at a university that's in partnership with the petroleum industry.....

Last night i had a dream that we were having another pretty big earthquake.... it was very real... but then when i woke up and checked the USGS site~ nothing.

Maybe there's still a big one yet to come....

I wrote the following in September, which, now that we're having these earthquakes so frequently, is kinda funny in hindsight....

Evidently there was an earthquake in Red River when i was playing out there the other day. Something like 4.5 on the Richter Scale. It happened in the middle of the night and i was sleeping so didn't feel it.

I've always been a little bit afraid of going out to California~ (having the feeling like that line in Steely Dan's My Old School, "California~ tumbles into the sea!") but then, when i was playing out there last month, the big earthquake happened not on the West Coast but on the East Coast in the D.C. area.  Come to find out though, there was an earthquake in the San Francisco area right after i played there, I didn't feel that one either-- i think it happened after i had left the next morning. Getting to the desert that afternoon, just east of LA, someone said so matter of factly, "oh, yeah, we have earthquakes here all the time." And i swear, the earth was undulating beneath me all the while i was out there....

About 9 years ago, i was in an earthquake right at home, (which isn't so unusual, as we've been having them a lot lately, due, they say, to fracturing.) This particular one happened around 3 in the morning or so. At the time, I didn't think it was an earthquake. The guy in the apartment above me cooked meth. And i was pretty sure he had finally gotten around to blowing the enitre complex up, so i tore out of the apartment house and down the street, still asleep and in my nightclothes....

Later, the news was, we had indeed had an earthquake, on the line there at the edge of the New Madrid Fault that runs through Missouri and Arkansas.....

All this to say, you just never can tell. The Earth is Alive.