I woke up in Las Vegas, a few years ago. It was in the early morning hours when only the really dedicated are still in the casinos feeding rent money into chrome machines. I had been sleeping in an upper-floor room at Caesar’s Palace and when I awoke – my first thought was of the thunderstorm outside.
The building was swaying just like the downtown Tulsa buildings do in high-winds. KRAV used to have a plumb line that hung down over the microphone so deejays could see just how hard the wind was blowing. I looked out the window in the early morning darkness, expecting to see sheets of rain and trash blowing down the street. There wasn’t any.
If I had known to look in that direction, I would have seen golfer John Daly, who abandoned his room to continue his sleep on a sidewalk bench. I didn’t see much, and – as those early morning urges go – tried to walk through the darkened hotel room to the other john.
It was a drunken walk, but not my fault. When I flipped on the light, the water in the toilet bowl was rolling from side to side, threatening to spill out over the top. Whoa, I said to myself. This just isn’t right.
Earthquake.
We had one of our own in Oklahoma yesterday, and just like a close encounter with a tornado, people like to talk about them. An attorney in OKC had the same swaying water symptom, but his was from a water glass on his desk. Some unlucky soul was on top of a ladder when the shaking started, and he walked away with a broken ankle.
The earthquakes in Oklahoma are a lot like the tornadoes. They happen to a few people and the rest of us can only muse about the proximity. “Yeah,” we tell our neighbors, “I saw that cloud drift over and knew there was a twister in it. Dropped down half a mile away. Scuffed up some houses.”
I woke up about the time the quake started (the store doesn’t open until ten and I enjoy my sleep…), but I’m not sure it was the shaking ground that got my eyes opened. I’m at the age that the body has a built-in alarm clock.
But it goes off several times a night…
A different kind of shake, but just as timely:
Mo Info: