In January of 1994 was living in San Francisco with my girlfriend, and we decided to rent a car and travel down to Los Angeles to visit friends for the long MLK weekend.

Sunday night, the night before we were supposed to drive back to SF, we went out to a bar to see a friend's band play. After the gig we were all sitting around talking and having a beer, and I blurted out the unthinkable, "You know, I've been living in California for a year and a half now, and I've yet to feel so much as a tremor! I wonder what an earthquake feels like?"

Needless to say, I was told to shut up by everyone else, and that my words would certainly come back to haunt me and everyone else. (Who knew it would happen so soon?) On the way back to our hotel in Hollywood later that night, we noticed that the gas tank was on "empty." I told my girlfriend that we could get gas in the morning, since our hotel was right next door to a gas station. She insisted we do it that night, as much out of intuition as anything else. I relented, and filled up the tank with gas.

The rest of the story is that the infamous Northridge earthquake hit at 4:30 am that same morning. I had just gotten out of bed to go to the bathroom, and was falling back to sleep when it hit. It started as a slow rolling, and quickly built into a horrifyingly loud shaking motion. Imagine you’re asleep inside of a matchbox, and the Jolly Green Giant picked up the matchbox and shook it real hard. That's what it was like. And of course, at 4:30 am, it's dark. And now there's no electricity, either. So now it's really, really dark. And you can't see anything, everything's on the floor, and you don't know if it's safer to stay in bed, or get the hell out of the hotel room! The bathroom of our hotel had sliding glass doors that were tremendously loud when the building was shaking. And all of the water in the toilet bowl was thrown out onto the bathroom floor.

We opted to stay in bed until daylight. There's no radio, no television, no nuthin'. We packed, cleaned up, checked out, got in the car that thankfully had a full tank of gas, and drove through miles and miles of destruction on our way out of town. We didn't encounter a gas station with power to have gas pumps that worked until we were well north of Santa Maria, a few hours north of Los Angeles. We would have been stuck in Los Angeles for the better part of a week had we not filled up the car the night before! Highway 5 was closed heading out of LA, so we drove back on 101.

Our "joke" the entire way back to San Francisco was, "Let’s hurry up and get back to San Francisco where it's SAFE!"

And now, whenever anyone asks what really causes earthquakes, I say it's because some dumb-ass somewhere couldn't keep his mouth shut!

[ps--Thanks to an ultimatum from my future ex-girlfriend, we moved out of California six weeks after that incident. I didn't return for another 10 years.]