Those who have experienced an earthquake know the queasy feeling you get after even a minor tremor. Your senses don’t quite know how to handle it when the world itself begins to buck and roll. You enter into a holding pattern of pre-panic because some mechanism of self-preservation understands full-blown terror isn’t going to help you survive.
I was awakened from a tremor and I knew I had to rouse my wife and kids. “We have to get out!” The words came to me more as a feeling than a thought. It was a moment of visceral terror.
It’s never easy to get the whole family moving. I started grabbing random things. I was throwing them into a rucksack when I happened to look out the window. We had an ocean view, and in the distance, I could see a wave. It dominated the horizon, inching inevitably closer.