I woke in a fright.
Since we moved to the country, I can’t even remember the last time I woke up in the middle of the night. We’d spent the last two years living in apartments in the city, and I’d get woken up all the time by trucks, trains, people yelling, people fighting and alarms. Our place in the country, though, is silent.
Completely, totally, amazingly silent.
So, when I woke to dogs barking crazily, my first thought, in the middle of the night-time silence was “EARTHQUAKE!”
The area that we moved to, the Pacific Northwest in the US is waiting for a big bad earthquake that will take a full year to recover from. The continental tectonic plate we’re on will drop 8 feet downwards and 40 feet West, and it’s only a matter of time… but no one knows if it’ll be tomorrow or in 80 years…
We’ve only been here a couple of months, and all our money has been going into setting this place up how we like it, so we haven’t had the spare time, brainpower or money to put together an earthquake kit that we might never use. It’s pretty scary though, we live deep in the forest, surrounded by amazingly tall beautiful pine trees… that we love with all our hearts, any of which could easily crush our house with us inside.
Apparently, animals can hear an earthquake coming, so if all the dogs in the area suddenly go nuts you might have a couple of seconds to prepare.
So… middle of the night… completely dark… dogs going nuts… super unprepared…. so so so cold… pretty nervous.
I brace myself and wait… thinking of where I could and/or if it’s safer just to stay in bed where stuff (except for massive trees) can’t fall on me… I realise that the barking isn’t barking… it’s more of a yipping sound.
COYOTES!
I’ve never heard coyotes before, never even seen one… but my partner has seen them in the neighbourhood, she was super excited. The yipping is so loud… but eventually it dies down… I wait nervously for an earthquake that doesn’t come… and eventually I fall back asleep in the freezing cold. I looked it up and coyotes tend to yip like that when they feel threatened by a dog in their territory… not when they’re about to pounce on a dude in his bed.
Phew.
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