Here I am, four miles to the Pacific Ocean and three miles to the San Francisco Bay. It’s Northern California. It’s sunny, it’s foggy, it’s windy, it’s cool in the summer and wet in the winter (usually). It’s bay flats and coastal hills and sandy and rocky and a peninsula that runs from San Francisco to San Jose. Lots and lots of forces of nature. None, however, compare to the one I hope remains unforced for many years to come.

That testy old San Andreas Fault runs just 400 or so yards from where I’m sitting. It’s one force of nature that you can be standing on and not know it’s at work. Relentlessly slipping and grinding away mostly unseen and unheard and unfelt. Most quakes are rocking or jolting or swaying affairs. Many go unnoticed. Most would say they never felt a little minor 2.0 tremor unless they were on top of it. That happened to me about a year ago. The whole place was buzzing like a giant industrial vacuum cleaner was at work on the floor above except it wasn’t. I stopped and looked around and had to wonder, “what the?” Then reason set in and I checked the USGS quake website. Sure enough, less than a mile away just on the west side of the fault. A reminder that the San Andreas doesn’t rest. A ceaseless yet silent force of nature.

Joe

See the weekly photo challenge here.

It’s not sunset. It’s the San Andreas Fault and the epicenter of the 1906 SF Earthquake.

We’ve got wind.

We’ve got waves.

We’ve got uplift.

We’ve got falling rocks.