Valentine's Day Oddities, Earthquakes & Witch Trials

Today is Valentine's Day, and such occasions always bring up memories for me. It is my mother's 81st birthday. It is Aunt Mary's and Jim's 26th wedding anniversary. Valentine is my mother-in-law's maiden name. In his twenties, my grandfather looked like Rudolph Valentino. What else can I beat this dead horse with....?

Here's something odd for you numerologists: My mother was born on 2/14. I was born on 3/15. My daughter was born on 4/16. Three generations, exactly a month and a day apart! How's that for weird and coincidental?

I remember traveling up I-55 from Louisiana to Illinois for Mary & Jim's wedding in 1982. I drove my van, Bill rode shotgun, and his dad perched on the ice chest between us. As we drove north, the early greening of the southern spring disappeared, replaced by the vestiges of the Midwestern winter. Dirty snowbanks edged the highway, growing higher with each stop. We took a break near Cape Girardoux, at the site of the New Madrid (pronounced "Madd-Rid") earthquakes.

Reading the plaques that told the story of the quakes was a revelation. I had never heard of the New Madrid events from 1811-1812, with the largest-ever recorded earthquake in the contiguous states occurring there on February 7, 1812. It was so violent that it made the Mississippi River flow backwards, and permanently changed its location and course to what we know today. The people who lived there at the time must have thought it was a Biblical apocalypse. Sinkholes, geysers, giant rifts swallowing up barns and livestock, along with unearthly noises and violent ground shakes. Who wouldn't think the world was ending in fire and brimstone?

Being from California, I thought I knew earthquakes. I had become accustomed to "little shakers" so much in my childhood that I hardly noticed them, other than remarking that the draperies were swaying or the water in the fish tank was sloshing back and forth. I had also been through a "big one," waking at 6 am on February 9, 1971, thrown out of bed to the floor, and rolling back and forth across the room for a minute or so during the Sylmar quake, epicentered 120 miles away. But here was a giant zero in my geologic knowledge! Missouri isn't anywhere near the "Ring of Fire" I learned about in school. Here was the physical evidence of the biggest cataclysmic rocker ever, laid out before me, complete with visual aids and historical markers, nowhere near California! I was stunned.

The wedding was lovely, the reception was friendly and tasty (though a little heavy on the Jell-O salads as I recall--it's a Midwest thing), but my mind kept creeping back to the rest stop at New Madrid. Since then, I've seen the National Geographic and History Channel specials on the New Madrid fault and the 1811-12 quakes, and read first-person accounts, all breathtakingly horrific in detail and stunning in ignorance of what was really going on underneath the ground.

How humbling it is to discover you don't know everything you think you know. And how arrogant it is to look back at historical events and laugh at the misperceptions of the people who lived through them. Context is everything. Salem was infested with "witches" in 1692, their distorted visions now believed to have been caused by a psychedelic mold similar to LSD on the rye crop that overly-wet year. The scientific facts may change with historical distance, but perceptions drive the reality of behavior in the time the events occur. That can't be changed.

I seem to have digressed. Happy Valentine's Day to all, whatever memories it brings to you.