Chapter 52 - The Earthquake

   We have our two big recliners side by side in front of the T.V.  Every once in a while Melaney will give my chair a little jiggle to see if I am awake, and of course it is her method of teasing me.  One evening about 10 days ago, my chair jiggled a little, and I looked over at Melaney to see what was going on.  Nothing.  Her chair jiggled a little too.  She said “I’ll bet that was an earthquake” I said “Oh no, it was nothing” We settled back into the TV programming.

   Next day, checking with the neighbours, they asked if we had felt the earthquake.  I guess it was one, and I didn’t realize it.  Melaney had experienced a slight tremor in her office building in Kelowna, so she recognized the action.

   Apparently two or three years ago there was a pretty sharp quake in the area going up to the Poas Volcano.  It took out a chunk of the roadway, and the municipality had to rebuild it.  I didn’t realize we were actually living in tremor country, but I suppose anything along the spine of the mountains is eligible.

I always said I would never live in California, for the very reason of the fault line traversing the whole state.  That, and many other things like too many people and too many cars and too much phony baloney, it just wouldn’t be my preference.

   The land here is a little strange.  The soil isn’t actually soil as I have known it, it is just volcanic ash from a zillion years, compacted into land.  I was told that you could grow anything, but I beg to differ.  The soil needs years of agricultural cultivation, and a lot of fibrous matter worked into it.  It is too solid.  You can grow trees and woody shrubs but soft rooted plants don’t do that well.  Of all the tomato plants that I started out with, there is only one that is indeed growing.  Now that it is at the stage that it is, I think it will mature, but it has taken a lot of patience.  My cucumber plant is doing all right, and my two butternut squash plants are coming along.  Victor forced a shaft of yucca wood into the ground, and it is doing very well.  It is native to the country, and accepts the harsh soil.

    I hope we don’t get any more tremors. That is one thing that would make me nervous.