The Great Trenton Earthquake

She swears the bedpost shook. And then, a minute or two later, our dad pokes his head into the room and says, “girls, we just had an earthquake.” This all might have been plausible if we were living somewhere like California in the early 1980s, instead of New Jersey. My sister was no more than three years old at the time, and I was maybe 5; we moved to Pennsylvania in 1984. This story is not about “the great Trenton earthquake,” because there wasn’t one. Instead, it’s about how you convince yourself something happened to the point that it must have happened.

There were two earthquakes near Trenton that we conceivably could have experienced: one in February 1983 and the other in January 1984. However, both of those quakes were fairly low on the Richter Scale, at 2.5 and 2.4 magnitude, respectively. According to volcanodiscovery.com, the 1983 one was located in New Jersey, north of Trenton, while the center of the 1984 one was in Wilmington, Delaware, a distance of some 60 miles away. At these magnitudes, though, any shaking would have been felt close to the epicenter under calm conditions.

And yet, how would we have known about the earthquake if we didn’t experience it in one way or another? Was it a passing remark that we heard when we were older, such as my parents talking about that time there was an earthquake, and we borrowed the story to make it our own? Whenever the subject comes up during family dinners, my mom is adamant that there’s no way we could have known it was an earthquake, because all that happened was a loud bang long after we’d gone to bed. The timing of the 1983 one took place at approximately 12:45 am, so we should have been fast asleep. The 1984 earthquake occurred just after 6pm, ruling that one out.

But what if that bang was enough to shake the bed, even just a little? What might have been a small, insignificant event to an adult can seem much larger to a child. And earthquakes are funny things, as you can be in the same room as someone else and while they see the light fixtures sway, you don’t feel anything. I know this to be true, having experienced the phenomenon while living in Berkeley, California. There is a lot of pseudoscience surrounding earthquakes and sensitivity, and I looked into it enough to understand that no, children do not have any special abilities where earthquakes are concerned. But, a recent article in Science Daily suggests that the earliest childhood memories start at age 2 and a half, which is how old my sister was in February 1983.

So, what really happened? We shared a bedroom until middle school, when she was going to start sixth grade and I eighth. Because my sister and I are so close in age, our parents often refer to us in the plural tense. I’m the one who remembers my dad coming to check on us after the supposed earthquake, and it’s always the second part of the story, after my sister saw the bed shake. But I also remember telling her stories as we tried to fall asleep, usually about Peter Pan and Captain Hook, because that was my favorite story. We had very active imaginations, pretending that we were caught in a disaster setting like a flood or storm, so why not add an earthquake to the mix.

Even though I ruled it out earlier, I wonder about that 1984 earthquake. What if we conflated the two of them, and were in fact awake to hear about that one, not in our beds asleep? And does searching for the truth take anything away from our story? I don’t think so. By creating a fictional story out of a real event, however minor it was, my sister and I have a bond that no earthquake could ever damage. These shared childhood memories are a part of who we are as adults, and since neither of us have children to pass the story down to, I’m releasing it out into the world.