Mesa Musings:

Earthquakes: I don’t much like them, but I’ve grudgingly learned to live with them.

I’ve been through dozens and dozens of them in my 64 solar journeys, and never has my house fallen down around me — knock on wood!

Now, what really does scare the blue blazes out of me are tornadoes! They leave me quaking in my boots, so to speak. They seem so impulsive, so arbitrary.

“Jim,” you might logically retort, “don’t fret. You live in Costa Mesa. This may be earthquake country, but it’s not tornado alley. We don’t have tornadoes here.”

True enough.

But my wife, Hedy, and I live several months out of each year at our home in North Carolina and, believe me, tornadoes are a fact of life there!

Earlier this spring, while we were in North Carolina, we experienced several “tornado watches.” Talk about scary!

When we first moved there I asked a neighbor about the frequency of tornadoes.

“Aw, you don’t have to worry about them,” he drawled, “they only hit trailer parks.”

We live 45 minutes east of Raleigh.

Raleigh TV stations do an excellent job of keeping the public informed of storm cells moving through the area. I watched this spring as a line of the menacing red, orange and yellow cells (on a benign green map) passed north of us. We dodged a bullet.

But a tornado actually hit our neighborhood just last week, touching down three times — the last only a couple of blocks from our house. Eight homes were damaged, and two had their roofs blown off.

It’s rather sobering when the National Weather Service issues an alert.

It usually goes something like this: “A tornado watch is in effect for the next two hours, until 6 p.m.”

That leaves you with a finite interval in which to examine your life. “If I survive the next 120 minutes,” you resolve, “I shall strive for depth in my life. I’ll never watch Regis and Kelly again.”

At 6:01 you breathe a sigh of relief.

There are advantages to the alerts. Here, in earthquake country, we have no such two-hour warnings. The Big One can hit at any moment, day or night. The San Andreas is no respecter of “off-hour” exemptions.

My favorite personal earthquake story occurred in the mid-1980s.

I was OCC’s director of community relations, and I invited the education writer for a large newspaper to tour the campus. She was fresh from Chicago and unfamiliar with the ways of Southern California.

Following the tour we had lunch with a key college administrator in the Student Center.

He’d taken his post a year earlier after spending his entire professional career on the East Coast.

Five minutes into our meal, as the administrator was waxing rhapsodic about education models, a sharp earthquake rocked the campus. The administrator — encountering his first-ever temblor — dropped to the floor and crawled under the table.

I continued to eat.

The journalist looked at me, unable to hide the panic welling just behind her eyeballs. “What shall we do?” she squeaked. “It’s OK,” I assuaged, “I’ve been through this many times. It’ll soon be over.”

The windows of the Student Center rattled ominously, and the floor undulated, but nothing serious occurred. Within seconds it was over.

The administrator extracted himself from beneath our feet and stood up.

He dusted off his suit, sat down and nervously cleared his throat. The conversation resumed — albeit awkwardly — as we tried to forget what had just happened.

But, lest you think me smug, I know what I shall do should I encounter a Carolina twister.

I’m diving under the nearest table — or into the closest bathtub.

I’m no hero.

JIM CARNETT lives in Costa Mesa. His column runs Wednesdays.