First Person Account Of the Clintonville Wisconsin Rumblings

The first big boom came Sunday night about 9:30 and I thought half of our maple tree fell on the house. Then through the night, when the periodic jolts hit with a loud bang I kept searching through the house for a cause; furnace malfunction? water-hammer in the pipes? white tail deer running full bore into the wall? furniture jumping up and down upstairs? Perhaps Al Quaeda switched from hijacking airplanes and instead has stolen the "Augernaut" from Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry and is now crawling under Clintonville (where else would they attack after New York?) and ramming its residential foundations. I finally, and embarrassingly, called the police around 3:30 when I was again rocked out of sleep, in order to discover if it was just my house that was disturbing the peace. The dispatcher told me people were calling in from Hughes, Wilson and McKinley streets, all of which surround my little abode! Obviously, I was much relieved and went back to sleep.  If a sink hole swallows my house I may as well be cozy on the way down.

So that night, the strange loud noises came periodically, but not regularly, through the night. I haven't heard anyone else mention this point, but it seems to me that most bumps had a two stage aspect to them. Like if you were throwing a chunk of firewood into the basement and it hit the floor (boom!) and then fell over and hit again (bump). I could not fathom why my neighbors were throwing whole tree stumps into my basement at 2 in the morning, but, people are people. At one point I was outside to see if maybe the Mars Rover, parts of the space station and all of Russia's old satellites were lined up and landing on my roof (well, anything is possible right?) when I heard a big bang and actually felt the sidewalk shake a bit! It was a very strange sensation. My tendency is to doubt even my own senses in such an unknowable situation as that, so I still never thought we might be in some kind of earthquake.

Regional seismographs have demonstrated that we did not have any earthquakes per se, but that the ground did shake. No, I never heard of an earthSHAKE either, but you probably never heard of Clintonville Wisconsin before it hit the world stage with its new Shake Rattle and Roll Show.

During the day Monday, there were some, but fewer rumbles. Monday night they returned, but not with so much vengeance. Tuesday, there may have been a few vibrations but that could be related to the overburden of Wisconsin's news vans arriving and touring through the quiet looking streets of our fair town! The last noticeable boom came around 5 AM on Wednesday. The city of Clintonville held an open meeting for the public Wednesday evening to inform us of all they don't know yet. One person there asked: "If the earth is shifting then why aren't we finding dead birds? 'Cause if they start dropping we're next."

I thought that was silly. How could the terrorist's Augernaut kill birds?