At five last Friday morning, I woke up. The house was filled with a loud rushing sound and another disharmonic disturbance that I couldn't quite identify.

In short, it sounded like all the air in our house was being sucked into the basement to feed a huge fire. My semi-conscious state quickly became a totally stupid state. I leapt over our bed and dashed down two flights of stairs to the basement.

'Cause, y'know, a guy armed only with his underwear can easily put out a fire that is consuming an entire basement.

By the time I got halfway down the basement steps, the noise had stopped. All I heard was the sound of the air conditioner (when the nightly low is 80 degrees or higher, the AC runs at five in the morning). I saw no light, smelled no smoke and heard no more rushing. I walked back upstairs to bed.

"What the hell was that?" my wife asked after I flopped back down.

"I dunno." I said. "It must have been some sort of dissonance between the AC vent and the ceiling fan."

Five in the morning is not my best thinking time.

"You didn't have to jump over the bed, did you?"

My wife had only gotten to bed three hours earlier after spending a fair portion of the morning with some of the neighborhood ladies. She was tired and was justifiably annoyed at my early-morning gymnastics.

"I thought there was a fire."

"So you ran right into it? Geez, you're brilliant."

"Yeah," I said. And then I fell asleep.

My wife has just finished her term as president of our youngest son's preschool, and Friday morning (after getting a bit more sleep) she needed to go to the bank to get her name taken off all the school accounts. Another of the outgoing school officers asked her if she'd felt the earthquake.

"What time was that?" she asked, even though she knew the answer as she finished asking the question.

At 5:04:47 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (that's half-past 5:04 for us regular folks), a 3.6 magnitude quake struck Germantown, Maryland, at a point about three miles below the surface of the earth. Germantown is about ten miles from where I live inside the Beltway, so I was more than close enough to feel the rumbles.

A lot of my friends have done time on the west coast, and they knew exactly what had happened.

"Yeah, it was an earthquake," one friend told me. "I thought about waking up my wife, but it wasn't that big a deal. Waking her up at five in the morning isn't a real good idea."

My friend is a lot smarter than me.

I didn't feel any shaking, probably because I spent my earthquake time running down stairs. Anyway, any shaking was ancillary to the noise, which was impressive

The rushing noise is obvious. That's the sound of the earth moving. The odd disharmonics? Probably the fan on the AC air handler slipping out of alignment as the basement floor rumbled. Or maybe I just imagined those odd squeals. I dunno.

A few times in the past, very small quakes (2.5 to 3.0 magnitude) have struck places where I've lived. I neither heard nor felt those and only learned about them after reading briefs in the newspaper. But I can now say that I've actually experienced an earthquake. It didn't scare me, exactly, but it sure disoriented me. And given my sleep-addled state, I have a feeling I won't be able to identify the next earthquake that comes my way.

Oh, and the scientists say they'll probably never know exactly what caused the quake, other than it's pretty obvious that a portion of the Pleasant Grove fault zone shifted a fraction of a millimeter.

The quake is Maryland's largest on record, but official records only go back to 1974. There were quakes in 1758 and 1939 that have been estimated at 3.7. So it's hard to say if this was a record-breaker. Certainly, back in the prehistoric day when volcanic activity shook the Appalachians (a couple hundred million years ago, give or take), there were a few serious shakes. These days, 3.6 is about as good as we're going to get.

But now I can scratch earthquake off my natural phenomena list. Hurricanes? Well, I've hunkered down through a few strong tropical storms. Floods? Tornados? Dude, I spent six years in Kansas and nine in Missouri. Plenty of both. Dust storms? Yep. I've never been that close to a wildfire, though I have been choked off by smoke from one a couple hundred miles away. I've never done a landslide, and I don't want to. Not many folks live to tell that tale.

So. An earthquake. In Maryland. Pretty cool. Now, if only something could be done about this heat.

Jon Worley is drinking three gallons of fluids a day and still feels parched.