“Merrillyn Smith of The Glass Knight shop in Langley begins to pick up some of the pieces of glass art that fell and broke during Wednesday’s earthquake.Joan Soltys/staff photoSouth Whidbey businesses fared much better than those in the cities across the water during the 6.8 earthquake that struck the area on Wednesday.Bottles shook, items fell off shelves, windows cracked and a few of the shop cats and dogs got as frightened as their owners, most of whom rushed outside from their stores during the 30 seconds or so of the rattle and roll.The Southend’s three liquor stores with their shelves laden with bottles suffered surprisingly little damage. Nancy White of Langley Liquor lost only one bottle of Aquavit and one decorative decanter, luckily empty.Every bottle in the store rocked, White said. I sat there and watched this big bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin wobble and kept saying, ‘Please, please don’t fall.’ It didn’t.White said her shelves have a tiny lip on the edge she thinks helped a great deal.There was no damage at Freeland Liquor, nor at Clinton’s liquor store.The shake went north to south, and the bottles just shook against each other instead of falling off, said Beverly David, who was working at the Clinton store. She herself left for the outdoors.I was terrified, she said. And I was afraid for my pets. David’s pet bird screamed and flew at me, she said, so I grabbed it and went outside. Then when I went back in I remembered my dog was still there!Grocery stores reported minor, if sometime annoying, damage. We had boxes of cereal fall off shelves, but worse were the bottles of olive oil and jam, said Harriet Felton of the Star Store. It was a mess to clean up.Felton said the wine department had no losses. Some bottles fell off, but none broke. There’s a wood floor there — it was put in for just that reason.Ken’s Korner Red Apple had just one bottle of wine that fell and broke, said owner Jim Springer.There was significantly more damage at The Glass Knight in Langley, although with the amount of glass art displayed throughout the store, owner Merrillyn Stone said, it could have been much worse.The biggest loss was a $465 bowl by Susan Glass, Stone said. Several large vases fell to the floor but did not break, and pieces in the glass fronted cabinets, including paperweights and small birds, fell over but also survived. The front window vibrated, Stone said. I dashed out to the street as soon as it hit. There was extreme rolling, and the sidewalk rolled too.Stone has been through several earthquakes, she said, including the Alaska quake in 1964. In fact her father, Capt. Merrill Stuart, was one of the heroes in that disaster, and is profiled in the book, On Shaky Ground.Stone has one of the many stories about the earthquake precognition among animals. My dog Sidney was in his kennel in the car, where he is always calm, she said. About 20 minutes before the earthquake, Sidney started acting up, barking and moving around.Kenon and Don Simmons of Simmons Glass in Langley traveled to several businesses where windows had cracked or broken, including The South Whidbey Record. They reported only minor damage.We were spared this time, Kenon Simmons said.Those standing near South Whidbey’s largest private employer, Nichols Brothers Boat Builders in Freeland, heard whoops and hollers emanating from the yard as the workers rode out the quake like cowboys.Everyone has a personal story to tell about the quake experience, but no one was in a more unique position than Useless Bay resident Clyde Whitey Martin.Martin was at Whidbey General Hospital undergoing some tests, and had just been inserted into the coffin-like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine when the earthquake hit. This thing is rotten, Martin remembered thinking when the machine started shaking. Technicians pulled him from the machine until the quake subsided. Then I had to go back and do it again, Martin said.By Thursday, most of South Whidbey was back to normal, but still remembering vividly the details of the 30 seconds on Wednesday morning. An unexpected victim of the quake was the Whidbey Island Writers Conference, set to open Friday morning at 8 a.m. Authors, editors, agents and publishers were to arrive on Thursday, and while many of them did, others were still waiting in airports from Oklahoma to Dalles for flights to resume to SeaTac, closed for a time after the windows of the flight control tower blew out during the earthquake. Everyone was expected to arrive by Friday.We thought we’d considered every ‘worst case scenario,’ said conference director Celeste Mergens at Thursday night’s reception for presenters. But on Wednesday, I thought, ‘It can’t get any worse than this.’But, Mergens said, there had been no presenter or participant cancellations due to the quake. In fact, one publisher, Dianne Moggy of Harlequin Books, said her flight to Seattle was one of the very few she’d ever traveled that had been on time. Perhaps the secret, she said, was to fly only into earthquake zones. “