For most readers, earthquakes are an utterly insignificant part of My Father’s People, residing miles below the surface of the work. I, however, have just written a book about earthquakes, which (for me, anyway) makes seismicity a driving force. For the last five years, I've spent much of my time reading official reports from the United States Geological Survey, and other, less official, reports from hobbyists like Rubin's father, full of theories and predictions, some of which confound me when they actually pan out. I've stared at pictures, evidence of seismic wreckage, details, descriptions, anecdotes, clues. On the wall before me is a photograph, taken from the space shuttle Endeavour, of the seam of the San Andreas Fault as it runs along the San Gabriel Mountains near Palmdale. Next to it hangs a color-coded shake map of the Northridge earthquake, which divides Los Angeles into a hundred different seismic zones. You might say I'm obsessed, but I don't think so; it's just that I see earthquakes everywhere. There are books — around the same time as I picked up My Father's People, someone sent me Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, a collection of stories inspired by the 1995 Kobe, Japan temblor — and endless items in the newspaper; there are insurance come-ons and TV ads. At least once a week, the Discovery Channel features some earthquake documentary or another: "Acts of God," the promo screams, as I settle in to stare at crumbled buildings and broken roads. Although I've seen it all a million times already, I can't seem to turn away. I'd like to tell you that my fascination with seismicity developed when I took up residence in California, but the truth is that I've always been like this. In 1989, two years before I moved from New York to Los Angeles, I spent three straight days staring at TV coverage from San Francisco of the Loma Prieta earthquake, a quake that collapsed bridges and highway overpasses and wiped out large chunks of the Marina District, yet may be most remarkable for not having been the Big One everyone in California dreads. Certainly, part of my interest stemmed from the fact that I had friends in San Francisco, friends I couldn't reach, no matter how often I dialed their numbers; each time the news flashed an aerial shot of the city, I'd search the grainy image for their neighborhoods, as if this might tell me they were okay. More to the point, Loma Prieta fulfilled a deeply held anticipation, a low-grade buzzing in the back of my brain. Six months before the earthquake, I'd been visiting the Bay Area, when one evening, heading back from Berkeley across the Bay Bridge, I caught a glimpse of downtown San Francisco as I had never seen it before. It wasn't that the view was different — the Transamerica Pyramid and the Embarcadero Center glittering with yellow light against the water — just my sense of what I was observing; for the first time, I became aware of the city as a veneer, a fantasy in three dimensions, an elaborate illusion that would one day disappear. Years later, looking at a picture of San Francisco taken five weeks after the 1906 earthquake, I saw the underlying reality I had, that night, imagined: a decimated landscape, block upon block with nothing standing, only the merest spine of buildings rising along what was left of Market Street to let us know that there had ever been a city here at all. Somewhere between that century-old photo and the gleaming image of a living city is the territory we all inhabit in California, even if we don't admit it to ourselves. Certainly, that's where I reside, in the middle ground separating apprehension from disaster, and disaster from its aftermath. This is why I see earthquakes everywhere — because they are everywhere, in every locus of our lives. When I drive my kids to school, I pass beneath the overpass of the 10 that collapsed in the Northridge earthquake; each morning, I wonder how I'll be able to retrieve them if another temblor shakes that structure loose again. When I leave my car in a multilevel parking structure, I recall how poorly such constructions fared during the disaster, floors pancaking like discarded dominoes. When I teach or go to the movies, I always mark the exits, and when I ride the L.A. subway, as I often do with my son, Noah … well, when I ride the subway, mostly I just sit and pray. None of this, I'd argue, has diminished me — no, I believe that living with disaster enlarges us, by heightening our sensitivity to every moment, which, in turn, roots us more fully to ourselves. That sensitivity often manifests as a double vision, an awareness both of what is and what will be. I arrived in Los Angeles nearly three years before Northridge, and for much of that time, I fixated on the potential for disaster. After the quake, though, fixation yielded to exhilaration, to the feeling of having had my senses rearranged. I'd never taken my life less for granted, never been so grateful for the satisfaction of my heartbeat, for having been left whole, unharmed. These may seem like small consolations, but they are, I think, the most important consolations that we have. In the late 1990s, when I began to write about seismicity, I used to say that either I would learn enough about earthquakes to feel comfortable with them, or I'd learn too much and have to run away. The truth, of course, is far more complicated, a truth that, in many ways, occupies its own middle ground. Earthquakes, after all, are elusive — we don't know when they're coming, or how much damage they'll bring, which means they exist as a set of open-ended questions in our lives. Yet earthquakes are inevitable also, the most concrete of physical processes; we can feel them, hear them, quantify them, measure their size and devastation, observe their traces for ourselves. Once, outside Redlands, I climbed down into the San Andreas with a seismologist who had been excavating there. Seismologists often dig trenches across faults to gather information about ancient earthquakes, the evidence of which continues to linger in the ground. That day, I wasn't scared so much as thrilled to be six feet below the surface, staring at a crumbling wall of dirt and rock on which were etched rupture lines like striations in a piece of marble, each one representing a different event. Here, I was told, were markings of a quake from 1680, and over here, those of another that had struck more than five hundred years before. Such distances may be unimaginable, but to stand there made them real to me in a way I'd never known. Perhaps the best way to explain it is that, for the first time, I felt not anticipation but its opposite: a monumental stillness at the center of the world. Ultimately, that stillness is another form of illusion, a frame constructed to make sense of something that we can't contain. It's this lack of containment that attracts me to earthquakes, the way we live with them yet can't quite live with them, the way we know them and at the same time never will. One night this past September, shortly after midnight, there was a 4.6 in Yorba Linda, about forty miles from my house. I was in the living room reading, when a gentle roll and rumble made me sit up on the couch. Briefly, I felt the slightest edge of uncertainty; the earthquake didn't subside right away, as the small ones do, but seemed instead to stutter, and go on. After another couple of seconds, however, the shaking finally faded, and the boundaries of reality snapped back into place. I got up, checked on my family, opened my book again. Just another night in California, I thought, just another night in the earthquake zone.
Author photo by Noah Ulin. |
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writer: David L. Ulin is the author of
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David Ulin admits to a fascination with seismicity. Penelope Moffet shares memories of Dorland Arts Colony. Wil Wheaton feels the love at his first reading. Kat Meads finds she is a California author afterall. Dayna Dunbar on the road from screenwriting to novels. Pamela Ribon on an unexpected outpouring for Oakland libraries. Gayle Brandeis on the dreaded author photo. Mark Lee tells us what it was like to ride with the Pulpwood Queens. Aimee Liu on the renewed interest in the international novel. | ||
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