I Feel The Earth Move

The Loma Prieta EarthquakeIt’s earthquake season here in California. 

Actually earthquakes happen all through the year, but every October we mark the anniversary of our last big quake, Oct. 17, 1989.  At 5:02 PM the ground shook, buildings swayed and collapsed, people died. The Loma Prieta earthquake, 6.9 on the Richter Scale, killed 63 people in Northern California and destroyed hundreds of buildings, bridges and roads. 

For the next few weeks we’ll have many anniversary news stories and photos. (We get another round in April, anniversary of the 1906 quake, but only a couple people who were babies then and are now over 100 take part in those annual commemorations.)   We ask one other, “Where were you on that October afternoon?  Are you prepared for the next one?”  We store back up water and flashlights in the house and car.  We bolt major appliances to the wall so they don’t “walk” and fall and kill. Entrepreneurs try to sell earthquake insurance.  But can one ever be really ready?

Scientists warn the next one will be really, really big, 9.0 or more. (Each added digit on the Richter scale is exponential; the 7.9 1906 quake was 10 times more powerful than the 6.9 Loma Prieta one.)

The Loma Prieta EarthquakePeople often tell me, when I travel, that they would never want to live in California because of the earthquakes, how scary and dangerous they are. I sort of scoff at that attitude.  I say something about every place having its natural disasters - I’d take earthquakes over tornados or hurricanes any day – we hardly every get those events.

But I wonder - are people formed by their local landscape and natural disasters? Are Californians different from Kansans because the earth moves under our feet and we run to stand in door jambs, while they, like Auntie Em, hide in storm cellars so they won’t get blown away to Oz? And the landscapes; do the flat hot Midwest plains form personalities that are different than those of us who live near a wild and vast ocean? Do landscape and natural disasters explain something of our regional differences?

I think Californians are a people on the edge and on the move.

We are on the far western edge of our continent.  Our local Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers began his poem “Continent’s End:”

     At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain,
             wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring,

     The ocean swelled for a far storm and beat its boundary, the
             ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

     I gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the established
             sea-marks, felt behind me

     Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent,
             before me the mass and doubled stretch of water…..

The Loma Prieta EarthquakeMost of our nation tends to look east. Californians and Kansans both look to New York and Washington DC for government, news, entertainment, and from there to Europe as the source of our heritage.  Ellis Island in New York Harbor is the gate through which most immigrants came. But when I moved to California from New York I learned a whole different US history story, how the Spanish sailed up the California coast from Mexico and landed in Monterey in 1603, years before Plymouth Rock or Jamestown.  How bold Chinese sailed across the Pacific in small wooden junks in the 1840’s. Later came Japanese immigrants, and in the 20^th century Vietnamese, Filipino, Samoan, all kinds of immigrants from the west, came across the Pacific and through the Angel Island immigration gate in San Francisco Harbor. We take Asia as seriously as Europe.

The Loma Prieta EarthquakeOur western edge is also the vast and deep Pacific Ocean. Here, unlike the Atlantic, we have the ocean phenomenon called upwelling.  Only in five places in the world, where also are the most productive fishing industries, on west coasts, does cold nutrient-rich water, come from the deep to the surface. A vast deep sea current system, water that travels around all the world’s oceans and stays down there for centuries, meets this west coast, in the spring and summer, this water from far away and long ago, and it upwells.  And up comes food for whales and squid and sea stars and kelp and all of us. It is a rich, diverse, productive edge.

This deep sea current also brings our famous fog, and in the years when the upwelling doesn’t happen, we call it an El Nino year.  Instead of all that food from the deep, we get the warm currents from the southern hemisphere, around Christmas time, the Christ-child “El Nino” (Little Boy) and long wet winters of torrential rain and wind. Love California, it’s cold and it’s damp.

So being an “edgy” people helps us Californians be a bit more open to diversity than those Easterners, I think, to welcome new and different surprises from the west and from the deep. Some years ago I edited a collection of poems written by a wide variety of folks inspired by a local state park, Point Lobos, and I called the collection, “Dancing on the Brink of the World,” which is a line from a song of the native folks of this region, the Ohlone.  I like that word brink.  I could picture those ancient ones, dancing on this edge, this brink, between land and sea, field and granite, east and west, safety and danger.

“Brink” also describes how we perch on a network of the north-south earthquake faults that striate our state, shaking all the time.

So we people on the edge are also a people on the move, especially those of us along the coast, west of the large and deep San Andreas earthquake fault. We are literally separate from the rest of the state, because we live on the Pacific Plate of the earth’s crust.  That plate moves in a completely different direction, slowly northwest, at about the same rate as our fingernails grow each year. Last year we were two inches farther south than we are now.  The rest of the state is slowly moving south east. From that scraping and sliding fault come the earthquakes.

But no matter where we live, we Californians are all accustomed to earthquakes, a little instability underground.  We know that things do not always remain the same, static.  I think that makes us more open to the new.

Now of course there are edgy folks on the move in Kansas. And New York.  We have lots of hubris here in the Golden State that we are the only ones on the move. And we are stupid enough to keep building gas lines and houses and hospitals directly on top of our hundreds of earthquake faults.  Are we really ready for that big one?

But I’d still rather ride out a quake above ground than hide from a tornado in the cellar. 

Copyright © 2012 Deborah Streeter

Comments

[Maren Hansen]

I love this essay about earthquakes and California. It is beautifully written, weaving history, geology, oceanography, poetry, and musings on the soul of Californians.