music: Bob Dylan- Blood on the Tracks
What can you depend on absolutely? What in this world is so rock solid that you’d never give it a second thought and always count on it being there? Quite literally, I suppose that rock ranks pretty highly on this scale. Not the music (although that has always been there for me as well) but the geologic substance. The stuff underneath our feet. The stuff upon which our homes are built. The stuff that makes the dinosaurs look like wet-behind-the-ears newcomers to creation. For my entire life I have taken the earth beneath my feet completely for granted, assuming that it would be strong enough to support whatever weight i might pile on top of it. All that was thrown into question for the first time last friday, around 4:40 AM. I was shaken awake - again quite literally - by an earthquake.
I’d felt minor tremors since moving out here, but they were mostly weaker than the sensation you might get from standing next to the highway as tanker trucks fly past. I also remember thinking as a kid how ludicrous it was to build and enormous city right on a major fault line. (I’m still not completely over the apparent oversight, but now that I live in the Bay AreaI can understand why people would want to put a city here.) This one was worthy of some attention, a 4.2 on the infamous Richter scale, and centered somewhere in the Oakland hills. Nothing like Japan’s quake of last week, but enough to wake me up and completely freak me out. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds start to finish, and all my books are still right where I left them on the shelf, but it was enough to make me reconsider my relationship with the earth below.
We humans take a lot for granted. It’s a mental adaptation, I think: were we to consider and reconsider every single variable we might encounter during the course of a day we’d be paralyzed, unable to properly weigh the relative risks and rewards of certain actions and interactions to the point where we do nothing at all. through some incomprehensible calculation, the human brain has determined it a very safe bet to assume that the ground isn’t going anywhere. This allows us to walk upon it, dig holes into it, move piles of it from one place to another, build things upon it, get on with our lives. But assuming something to be a very safe bet isn’t any sort of guarantee that it is 100% dependable. And out here, near the San Andreas and Hayward faults, “very safe bet” looks something like a major rattler every 25 years or so. The last one, baseball fans will remember, was in 1989, which means we’re overdue. Suddenly our assumptions about this essential consideration shift. I’m beginning to pick this up. What do I know of it? I’ve been living in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts for my entire life.
I was not overly concerned for my safety, but the earthquake freaked me out. Like being caught in a mountain lightning storm, coming face-to-face with a bear, taking a small boat over serious whitewater, feeling the sting of a -40 degree winter wind, or being sucked under by a Pacific wave, an earthquake reminds you that nature does not carry one speck of concern for my individual well-being, and that I need to be incredibly respectful of its power. The earth is a dynamic entity, slowly shifting and morphing. Continents move, given enough time. Sometimes the earth feels the need to high-five itself. Sometimes the earth belches out its insides. Sometimes the earth needs to readjust its crust a little too quickly for human comfort. But the earthquake also made me reconsider my operating premises. What do I take for granted? What do I assume that maybe I shouldn’t? What am I prepared to deal with? How will I act when taken completely off guard? And what, when it hits, will shake me wide awake?
Posted by davidtaus at July 24, 2007 02:20 AM | TrackBack