Orientation: And Other Stories

Shakers

They are called P-waves. They are the primary waves, the first and the fastest, moving at up to six miles per second, near top speed through the fold and furl of basalt layer and slowing when they hit the granite massifs, the slabs of continent borne upon magmatic flows inside the earth’s crust. P-waves are sound waves that move through solid rock and compress and dilate the solid rock they move through, coming at you peristaltic and slinky-like, radiating upward and outward from the seismic event. S-waves follow four to twelve seconds later, depending on where you are from the epicenter. L-waves follow soon after. These last are the slowpokes, the long-period surface waves that arrive like laggards in the seismic sequence, languid and weary, but powerful enough to do all the damage you will read and hear about when it is all over. But the P-waves come first.

When they hit, rats and snakes hightail it out of their burrows. Ants break single-file ranks and scatter blind, and flies roil off garbage bins in shimmering clouds. On the Point Reyes Peninsula, milk cows bust out of feed sheds and bolt for open pasture. Inside aquariums in dentist offices and Chinese restaurants and third-grade classrooms, fish huddle in the corners of their tanks, still as photos of huddled fish. Inside houses built on the alluvial soils of the Sacramento Delta, cockroaches swarm from behind walls, pouring like cornflakes out of kitchen cabinetry and rising in tides from beneath sinks and tubs and shower stalls. Crows go mute. Squirrels play possum. Cats awaken from naps. Dogs guilty of nothing peer guiltily at their masters. Pigeons and starlings clatter fretfully on the eaves and cornices of buildings, then rise en masse and wheel away in spectacular roller-coaster swoops. Pet-shop parakeets attempt the same maneuver in their cages. In the San Francisco Zoo, every single Adélie penguin dives and swims around and around their Plexiglas grotto, seeking the safety of what they believe to be open ocean. Big cats stop pacing, tortoises drop and tuck, elephants get antsy as pee-prone toddlers. The chimps on Monkey Island go ape-shit. Horses everywhere go mulish and nippy. Implacable cattle get skittish as deer. And a lone jogger on a fire trail on Mount Diablo gets lucky, for the starving cougar stalking her gets spooked by the subsonic pulse that rolls under its paw pads, and breaks off the hunt and heads for the hills, bounding silent and unseen up a hidden defile and leaving behind only a shudder of knotweed grass burnished amber by the waning light of an Indian summer dusk.

Subsonic pulses register in measuring devices throughout the state — in boreholes surrounding sag ponds in Big Pines and Lost Lake; in austere concrete vaults strung along abandoned railway through Donner Pass and on the peripheries of rest stops along Highway 99 through the San Joaquin Valley; and inside an array of seemingly derelict, rust-pocked, and listing corrugated-steel shacks smack in the middle of nowhere. Subsonic pulses register in instruments in firehouses, transformer substations, and the watershed property surrounding every dam in the state. In university labs and USGS offices, ink styli twitch against seismograph drums, unnoticed for now. In field stations, in Latrobe and Bear Valley and Mercey Hot Springs, the pulses are registering inside wideband seismometers, flat steel cylinders painted green and bolted onto bedrock outcrops, squat and solid as toads. In Colusa, in Cloverdale and Coalinga and Arbuckle, pulses are registering inside sleek steel-cased tubes stashed down sixty-meter boreholes. Pulses are registering in tubular, yam-size instruments embedded in grabens and scarps and streambeds in fault zones everywhere. The devices are called geophones, and their urethane casings are pumpkin orange, and there are hundreds of them pimpling vistas everywhere, from Cape Mendocino and across the geologic fretworks of the Carrizo Plain and down to the crusted shorelines of the Salton Sea, near marshes where migrating gulls think they are starfish and try to eat them.

To look at them, these field instruments — these containers embedded and tucked and stashed about — seem benign and dumb and exquisitely unperturbed. But inside them, everything is going crazy. Within precisely calibrated tolerances, tiny leaf springs recoil and pea-size bobs pendulate between capacitor plates. Feedback circuits open wide, resistors hum, and a wee electrical impulse begins a journey. Precambrian time and the making of mountains and the heat and energy that has extruded ocean floors and shoved continents apart — all is rarefied and reduced and squeezed into the gauge and extent of a titanium filament whose vibration releases a speck of data that will join the million others in a telemetric stream that, when it is all over, will tell the story of this earthquake.

Southeast of Palmdale, at a conduit box atop a phone pole along a stretch of Pearblossom Highway, a telephone lineman testing relays sways in his cherry picker. He looks down, around the perimeter of his truck thirty feet below, then at the traffic whipping past. He squints out into the desert, the horizon a laminate of browns and ochres wiggly in the heat. It is near dusk. The air is still. He listens. And there it is again, like a wave rolling under him, and his heart skips and he lets out a hoot. His life thus far, untroubled and unremarkable — in other words, a good life — has passed without a California earthquake. He hollers: Shakers, baby! Whoo-hoo! He whirls his hips, does the tiniest of hulas in his basket high off the ground. This is never smart, but especially now — the S-waves that are following the P-waves he is dancing to will resonate with the same frequency as the vibration his hula is inducing in the hydraulic lift. When frequencies match, vibrations will increase and the hydraulic lift will shudder and lurch, and both it and the truck will keel over. The cherry picker will snap in two, and our telephone lineman will ride his basket all the way down in his first earthquake, slamming into the macadam below and the traffic streaming on it. He will be the first to die.

In the landing area of a timber tract in the Headwaters Forest, two loggers are intent on the problem of unhooking a troublesome choke line, and feel nothing. But soon the forest will keen and low, and the grinding of tree roots in the unsettled earth will grow to a deafening roar, and the loggers will drop their grapples and watch with trepidation the rumbling decks of log stacked ten feet high all around them.

A slack-jawed teen playing Grand Theft Auto in the basement of a house in San Francisco’s Sunset District is too stoned to know or care whether he’s winning, too stoned to remember that he’s had a frozen pizza going in the microwave oven upstairs for over an hour. Yet he feels it, up through the dune sands his neighborhood was built on and through the foundation and flooring of his mother’s house and through his sneakers and up deep and weird into the lengths of his shinbones.

In houseboats and fishing sleds on Shasta Lake and in sailboats bobbing in their slips along the Sausalito marina, they feel it as a series of nonrandom thumps, as if water had somehow acquired the wherewithal to come together and knock polite but resolute on the hulls of their vessels, and sounding nothing like the slap and slosh they are used to, and being disconcerting enough to give pause — beers and forks stilled halfway to expectant mouths, quesadillas and turkey patties suspended mid-flip.

Thousands give pause, hesitate, stop short. Thousands take a moment — to weigh up and sort out, to digest and to process and to see what’s what. Hygienists stop flossing, butchers stop cleaving, priests stop absolving. Coupled lovers in their throes stop for just a second. Inside vehicles up and down the Nimitz and the Bayshore and strung along the Ventura and the Van Nuys, thousands of commuters cease their prattle and yammer and — abruptly compelled to ponder the Now — give pause, then speak the exact same phrase into their cell phones: Did you feel that?

A checkout clerk at end of shift in a grocery store in Watsonville feels it just as she nicks a carton of Lucky Strikes and tucks it into her backpack, and stands up and looks at everyone looking at each other. And when the shaking starts, she will hang on and watch awestruck as every single item on every single shelf leaps off in a slow-motion mass suicide and piles up three feet deep in the aisles. She will hear the great shattering of every window blowing out. And when the shaking stops, she will pick herself up and take that carton of cigarettes and step over debris and return it to its now empty shelf, and see that her hands and arms are covered with blood and embedded with broken window glass, and drop like a hammer in a dead faint.

Inmates in Folsom Prison’s dining hall stop eating and glare at each other as century-old mortar shakes off the ceiling and sifts down, dusting the tops of their heads like cannoli.

In Oxnard, the local earthquake prognosticator shuffles down an alley behind Taqueria Row. A forgotten and once-ascendant surf god of the ’60s — a Hurricane Nationals champ, a Duke Kahanamoku protégé—he now lives under a footbridge on the beachfront along Point Mugu, and on this day, diving dumpsters for supper, he feels — and prognosticates — nothing.

And at a vast and bustling gas station and travel center in Tracy, just off the I-205, a girl with spiky green hair climbs into a very tidy cream-colored Ford Econoline. She is nineteen but looks younger, and she is traveling light — the clothes on her back and a midsized duffel — and heading east. She tells her ride that her name is Neve, and her ride — a compact, neatly dressed man in his forties who looks older — tells her he’s meeting his wife and kids in Yosemite Village. He backs the van out of its space, and as he shifts into first, his palm slips on the gear knob and he pops the clutch and kills the engine, so flustered and thrilled is he to have gotten this girl, this Neve. And before he can start the engine again, before they can be on their way, the van will begin to pitch and yaw and the cars parked around them will rise and fall as if heaved by cresting seas. Neve’s ride is terrified, unable to breathe, and Neve’s hand will come from nowhere and snatch his and squeeze it hard, and his hand will squeeze hers back. And for the next thirty-seven seconds they will in this fashion watch light poles and freeway signs bow deeply to one another, and watch the parking lot pavement in front of them snap and ripple, then settle like a bedsheet. They will watch an espresso cart stagger drunk across their field of view and stagger back. They will see the treetops on hills in the distance shimmy and shake on this still and windless day. A chorus of car alarms will rise up around them. And when it is over, they will let go of each other and survey the damage — very little, as it happens — and they will both laugh crazily. The man will rub his hand and say: Wow, you’re strong! They’ll laugh some more. And then he will start up the van and ease out of the lot and onto the I-205 and take this girl where she wants to go. The radio will be on low, and they’ll listen to the damage that has occurred elsewhere. They won’t talk much; they won’t need to, because they’ve been through something together and that is enough. They will cross a reservoir and veer north, away from the water and into the foothills. She’ll stare hard at the landscape while giving him directions, as if matching what she sees with the memory of it in her head. And just before dark she’ll point to where she wants to be let off, at a busted cattle gate with the barest trace of a road behind it and nothing but arroyo and scrub all around. He’ll ask her if she’s sure and she’ll say: Yep, this is the place. She’ll get out with her duffel and thank him. We had some ride, didn’t we? she’ll say. And he’ll say: We sure did! And he’ll give her a twenty from his wallet and wish her luck and mean it. And all this he will do instead of what he was going to do to her, because of the touch of her hand, which made her human, and the fear she saw in his face that made him human like her, and that made them both the same. She will grow small and dim in his rearview mirror, and when she waves, he’ll wave back. And as he returns to the travel center in Tracy to get another girl, he’ll wonder what will become of this girl — this Neve — out here, in the middle of nowhere.

The middle of nowhere. In Death Valley, a string of ultra-marathoners on mile sixty-five of a hundred-mile course weaves along sticky blacktop road in 115-degree heat, sucking hard at unyielding air and trailed by ESPN news crews in satellite vans. Miles from nowhere in Sierra Nevada high country, on a mudflat of lake bed sun-baked hard and gray as pavement, hundreds camp out for a motocross rally. Somewhere along a desolate stretch of sea cliff due west of the Coast Highway, through cypress and thickets of scrub oak, then over the edge and seventy-five feet straight down and under cold black water, divers feel along cleft and crag with numbed fingers, poaching abalone. Deep inside the old-growth woods of Plumas or Lassen or Kings Canyon — regions so remote that rangers have yet to map or break trail therein — pot farmers dangle fishhooks at eye level around their crops, and a meth cooker crazy from isolation and from paint thinner and acetone fumes sets punji stakes inside pits dug around his makeshift lab. On a map, the roads end in the Granite Mountains north of the Mojave. Dotted lines, then white space — nothing. But in the Granite Mountains, air force personnel in air-conditioned Nissen huts play foosball, microwave corn dogs, and watch Oprah on TV. In terrains unreachable by road or trail, mountain bikers whoop and tear up and down the broken, rain-rutted slopes of hidden gullies, and hang gliders pitch off bluffs, wheeling high above tiny golden fans of virgin beach and an ocean inflamed by the sun dropping into it. In the middle of nowhere, phone company technicians rappel down slopes and hack through Douglas fir and sugar pine to erect cell towers disguised as Douglas fir and sugar pine. And in Joshua Tree National Park, a day hiker off trail in the Pinto Mountains lies at the bottom of a ravine with a broken left ankle and a mangled right knee. He lies prone and still to avoid the grinding pain when he moves either leg. His water bottle is empty. His cell phone is gone, lost on the craggy slopes above him — his cigarettes are somewhere up there, too, and his sunglasses — and he has no warm clothing for the cold desert night coming on. He is hoarse and thirsty, and feeling humbled and stupid, and wondering whether he really could die out here, just three miles from his car parked in the lot of a gift shop that sells trail maps and nature guides and bottled water and sunglasses and tote bags and key chains and postcards — HOTTER’N HELL IN JOSHUA TREE! WISH YOU WERE HERE!

It is like this here: Get off the interstate, get anywhere off of it and drive away, onto State Route 16 to Gold Country, or Route 36 into Trinity Wilderness, or 178 toward the Piutes. Find a smaller road and take it, then a smaller road, and take that — the one that squiggles like a heartbeat’s trace along a skinny ridge; the one that winds through an endless wold of identical hummocks; the road cut that is barely road or cut, cinched tight across the midsection of sheer mountain wall; or the straightaway that shoots into the empty flats below you and fades into the distant haze, becoming more an erasure of a road than a road itself. Keep going. Go past signs with the names of towns on them that make you chuckle: Peanut and Fiddletown and Raisin City, Three Rocks and Copperopolis, Look Out and Rescue and Honeydew. Listen to the static on your radio, which picks up nothing here in the middle of nowhere. Marvel at how fucking big this state is. Allow yourself to be seduced by notions of vastness and desolation. Do this, and a pickup truck crammed with paint cans and ladders, or bundles of steel pipe or a dining-room set, will rise up and loom in your mirrors and rattle past you like the clamorous armies of Death himself, late for the Apocalypse. Do this, and in the middle of boundless farmland devoid of human landmark to all horizons, you will come across a sprinkler going. On the shoulders of derelict roads you will see mailboxes huddled like abandoned old men, weathered and stooped, and among them, today’s paper inside a bright blue tube. Around a curve that brings into view an unbroken panorama of brown mesas and buttes, you will see graffiti, bold and crass, painted high on a rock face: baroque gang tags or cryptic acronyms, or GO TITANS! or I LOVE YOU VANESSA! Chained to a lone dead tree you will see a lidless rust-chancred garbage can — forsaken, forlorn, God’s Last Garbage Can — filled with fresh, logoed trash from Taco Bell and Hardee’s. At sunset, the spectacular scenery that you’ve begun to ignore will recede into shadows, into night, until you are hurtling through a tube of darkness. In the wedge of your headlights the road sweeps under you, and there is only the ember glow of the dashboard, and the thump and thrum of the tires, and the static on the radio turned low and hissing steady like a whisper of distant rain. And just when you succumb once again to the romance of solitude, you see lights up ahead. You tap your brakes, and this is what glides past you — a neat little cottage with a fence and a lawn, the porch light a fever of beetles and moths; in the windows, the water of light from a TV; from the chimney, a steady white finger of smoke; and in the gravel driveway, a freshly washed car, beaded and gleaming. And then it is gone, sailing into the night, and for a moment you’re not sure you saw what you saw. But there it is, glimmering small and bright in your rearview mirror for a long time, until it finally drops into a dip of road behind you. And you realize you couldn’t get lost here if you tried. And you’ve tried. The middle of nowhere is always somewhere for somebody.

Down a densely wooded gorge in the Siskiyou Mountains, the bones of a hiker lie scattered in the underbrush, long picked clean by coyotes and crows and grown brown and mossy in the cool dirt. Inside the mud at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, hundreds of commuters rustle and sway on trains rattling through the Transbay Tube. In a ninth-floor dorm room on the UCLA campus, two students who’ve just tearfully broken up have breakup sex on a futon in the corner. One room over, a young woman gingerly presses her entire body against the wall to listen, rapt as an acolyte apprehending the mystery of the divine. And four floors down, an unfinished letter to Mom sits atop the rubble of a desk. Its last line is: I hate it here. And its author is cross-legged on the floor, tearing the pages from hundred-dollar engineering textbooks and gazing as if sun blind into a floodlit vision of disappointment and ruin.

In an efficiency studio high up a tower block in Bakersfield, or in an upscale-ish condo on the fringes of a dicey neighborhood in Inglewood, or in an in-law unit wedged beneath a house that clings to the Oakland Hills, or in a loft or duplex or railroad flat in Rio Linda or Citrus Heights or Gilroy, you are watching TV.

You are sitting in a leather club chair in the middle of an otherwise spare room. You are home early from the office, having feigned a headache worse than the one you really do have. You are drinking a beer, watching the local news anchor read. Her name is Wendy Something, and you have a crush on her. You moved here only months ago — from Cedar Falls, from Monroe or Meridian, from Canton, Grand Forks, Eau Claire — and you have yet to make friends. The weekly drink with coworkers has drifted into a less occasional gathering, then none at all, as you’ve gradually discovered you have little in common, and you get along well at work anyway, so why even bother? People are hard to get to know out here, inside their bubbles, with their benign, almost tender indifference toward you and their studious gestures of intimacy — the banter that is devoid of subtext and the How-are-you! that is never a question and the See-you-later! that simply signals the end of conversation. It has been lonely. You come home in the evenings and eat a take-out burrito over the kitchen sink and stroll through your half-furnished rooms, with books in alphabetized stacks on the floor and unpacked boxes as end tables and nothing on the walls. You have pondered this metaphor for an unfinished life — or better, the beginning of a new one — and you remind yourself why you moved here, why everyone moves here. And you may be lonely like this forever, but out here at least it feels transitory — a step on a journey, a blip on a timeline, and all that.

Joists groan overhead. A window frame stutters in its casement and is shot open. A kitchen chair is scraped across a floor. Movement above you. The sound of other people.

The sun will set within the hour. It is a time of day you love, between the room growing dark and you turning the lights on.

They crow about their light out here. In the early twentieth century, artists came in droves to paint in California light, adjusting color schemes and developing a choppy brushstroke and applying the paint quickly so as to capture on canvas the fleeting quality of the light — the “temporal fragment,” the “instantaneous view.” Out here they go on about how the light chisels, how it polishes and defines the edges of whatever it falls upon and imparts a dazzling clarity. They go on about how the light comes down around you in curtains or how it pours and spills like honey. It gleams and glints, it sparks and flares. The light has weight, it has density, it is palpable. Sometimes you can even hear it, zinging metallic and bright! What crap. When they aren’t steeped in the clichéd golden hues of a shampoo commercial, the skies most days are an insipid palette of white and bluish white and yellowish white. Every vista is dull and bleary, a sun-bleached smudge in the distance. And nothing is chiseled. Everything you look at is foreshortened, flat and common as a souvenir poster. Although there can be days — those mornings of unseasonable fog when the sunlight is filtered through a fragile veil of cloud that renders the air itself luminous as milk; or the clear, cloudless afternoon when you’re walking under a canopy of trees or through the lobby of a building downtown, and just before moving out of the shade, you take off your sunglasses and stand there a moment and anticipate entering the world of sunlight.

You take a swig of beer. You catch the whiff of a cigarette — the woman above you, smoking out of her window. You’ve said hello to her. She’s said hello back.

On the TV, something is up with Wendy Something. She stops mid-sentence and looks off camera. You feel a bump beneath you, then another. The ceiling joists begin to groan loud and steady, and all your windows are rattling like maracas. Wendy is hanging on to her bucking desk, that on-air equanimity of hers that you love pretty much gone. She is looking right at you, and then the screen goes to snow and the TV tips over. There is a pounding like the fists of giants against the building you live in. There is a muffled cry from the woman above you, and you finally apprehend what is happening. You take a breath, chug your beer, toss the empty bottle over your shoulder. You hang on tight to your fat, heavy chocolate leather chair — your gift to yourself for finally making the move out here. You hang on and you think: The shaking will either stop or keep going. Life is lived from moment to moment.

On a grassy knoll overlooking an ocean view in Pacific Grove, two lovers on a blanket sip wine from plastic cups, reveling in a silence between them that goes on and on. A rice farmer, shin-high in flooded fields, stops brooding over weed infestation and a late harvest to watch the sunlight shatter and re-shatter on the surface of the waters. A tiny old woman seated on a crowded bus barreling along an express lane peels a tangerine with the gravity and precision of bomb disposal. A grill cook on break from a hellish workday lolls on a bed of flattened boxes in an alley, and with absolutely nothing on his mind — hellish day gone! — watches a queue of mare-tailed clouds file across a slot of sky high above him.

A Riverside County sheriff loops through the parking lot of the Oasis Visitor Center in Joshua Tree National Park. The center is closed, and the lot is empty except for a silver Honda hatchback. His last stop before going off shift, the sheriff idles in the middle of the lot inside his beautiful new-issue Chevy Tahoe. The sun moves behind a row of fan palms, their long shadows reaching for him. It is windless and still. He lingers in this anticipatory moment, then punches the gas and cranks the wheel and hangs on, going around and around, reduced to breathlessness and gooseflesh from the thunder of 240 horses in his bones and the delicious centrifugal tug on his innards and the darkling hills and mustard skies of a desert dusk streaking and smearing all tilt-a-whirl around his head.

Three miles to the southeast, the owner of a forgotten Honda hatchback lies at the bottom of a ravine. He is very thirsty. His skin is sunburn pink. A line of shadow slices his body in two, and in the shaded half it’s cold already. His ankle swells inside a boot he can’t reach to untie and take off, and his right knee is big as a cantaloupe and awful to look at. Plus there’s something wrong with his elbow; he can’t move his arm. All in all, a shitty day. And then the earth begins to move. The rock debris in the talus he is lying in shimmies and shudders and shoves him around. Scree chatters down the slopes of the ravine. He is pelted with stones and submerged in a cloud of desert dust. The quake subsides, the cloud settles. His eyes are cut and raw from grit, and his mouth is filled with sand. He hacks and coughs, igniting his legs with pain, and his heaving soon gives way to sobs. He is desolate and alone. He is so dehydrated that tears do not come.

And hours from now, after the sun has gone down, when he is shivering from the cold, when the cold is all he can think about, something remarkable will happen. A diamondback rattlesnake will home in on his heat trace and unwind itself from the mesh of a creosote bush and drop to the ground and seek the warmth of his body against the chill evening, slicing through the sand and sweeping imperiously between his legs and turning into itself until coiled tight against his groin and draped along his belly with the offhand intimacy of a lover’s arm. He will watch its dumpling-size head in repose on his sternum go up and down with his breathing, its eyes open and indifferent and exquisitely wrought — tiny bronzed beads stippled black and verdigris. And his breaths will soon come slow and steady, and his despair will give way to something wholly unexpected. He is eyeball to eyeball with a rattlesnake in the powdery moonglow of the Mojave Desert. He can hear birds calling back and forth — birdsong! — in the middle of nowhere. He can look up at a night sky that is like gaping into a chasm boiling with stars, as if the celestial spigots were opened wide and jammed, and he can remember nothing of the life he’s lived up to now. And he will shake, not from cold nor fear, nor from any movements of the earth, but from some vague and elemental conviction about wholeness or harmony or immortality. He will shake, resolute in a belief in the exaltation of this moment, yet careful not to disturb the lethal snake on his chest. How cool is this! he will think. Wish you were here! he will think.