Strangers in Hollywood
During one of the weeks I spent this summer in Los Angeles, there was a cluster of small earthquakes, the most noticeable of which, on the Garlock Fault, a major lateral-slip fracture that intersects the San Andreas in the Tehachapi range north of Los Angeles, occurred at six minutes after four on a Friday afternoon when I happened to be driving in Wilshire Boulevard from the beach. People brought up to believe that the phrase “terra firma” has real meaning often find it hard to understand the apparent equanimity with which earthquakes are accommodated in California, and tend to write it off as regional spaciness. It is in fact less equanimity than protective detachment, the useful adjustment commonly made in circumstances so unthinkable that psychic survival precludes preparation. I know very few people in California who actually set aside, as instructed, a week’s supply of water and food. I know fewer still who could actually lay hands on the wrench required to turn off, as instructed, the main gas valve; the scenario in which this wrench will be needed is a catastrophe, and something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for catastrophe. I once, in the late sixties, interviewed someone who did prepare: a Pentecostal minister, who had received a kind of heavenly earthquake advisory, and, on its quite specific instructions, was moving his congregation from Port Hueneme, north of Los Angeles, to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A few months later, when a small earthquake was felt not in Port Hueneme but in Murfreesboro, an event so novel that it was reported nationally, I was, I recall, mildly gratified.
A certain fatalism comes into play. When the ground starts moving, all bets are off. Quantification, which in this case takes the form of guessing where the movement at hand will rank on the Richter scale, remains a favored way of regaining the illusion of personal control, and people still crouched in the nearest doorframe will reach for a telephone and try to call Caltech, in Pasadena, for a Richter reading. “Rock and roll,” the d.j. said on my car radio that Friday afternoon at six minutes after four. “This console is definitely shaking. . . . No word from Pasadena yet, is there?”
