TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/103089/10308900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 100

When the Earth Cracks Open


By Lance Morrow


    In the spring of 1872, the naturalist John Muir was asleep
in a small cabin in the Yosemite Valley. "At half past two
o'clock," he wrote later, "I was awakened by a tremendous
earthquake . . . the strange thrilling motion could not be
mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened,
shouting, `A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake!' feeling sure
I was going to learn something."

    It would be delightful to think that he actually uttered
those words, looking for sermons in the shaking stones. In any
case, Muir was alone in the moonlit mountains, and so he could
indulge his charming 19th century awe. When the earth turned in
its sleep, it crushed much landscape in the folds, but somehow
the event could keep its innocence. When nature does something
awful, after all, is it part of the electrical display of God
the Father, or merely geography rearranging itself, obeying an
impersonal agenda?

    When the earth cracks open to dismantle a city, then
metaphysical questions come boiling up. What would Muir learn?
What does the cataclysm have to teach? That the earth retains
its genius for the wild surprise? Or that some profound
principle of disorder and annihilating wrath has been set loose
in the world?

    Of all natural disasters, the earthquake somehow is the
most unnerving. It is the earth talking, after all, and so it
speaks with a primal power. Earthquakes in Scripture mean that
God has crumpled up the order of the world and hurled it down
in disgust. "And the foundations of the world do shake," says
Isaiah. "The earth is utterly broken down." Or, agnostically,
earthquakes are a wandering, enigmatic fierceness, now and then
breaching the surface like Moby Dick.

    An earthquake rides on a principle of disintegration -- the
disintegration not only of architecture and pavements and lives
but also of the entire idea of order, of process and human
control. "What can one believe quite safe," asked Seneca, "if
the world itself is shaken, and its most solid parts totter to
their fall . . . and the earth lose its chief characteristic,
stability?" The familiar world goes rioting down to rubble.
Reality comes to rest at a crazy angle.

    The terror lies first in the surprise. An earthquake is
hidden from one moment to the next, as the future is hidden, as
God is hidden. The event does not announce itself as most other
disasters do, as a hurricane does, or a flood, or even an
erupting volcano, which is after all hard to miss as dangerous
geography. A plague too arrives more slowly. That is no
consolation, but at least the mind and nerves are prepared. The
event proceeds in a logical continuum of developing bad news.

    An earthquake is simply an unannounced convulsion. It is
nature performing a Shakespearean tragedy that begins absurdly
in the fifth act: after 15 seconds, Hamlet and the others lie
dying, the stage is covered with blood and debris. For many
years one may have lived on top of the San Andreas fault and
made doomy jokes about it; it is like having a violent beast in
the basement, knowing that one day it may burst up through the
living-room floor. But there is no preparation for the moment.
Only certain animals feel premonitory vibrations undetectable
to humans. They grow skittish. Horses glare with a wild panicked
eye.

    Sometimes storms, even hurricanes, can be exhilarating. It
is fun to stand on a beach during a histrionic blow. An
earthquake is not that kind of thrill. The worst part may be the
feeling of helplessness. There is no right thing to do just
then, except perhaps to flee the building. There is no knowing
where the earth will open next. The wild cracking follows no
principle but the terrifyingly random. Denial ("this is not
happening") competes with fascination.

    A major earthquake lays waste the human sense of scale.
When reporters write about earthquakes, they invariably say that
cars and other large objects were "tossed around like toys."
Architecture collapses upon itself. The human idea of
proportion is outraged in the rifting and shearing.

    So certainties vanish. The earth liquefies. It becomes as
wild as surf. The solid is abruptly fluid. Normally, earth is
the refuge, the stability, the foundation of things. The earth
should be alive only to grow vegetables and flowers. Now the
earth itself becomes a beast, all teeth and gashes and sudden
topplings. Reality has turned molten and violent.

    Sometimes when the earth cracks open, it produces good
stories. In March 1933, Albert Einstein was visiting the Long
Beach campus of the University of California. He and his host
from the department of geology walked through the campus,
intently discussing the motions of earthquakes. Suddenly they
looked up in puzzlement to see people running out of campus
buildings. Einstein and the other scientist had been so busy
discussing seismology that they did not notice the earthquake
occurring under their feet.

    There may be something perversely cathartic about
earthquakes. For some time mankind has been in the business of
manufacturing its own disasters -- wars, acid rain and other
pollutions, drugs, a globe aswarm with refugees. Perhaps it is
a relief for a moment to be face to face with a disaster that
man did not invent, a cataclysm that has at least a sort of
innocence of origin in larger powers.

    The survivors will proceed like Odysseus and his men, after
one of their escapes: "And so we sailed on, aching in our hearts
for the companions that we lost, but glad to be alive."