“Shit,” I said under my breath, and moved closer to the door of the Jeep.
“But?” I said aloud.
“But it just seems…I don’t know. Extraneous. Like a stage set, or a perfect architect’s model. I know people live and work here, and get married and have children and are happy and sad and die and all that, but I can’t seem to picture it. It’s a tinker-toy town.”
“Don’t let Tony Bennett hear you say that.”
“Are you kidding? That poor son of a bitch probably hates San Francisco like he does the IRS. Probably goes back-stage and throws up every time he has to sing that song.”
I laughed and he looked over at me and squeezed my hand and said, “You look nice this morning,” and we bowled off the bridge and into Martin county, my hand tingling.
“It’s probably some of the most gorgeous countryside I’ll ever see,” I said chattily, as he cut over to Highway 1 toward Muir Beach and the Golden Gate Recreational Area. “I wonder why I don’t feel about it like I do the redwoods? You’re right about the city; somehow it doesn’t have much to do with the way I feel about this part of the country. I mean, I’d love to spend some time in it, and I know I’d like a lot of the people, but somehow I just want to get back into the wild stuff.”
I knew that I was babbling. I knew that he knew it. I took a deep breath.
“T.C.,” I said, “I think you’d better kiss me one more time and get it over with so I can stop waiting to see if you’re going to do it. I’m not behaving at all like myself.”
He laughed aloud and drew me to him with one arm and kissed me long and hard, without stopping the Jeep or even swerving it. When he let me go my mouth felt warm and numb, and I could feel my whole body melt into relaxation. The silly, stilted tension went out of the morning. Another sort entirely crept in.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re very welcome,” he said. “I was going to do that, but I thought I’d wait till we were standing on firm ground, so if you slapped me I wouldn’t wreck us. If you like it I could stop now and do it some more—”
“Drive, fool,” I said. “I’m not even going to ask how you can do that at fifty miles an hour and not even swerve.”
“First thing you learn on the Delta. Whatever you’re going to do, you learn to do it in a car, because that’s where we spend half our lives. I didn’t know how to kiss a woman standing still till I got to college.”
“I can imagine it was a considerable handicap,” I said. I did not want to dwell on whom he kissed in college, or how, and so I changed the subject.
“If you’re going to show me earthquake country, shouldn’t you start in San Francisco?” I said. “Laura said there was still a lot of damage down around the marina, and where that bridge collapsed.”
“I will if you really want to see it,” he said. “But I’ve never thought that that stuff really belonged to the earthquake. I mean, it had more to do with people and where and how they build their structure than it did with anything the earthquake did. See, the Loma Prieta hit way up in the Santa Cruzes; only it happened so deep down that there’s nothing much to see up there except some sheared-off redwoods. It’s the deepest earthquake ever recorded in this part of the country. The shock waves traveled out from the epicenter and took out whatever they hit while they were still active. There are three kinds, the compressional waves that make the first big thump when the quake hits; we call them P waves because they’re the primary ones. The second one is the S wave, and it comes in a rolling, side-to-side motion; it’s the secondary wave. It’s called a shear wave, too. The last is the surface wave. It travels slower, along the surface of the earth, and it’s the largest. It finishes up what the first two don’t get. In the Loma Prieta, there wasn’t anything much in the way of human habitation, relatively speaking, until the waves got to Santa Cruz and then San Francisco. If there hadn’t been cities there, nobody much would have noticed the quake. Do you see what I mean? The quake is its own entity. It’s not San Francisco’s quake or L.A.’s. Damage in a city is arbitrary, because if there was no city there wouldn’t be the damage.…I don’t think I’m making much sense. But see, it’s like, the land under the marina is fill. It was literally filled with dirt and stuff to create usable land. Lots of the debris Loma Prieta uncovered turned out to be debris from the big one in 1906. That kind of land is porous and when the waves hit it, it acts just like gelatin. It’s like…we did that, not the quake. The city did itself in, so to speak. A quake is a wild thing, and it’s born in elemental wildness, in the crust of the very earth. What sits on that crust is us, not it. It’s not a popular point of view, as you might imagine. I’ll take you by the worst of it when we come back, if you still want to see it.”
I thought of the awful images from the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, of the fires in the night and the collapsed buildings, like folded accordions, and the terrible flattened bridge. I thought of dry land turning to rolling Jell-O, of the terror that must engender.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I want to see what a quake can do to a city. But I can see why it’s not a popular point of view. Lord, T.C., you sound like you’re in love with them—the earthquakes. Like you’re rooting for them, somehow.”
He looked briefly at me, and then back at the road and the heaving sea beside it.
“I guess I am,” he said. “I know there’s something in an earthquake that speaks to me like nothing else ever has. Maybe it’s not that I’m in love with them, exactly; it’s just that I need to know what all that is about.”
“And you don’t yet?”
“No. Not yet.”
“You weren’t in the Loma Prieta, then?”
“No, I was back home at my son’s first big-time football game. I missed the Northridge, too. I was up in the mountains when that hit. I’ve never been in one, not a big one.”
We drove in silence for a while, and then I said, “T.C.?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you camped up there waiting to be in an earth-quake?”
“Yeah. I guess that’s about it.”
“And you think that’s where the next big one will be? Even when everybody’s saying that the…what, the seismic gap there was filled by the Loma Prieta?”
“That’s what I think, Merritt.”
“Why?”
He sighed a long, soft sigh, and said, “Because I can feel it coming. I can feel a big quake waiting to happen right through the soles of my feet. I can feel it getting stronger. I felt it the first time I went up there, when I was in Berkeley that time. That quake down in that earth talks to me like a giant that’s been buried alive. I know I’m not wrong about that. What I don’t know is when. Nobody knows that, not with any precision. But I know that it isn’t going to be long.”
I felt the hair prickle along the back of my neck.
“You said you’d get us out before it happened—”
“It’s not going to be that soon. I really would know that. None of my instruments indicate that. Neither do the bottoms of my feet. I’d get you out, Merritt.”
I sat looking at the empty sea and the cliffs. I felt something bleak inside me, like grief, an old, deep, tidal pull. I realized that I had been talking to him, responding to him, as if he made perfect sense. But the clear, cool top part of my mind told me that he didn’t; that what he spoke was not science or even casual knowledge, but obsession. Maybe more than that.
“T.C., I don’t think I can bear it if you turn out to be crazy,” I said in a low voice, meaning it, and he laughed so hard that he had to slow the Jeep.
“What you need more than anything in your life is to make out with a crazy man,” he said, when he finally stopped laughing. “You have not lived until you’ve been loved by a loony. I can promise you that, should you accept the advances I am most certainly going to make before this day is over, you will never forget the experience. I will growl; I will froth; I will snuffle. I will roar. It will ruin you for suits and the Junior League for the rest of
your life.”
Once again I laughed, unwillingly but helplessly. T. C. Bridgewater simply delighted me. The laugher was healing. I did not think a truly mad man could be a funny one. If he had an earthquake madness in him, well, I was unlikely to be dis-accommodated by that. The rest of him was as whole and strong and as open as the earth and air of his mountains. That part drew me to it as if he had a powerful magnet deep in the center of him, and I a core of warm iron.
“Growling is okay,” I said. “Froth is definitely out. Snuffling—maybe. Roaring—I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”
His face grew serious in that mild, interested way that it sometimes did.
“Who is this talking?” he said.
“I don’t know her,” I said. “She just followed me out here. Should I keep her?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you should definitely do that,” he said slowly and softly, and the warm ore in my middle gave a leap.
“You’d better tell me some more about earthquakes, and be quick about it,” I said. “Why do y’all have them out here, and we don’t at home?”
“You do have them back home. There’ve been really destructive ones in Charleston and Missouri. There’s an active fault under New York City. There are faults all over the place that we don’t know about and won’t till they blow; Northridge was on a fault nobody knew was there. But California is the meeting place for two of the tectonic plates that make up the crust of the earth. There are seven major ones and some other, smaller ones. The ones that give California all the trouble are the Pacific plate, that’s mainly under the Pacific Ocean, and the North American. That one underlies the earth out here. They kind of slide past each other, with the Pacific going northwest, and the North American vice versa, and where they bump together is the San Andreas Fault. The San Andreas is a transform fault—the plates don’t destroy old material or create new. The places where the boundaries spread apart underwater and let new molten mantle rock rise are called spreading centers, and the big ocean trenches where the cold, dense oceanic plates are forced underneath the continental plates are called subduction centers. Most of the seismic activity in the world occurs within narrow areas along those plate boundaries. There’s a phenomenal amount of activity in a line that runs along the western coast of North and South America, up across the Aleutian Islands, and down through the waters off Asia. It fetches up off New Zealand. It’s called the Ring of Fire, because there’s so much earthquake and volcano activity going on. There’s nothing near to that off the East Coast. The nearest subduction center is way, way out to sea. Y’all just have to make do with hurricanes and tornadoes.”
“So there’s earthquake activity going on all the time, but maybe not strong enough to feel it?” I said, hating the thought. It was like suddenly finding that you had been standing on a nest of squirming small snakes all along, but never noticed until a big one bit you.
“About ten thousand a day, in California alone,” he said proudly. “Only the most sophisticated equipment can pick up most of them. You start feeling them about two point seven or three. They’re using a network of receivers now, for instance, that pick up signals from the army’s Global Positioning System satellites and tell you where and how much the earth is moving within a fraction of an inch—and it’s moving all the time. Over the ages most of the earth has moved around dramatically. You ought to read John McPhee’s Assembling California, to see how California, and the whole earth for that matter, is made up of chunks of rock that were carried from somewhere else by earthquake action. That’s over a period of millions of years, of course. Or read Kenneth Brown’s Cycles of Rock and Water at the Pacific Edge. Fascinating; really fascinating. Somewhere in one of them is the statement that the top of Mount Everest is made from marine sandstone. That just plain fries the roots of my hair.”
I looked at him. His face was rapt and his eyes were farfocused, as if they could actually see the gargantuan, millennial creep of the earth; see the ancient spasms that flung up coastal mountains and corrugated deserts, that moved future continents and countries around like building blocks. Through his dark, blind eyes I too could see, for just a moment, that vast old cyclopean tumbling. It made my breath shallow and thin and the space around my heart cold.
“It makes me feel like throwing up,” I said. “If I thought about it I’d be so dizzy I couldn’t walk upright on the earth again.”
“Ah, well,” he said. “You don’t have to love it. You just have to see why I do. That’s important to me, that you see that.”
“I see that it’s important to you,” I said. “You’ll just have to make do with that. Have you ever thought about teaching this stuff, or becoming a seismologist or a geologist or something? With your…passion for it, I think you’d make a wonderful teacher—”
“I don’t want to do anything about earthquakes,” he said. “I don’t want to teach people about them. I just want to know about them.”
“But when you do that—when you know—what then? What will you have?”
We were heading up the Olema Valley. On either side of us sharp-boned mountains rose abruptly, a thousand feet or more. The fog that had held off so far was drifting along the road, and he slowed the Jeep to accommodate it.
“What I’ll have,” he said, turning again to look at it, “is a real sense of them, and if I’m lucky, a sense of where I fit in with them. A context. If I’m very, very lucky, maybe I’ll know what it is they’re saying to me. That would be worth anything. Why does there have to be a ‘then what’? There’s not going to be an end to the knowing about them; there’s no ‘then what’ on the horizon, because there’s not going to be a then, in the sense that I ever know enough about them. Does that disappoint you?”
“No, it doesn’t. Knowledge for its own sake—it’s a very pure concept. I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being, sometimes,” I said, but deep down a small part of me was disappointed, and I knew that he knew it. I suppose I thought that once he satisfied his passion for them, he would take his knowledge of earthquakes and do something with it to benefit mankind. Predict, warn, mitigate…
I looked at him helplessly.
“It’s just that all I’ve ever known about, really, is helping,” I said. “I don’t know how to let go and just…be. I’m sorry. I know that disappoints you. I think I could learn.…”
He reached over and pushed the blown hair off my face, very gently.
“I think you can, too. That’s why we’re up here. You don’t disappoint me, Merritt. There’s a joy to being with you for me. Watching you up here is like watching a kid learn to play for the first time in its life. One thing we’re going to teach you is how to play. I don’t give a shit whether you learn to love earthquakes or not. It’s enough that I do.”
Tears stung my eyes. When had play left my life? When Crisscross and I had stopped our weekend jaunts together? When Glynn had grown past babyhood?
When had Pom and I stopped playing? Had we ever really done it?
“I play,” I said, trying for lightness. “I swim with the Rattus ratti, remember?”
“Oh, Merritt,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said fiercely, blinking hard. “Don’t or I’ll cry, and I just goddamned well do not want to do that.”
“Well, we’ll start with Forrest, maybe,” he said, accommodating me. “Y’all can gambol in the glades, play a little Nerf ball, maybe take a shower together. See what happens. Work right on up from there to some serious playing.”
“Speaking of Forrest, where has he been?” I said. “I miss his bright eyes and sweet smile.”
“Forrest takes off sometimes,” T.C. said. “I don’t know if there’s a great sadness in him, or if he’s got a lady friend somewhere, or what. I used to think it meant an earthquake was on the way. Animals, especially cats and rats, will leave an area where one is about to hit, or so the saying goes. But he’s done it the whole time he’s been with me, and it hasn’t meant a quake yet. I thought when I found him he’d
make a great canary—you know, an early warning system—but he’s a dud at that.”
“Where did you find him?”
“Curtis brought him to me, in his mouth, like he was holding an egg,” he said. “Something killed his mama, apparently; he was just getting hair on him. Not the most attractive time in a rat’s life. But Curtis was so proud of him that I just had to take him in. I fed him with an eyedropper and made him a nest out of my old socks. I think it was my socks he bonded with. Curtis has been jealous ever since. I named him Forrest because he looked so much like my father when he started to go bald. His name was Bedford Forrest, after…well, you know. Curtis I named after my cousin in Jackson, because he never could resist a good-looking woman, and neither can my Curtis. I like to keep the names in the family.”
“Why did you leave Curtis at home?”
“Curtis once came damned close to taking a header off Point Reyes after a cormorant, and that’s a four-hundred-foot drop straight into the Pacific. I had to tackle him and practically sit on him. He knows he’s supposed to retrieve, but he doesn’t have an ounce of sense about where to do it. Just like Cousin Curtis again. Look at those ridges over there, Merritt. See how they knock the whole landscape off-kilter? That’s from past quakes. They call them shutter ridges. There are creeks here that are less than half a mile apart, but they run in opposite directions. The quakes have done that, too. And there are about fifty small ponds in this valley that have absolutely no reason to be up here because of the low rainfall, but here they are. They sit on the tops of those ridges; you can see one or two from here. Sag ponds. All from the fault.”
“Are we close to the fault here?”
“I’ll show you in about five minutes,” T.C. said.
A few minutes later he stopped the Jeep. Just ahead of us in the road was a strip of darker asphalt, as if workmen had patched the place where a pipe of some sort had gone through it. T.C. swung down and held out a hand to me, and I scrambled out behind him. The wind had picked up here and was blowing sheets of fog out toward Tomales Bay.
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