Orientation (17 page)

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.