April 24, 2006

Life is fraught
with rogue waves

And you never know when one will come
So sisters and brethren prepare thyselves
For the undoing of all you have done

I FELL, FROM THE TOWER

I wrote that little poem in 2001 to accompany a photo of the Eiffel Tower getting toppled by a freak wave. Improbable—but I guess it could happen, if the Seine whipped itself up into enough of a frenzy. Little did I know how relevant the verse would become in light of the tsunami disaster of ’04 and the Katrina debacle of ’05. How would you like about a nanosecond of warning that life as you knew it is over? As San Franciscans, we know this could happen to us in a fingersnap, and we live with that sword of Damocles hanging over our heads night and day; it dangles from a horsehair as we sleep, work, watch TV, as we argue over the design of the Bay Bridge. We know it, but do we believe it?

THE GATHERING OF THE CLAN

Mine was hardly the only tired ass dragging its way through work on Tuesday the 18th. I went to sleep the night before at 10:30 (unheard of), got up at 3:45, and hopped a cab to the Earthquake ceremony as did thousands of others. As we drove down Market Street, people were singly, in couples and en masse walking, biking, and driving to the event. I could easily have slept through the whole thing; with what little of the ceremony I could see by standing on tiptoes on the railing of a barricade fence, and what little I could hear with the drone of helicopters above, I would have been better off watching it on the morning news.

MAY I FONDLE YOUR FIREHOSE?

But it would not have been experienced. When in doubt, leave the house. This is my city, and I had to be there. Had I rolled over and pulled the covers up, I wouldn’t have stepped out into the dark, sweet, quiet, balmy night; I wouldn’t have felt the excitement of momentum building, of people gathering to share a historic moment; I would not have made repeated eye contact with the cute firefighter in jeans and helmet; and I would not have been standing next to the frightening dude in a nightshirt and ruined mess of a skullcap wig sprouting random tufts of hair, holding an old-fashioned lantern bearing a burning candle. He had covered himself with black and white makeup, and what looked to be real ash, and stood frozen with a stricken expression, as if his life as he’d known it had ended in a fingersnap. His eyes did not focus. He was hard to look at. These living ghosts most certainly must have wandered the streets on that day in 1906, and where orderly masses of people now stood listening to the commemoration, had been total chaos, shock and fear. I could feel the power of what had happened on this very street, and the ghosts of the thousands who died, observing the scene. According to my sketchy recollection of one of the first films I ever saw (I was 6 when it came out), Antonio Pietrangeli’s charming “Ghosts of Rome,� if one dies tragically, before one’s time, one is doomed to wander eternity as a ghost (apparently wearing the clothes you died in—I think Marcello Mastroianni wore only one shoe, having lost the other crossing water running from someone’s husband). For all we know, the dead of 1906 are still walking among us, many in their bedclothes.

MORNING OF THE LIVING DEAD

Seeing men and women dressed in the clothes of the day and the horse-drawn fire wagons speeding by, but most especially, the urgency of sirens and church bells at 5:12 a.m., gave me the heebie-jeebies, because this was a party atmosphere, but when we hear those sirens for real, all over the city, it will be deadly serious. And how will our city take it? One hundred years ago, it was laid to waste. OK, so there are newer standards and codes and building technologies, but are they any match for Mother Nature? Will Office of Emergency Services head Anne Marie Conroy, Police Chief Heather Fong and Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White rise to the challenge? I can’t say I have complete confidence in that trio. I’d rather not have to test their mettle in the direst of circumstances. I’d almost rather have h brown in any one of their spots. At least he knows where the cisterns are.

At one point a young woman collapsed in front of me, went limp in her friend’s arms as if her skeleton had gone on strike. She was carried onto a gurney, where they rolled her sideways so she could puke on the street. Oddly, she had lost one shoe, which her friend carried helplessly, following along behind. She was well cared for, promptly, by the medics standing by, but what would have happened had the earth committed the grossest of ironies and split wide open right then and there, and the majority of people gathered at the scene needed emergency attention? Can any body of people really ever be prepared for such a thing?

While earthquakes are on everyone’s minds these days, and as certain as I am that if I live here the rest of my life that I will without question experience one, contemplation of the consequences of the real thing is something we must need to shield from our psyches just out of self-protection. I’ve often had a fantasy, with all the stuff I have accumulated over my lifetime, that I will one day walk the streets of Tibet owning only the robes I wear. For all I know, that’s all I’ll be left with without even leaving the house.

“IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.�

That’s the first line of Gordon Thomas’ and Max Morgan Witts’ 1971 book The San Francisco Earthquake. They quote Perry Byerly of the UC Dept. of Seismology: “The further you are from the last big earthquake, the nearer you are to the next.�

Yet, with a disregard for reality almost beyond comprehension, San Francisco ignores the sentence nature has passed on it. At any given moment, probably with one great convulsive opening of the earth’s crust, much of the forty-seven square miles the city occupies will crumble in an avalanche of reinforced concrete, iron, steel and plate glass. The destruction of San Francisco will be just one of the by-products of a major earthquake somewhere along the San Andreas Fault.

That was written before Loma Prieta and we are not so cavalier by now, I think, but what makes us capable of risking our lives to live here? How do we do it? The old-fashioned way: denial. The time-honored way: Won’t Happen to Me. Why do we do it? Because, according to Tony Kushner’s bizarre “fantasia,� Angels in America, “Heaven is a city Much Like San Francisco…Undulant Landscape Over which/The threat of Seismic Catastrophe hangs:/More beautiful because imperiled. POTENT: yet DORMANT: the Fault Lines of Creation!�

FLYING TOO HIGH WITH SOME GUY IN THE SKY IS MY IDEA OF NOTHIN’ TO DO

But admit it, you get a little kick out of it, don’t you. Earthquakes are somehow hipper than hurricanes or tornados. Earthquakes are downright sexy. We are so in love with our almost-island that we will risk being swallowed by it to stay here. We feel oddly privileged living here on borrowed time. If it happens, we’ll know how to deal with it, right? We’ve been through this before. We’ll rebuild and go on, right? My house, of course, will be spared. I am far from ready for the inevitable. I must think the earthquake’s going to wait for me to get my act together. I had Channel 26 on one time and in a crawl across the bottom of the screen came a tsunami warning and I thought, well, OK—now what am I supposed to do about it? Head for the roof? There was no yelling in the streets. I ignored it. What were the chances the Pacific Ocean would make it to the lower Haight? Perhaps I’d find out. Perhaps it would bulldoze its way through Golden Gate Park, the Panhandle and my house before I got off the couch.

WHOLE LOT OF QUAKIN’ GOIN’ ON

I lived in Portland, Oregon for 15 years, and we had our share of shakin’ and quakin’. I was watching TV with a newly arrived easterner and was about to ask him why he was kicking the couch when I noticed the lampshade was trembling. “Welcome to Oregon,� I said, “we’re having an earthquake.� Of course volcanic eruption and its attendant catastrophes are the fact of life up there in the Pacific Northwest. With the entire Cascade range being volcanic, there are any number of opportunities for Mother Nature to blow up. I even had a neighborhood volcano, Mt. Tabor, a few blocks from my house, supposedly extinct. Supposedly. But oddly there is a romance about these things. We can never take for granted what we have. We have to live in the present and cherish life as it comes, in all its unpredictable minute-to-minute glory. It lends a poignancy to the city we love, which like any other love, we know we may one day lose.

THE FLOOR WILL HAVE TO DO

As the ceremony broke up, around 6:15 a.m., I was so close to Transbay Terminal I thought I might as well skip going home and head straight for work, where I slept for an hour on the floor of the office loft, the carpet for my bed, my sweater for my pillow, my coat for my blanket. Maybe we should all get used to such conditions. For they could, at any moment, become life as we know it.

Now here’s hoping the next time the earth moves for you, it will be because of the Big O, and I don’t mean the Big One.

And we the little lives are workin’
out tiny salvations in the huge
detonations of world disasters

-Jack Kerouac

Coming up in the next The Ax Files…
“How I Lost My Virginity,� by Alexandra Jones

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Short Attention Span Poetry Corner

One thing I have found—
Whatever pleasures abound,
Whatever comforts surround,
Despite philosophies profound,
No one’s safe and sound
And through no fault of our own
We’re all on shaky ground.
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Shake your groove thang
4/24/06

axfiles@sbcglobal.net

copyright Alexandra Jones 2006