Dispatches From The Crust

I recently mentioned that I have moments of doubt while writing. Not many, and not often, but more often than I used to. Some of the stuff I've learned hasn't stayed learnt.  I wrote a sentence the other day with about fourteen more clauses in it than anyone really needs, and by the time I got to the end of it I was just shoveling in pronouns with no confidence that they were the right ones. In those cases, I get a machete and whack at my sentence until I get control of it again. But it would be nice to be certain. It's humbling to feel at sea in my native language.

It's not just language, though. Thanks to the social media, I'm much more likely to weigh in on other issues. I'll stick my opinions out there like I'm planting flags on conquered territory--fervently, righteously. There are so many people who need correcting, and I'm just the one to do it. It's easy to let fly without lining up your shot first.

There are times I'm sure I'm right but can't say exactly why, and there are times I'm not sure I'm right at all. Humility can be a good thing. It's a big wide world out there, and I haven't learned everything about it yet, and unlike some people I won't name but didn't vote for, I know how complicated it actually is.

So I came across a thread about all the natural disasters that are happening all over the world, and someone said climate change was exacerbating the earthquakes, and as much as I like to sound the alarm about global warming, I don't like to attribute things to it promiscuously. There's enough misinformation out there already, and I didn't want to see someone set up a straw man that some Denier could knock down. Far be it from me to suggest we're not screwed, I typed, or words to that effect, but that's not how earthquakes work.

Because, you know, I'm all science-y like that.

Tectonic events are shaped by things that are beneath us, not to put on airs. Heat within the earth, friction and pressure, that sort of thing. This guy contending that we're getting earthquakes now because the crust is heating up? I suspected him of also having the inside skinny on The Rapture. So I just made my comment and flang it out there.

And there it dangled, nice and slow, so I could get a look at it. And doubt crept in. Was there something I hadn't read about? Some new discoveries? Did I go off half-cocked? And what does half-cocked mean, anyway? How much else don't I know?

Lots, as it turns out! Yes indeedy, score another one for humility--global warming is affecting earthquakes. It's not going to create one that isn't all cooked up and ready to go, but it can trigger them in a number of ways. A fault ready to slip can go off if the weight of the atmosphere eases up on it because of a good low-pressure typhoon. Rainfall can result in landslides massive enough to release strain on a fault. Ice sheets maintain a load on the crust, but when they melt, the crust levitates. The surface of Iceland is rising fast as glaciers disappear, and it's expected this release of tension will pull in more magma below. Et cetera, et cetera.

I lie in bed and think about it. Do I believe it? Our cat Tater weighs a thousand pounds when she lies on my feet. I'm trapped. There will be no rolling over until she gets up. And when she finally does, limbs are gonna fly.

I believe it.

Naked Came The Trilobite

Ten trekkers climbed the highest peak in Malaysia, took their clothes off, and snapped photographs of themselves, thus pissing off the mountain to the degree that, after thinking about it for a few weeks, it let fly with a fat earthquake. Four of the trekkers were fingered and detained and the remainder has apparently fled the country to points unknown, putting nerves on edge at the margins of tectonic plates worldwide.

The trekkers themselves have mocked Malaysian authorities who have accused them of causing the earthquake, but they're on shaky ground. I myself once climbed our state's highest peak in the company of a young man who stripped down to his hiking boots for photographs at the very top, in full view of Mt. St. Helens, and two days later that mountain shot off some thousand-plus feet of elevation. Coincidence?

In that case, and also in the case of the Malaysian visitors, the climbers' motivation was the same: they were expressing their sense of freedom, they were getting closer to nature, and they were young enough to be pretty goddamn proud of how they looked.

There's a good record of evidence that public indecency has a direct causative effect on earth movements, so much so that we can conclude with confidence that if there is an earthquake anywhere, somebody somewhere was probably naked. Similarly, it is also true that such events always happen in threes, given enough time, after which we start counting over. There is some disagreement on the issue in scientific circles, although scientists can generally be discounted because of their habit of writing snotty personal emails. However, they do make a good point that there used to be a lot more tectonic activity when the world was younger, long before humans were invented, and even longer before pants were invented. Still, the science is young, and it is expected to be years before we can devise methods of verifying episodes of naughtiness among trilobites.

Vagaries of climate can similarly be traced to untoward human activities, as was recently noted in the California legislature, when an assemblywoman declared that the terrible drought was caused by God's wrath over abortion. And there might be something to it. I once voted for a presidential candidate who merely favored abortion rights, and I not only didn't get my man, but we ended up with some weird massive war. There was a Dick hanging out then too.

And whereas I am certain that the trekkers in Malaysia did somewhat tardily cause the earthquake, I'm not so quick to maintain that the mountain was pissed off. Could have been it was just excited. I'd have to see the photos.

My Beliefs Can Kick Your Beliefs' Asses

A Colorado baker refused to sell a couple a wedding cake because doing so would violate his religious beliefs. The engine of commerce was chugging along right up to the frosting and sugar roses but as soon as he put the little figure of the two men in tuxedos on the top he felt he would be crossing a line that God had been very clear to him about. Why, you might as well ask him to drive the tour bus to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Elsewhere, the owners of a craft store chain kicked up a fuss over providing insurance to their employees if it meant some of them could get birth control, which violated their religious beliefs. If there was any chance their benefits package might result in a sperm not fulfilling its destiny, they would have no part in it. God had been very clear about his interest in human overpopulation. It would be crossing a line.

It would be like forcing me to sell bed linens to a Klan member, who might decide to make grand wizard duds out of them. Or sell whole cloth to a fundamentalist, who might decide to make divine instructions out of it. All of our precious individual souls are at stake, and we all expect to be indulged and accommodated, even if my blood sacrifice is of your sacred cow.

It would be one thing if everyone agreed on a god to listen to, but it's pretty clear that there is a whole pantheon of them out there, each with its own bizarre bailiwick--this one in charge of what you get to eat, that one in charge of who you get to kill. You spend enough time paying attention to everything that violates someone's religious beliefs, you realize you're in the company of schizophrenics. Everyone's hearing voices.

I always wondered if my eyes could roll back in my head so far they snapped off, but I gave them a good whirl the other day, and they don't. Some woman woke up recently to discover her husband was trying to suffocate her with a bag. Once in custody, he admitted he tried to kill her because he thought she was leaving him, and he didn't think he could live without her. "And it's against my religious beliefs to kill myself," he said.

That's enough. I have strongly held beliefs too. I believe war is a shitty way to make peace. I believe this planet has been rumpling its covers for billions of years and we should not take earthquakes personally. I believe we've managed to squander so many of our limited resources that we are on the verge of making the world fit only for insects and bacteria. If I just went ahead and said God sent me all that on a tablet, could I win a court case?

Number Nine! Number Nine!

I am totally looking forward to the big earthquake we're going to have, and that's one way you can tell I've never been in a big earthquake. You can't tell by my hair. It always looks like this.

The biggest earthquake I was in happened early one morning, shortly after I'd gotten up to go to work. I walked into the kitchen and stuff was swinging back and forth. I stared for a while until I finally came to a conclusion. "That ain't right," I concluded. The rumbling lasted about 45 seconds. It was pretty exciting. My friend Lisa had just moved into a new place the day before, and had just stepped out of the shower and flipped on the switch for the heat lamp when the earthquake started. So she flipped it back off. Any of you would have done the same thing.

I do know, however, that big earthquakes are invariably described as terrifying, and to everybody, and I doubt that I will be the exception. As it is, I can be startled into urination by a floating lint ball if the sun catches it just right. In an earthquake, I will not only crap my pants, I'll crap yours.

Our impending earthquake is going to be so big, the ground will undulate up and down six feet for minutes at a time. It's going to take out our bridges and send the homes in the West Hills sailing into the Willamette River. In my neighborhood, it's going to turn the soil to soup and us to stew meat and dumplings. Haitians will hold bake sales for us. It's going to be a doozy. A number niner.

The reason I am so cheered by the prospect is that I am immensely comforted by my own insignificance, and a whomping geological event should be able to point that out quite nicely. In the sea of life, the way I see it, we are not even plankton: we are that little, but not as attractive or important. If the earth wants to shake out its blankets and bounce us on top like fleas, I'm not in a position to say it shouldn't. We can whine about it all we want, but we'll bounce just the same.

The earth has been shaking out blankets for a very long time, which is how it happens to have the ripples and corrugation it does, and it isn't about to stop now, so there's no point in taking it personally. Nevertheless, that's just what some people do. I had always understood that our earthquake will come to us courtesy of the Cascadia Subduction Zone fault,

where the Juan de Fuca plate slides under the land mass. The ocean plate grinds against the continental plate and ultimately ruptures it. That's how I always understood it works, but it turns out that homosexuality has been the problem all along. I guess we have outbreaks of raging sodomism along this fault line every 300 years or so. You don't have to believe me--it's in the geologic record. I don't know what was up with the Tillamook and Siuslaw Indians that were blown away by the last huge earthquake on the coast in 1700, but you can bet your loincloth they had it coming. The flamers.

Slightly Above It All

It's been a few years since we've had a Hundred-Year Flood, so we're about due. No one's ruling one out this year. We're having no shortage of rainfall and some people are right up to their beanie baby collection in the stuff. That's the sort of thing that floats to the surface of the mud and the crud when someone's house floods, and that's when the television crews come in and take pictures. It always looks a right mess for sure, and no one likes to see someone lose everything. But some of it is hard to get real worked up about.

There are all sorts of ways to lose everything, and Dave and I are pretty well situated to avoid most of them. We don't get hurricanes or tornadoes. Our house is on a little high plateau so we're not going to have a flood or a mudslide. We don't have the kind of vegetation or topography that makes us prone to wildfire. We do have a pair of thriving burrito joints within a half a block and it's possible, what with the grease and all, they might go up in smoke some day. They also have rats out back, but that's not so much a disaster thing as it is a pestilence thing. Whatever it is the rats do, though, they pretty much do it under cover of darkness, like Dick Cheney, so if you choose to, you can pretend they're not there and not up to anything. The burritos are delicious. I don't know what the meat is, because the menu isn't in English, and it's probably just as well.

So I'm happy on my little plateau, because mudslides and the like give me the willies. Many of us who are ignorant of house construction tend to think of buildings as being solid and immutable, and when we look out at the scenery around us, we rather expect it to stay put also. I remember how utterly shocked I was when, once, at a teenage friend's house, a bunch of us were laughing and playing grab-ass and suddenly Elaine backed heavily into a wall and went right through the sheetrock. I didn't even know about sheetrock, and saw the walls as being solid and unyielding things, although if anything was going to be able to punch through a wall it would have been Elaine's rear end. But around here, lately, entire hills come loose and knock houses right off their pinnings and sometimes the houses slide right into other houses and so on, and then the whole neighborhood has to pack up and leave in case God was planning on picking up the spare.

What we do have, even here on our plateau, is the imminent likelihood of a catastrophic earthquake. Evidently we get one of those every five hundred years or so, and it's been about four hundred and ninety-eight since the last one. And it's supposed to be a doozy. Down in California, they have earthquakes as regular as garbage pick-ups, and some of them are pretty strong. But here, all that energy is building and building, unbeknownst to us, and getting ready to rear up and tip us into the ocean like a plate of peas. Meanwhile, we're not even jiggly. It's like what they say about mosquitoes: only the males make noise, and only the females bite, so if you're lying in bed at night and you don't hear anything, that's when you should worry. None of us can hear a thing. We're doomed.

I haven't made any plans for an afterlife. I've been busy. But I do plan to scurry under my piano when the big one hits. It's a seven and a half foot Yamaha grand with a hell of a bass, and it should hold its own pretty well if chunks start falling out of the ceiling. And if the whole thing comes crashing down on top of me, well, that's just the way death should sound.