The 5:17 express was crammed, as usual — a stew of human heat, dank and thick and close, and Clarissa Snow loved it. She loved to ride the bus, to feel its pitch and roll beneath her feet and the vibrations of its aggrieved engine thrumming into her leg bones; to hear the swell and lull of muted conversations around her, their cadences broken by the exhilarating punch of laughter. Riding the bus, she felt immersed in the world, felt its press and push and jostle, its gentle and yielding weight sliding past and around and against her body. For this is what she loved most of all — the simple touch of another, random and intimate and essential. For no one is alone on a bus. The lowering sun flashed between high-rises, and the light that flickered in the grimy bus windows was harsh. She stood swaying blissfully against her fellow commuters and closed her eyes to the light that strobed in the windows all around her — sheets of light flipping, flipping like the pages of a dozen golden books that she would never read.
Shakers
Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you,
The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.
They are called P-waves. They are the primary waves, the first and the fastest, moving at up to six miles per second, near top speed through the fold and furl of basalt layer and slowing when they hit the granite massifs, the slabs of continent borne upon magmatic flows inside the earth’s crust. P-waves are sound waves that move through solid rock and compress and dilate the solid rock they move through, coming at you peristaltic and slinky-like, radiating upward and outward from the seismic event. S-waves follow four to twelve seconds later, depending on where you are from the epicenter. L-waves follow soon after. These last are the slowpokes, the long-period surface waves that arrive like laggards in the seismic sequence, languid and weary, but powerful enough to do all the damage you will read and hear about when it is all over. But the P-waves come first.
When they hit, rats and snakes hightail it out of their burrows. Ants break single-file ranks and scatter blind, and flies roil off garbage bins in shimmering clouds. On the Point Reyes Peninsula, milk cows bust out of feed sheds and bolt for open pasture. Inside aquariums in dentist offices and Chinese restaurants and third-grade classrooms, fish huddle in the corners of their tanks, still as photos of huddled fish. Inside houses built on the alluvial soils of the Sacramento Delta, cockroaches swarm from behind walls, pouring like cornflakes out of kitchen cabinetry and rising in tides from beneath sinks and tubs and shower stalls. Crows go mute. Squirrels play possum. Cats awaken from naps. Dogs guilty of nothing peer guiltily at their masters. Pigeons and starlings clatter fretfully on the eaves and cornices of buildings, then rise en masse and wheel away in spectacular roller-coaster swoops. Pet-shop parakeets attempt the same maneuver in their cages. In the San Francisco Zoo, every single Adélie penguin dives and swims around and around their Plexiglas grotto, seeking the safety of what they believe to be open ocean. Big cats stop pacing, tortoises drop and tuck, elephants get antsy as pee-prone toddlers. The chimps on Monkey Island go ape-shit. Horses everywhere go mulish and nippy. Implacable cattle get skittish as deer. And a lone jogger on a fire trail on Mount Diablo gets lucky, for the starving cougar stalking her gets spooked by the subsonic pulse that rolls under its paw pads, and breaks off the hunt and heads for the hills, bounding silent and unseen up a hidden defile and leaving behind only a shudder of knotweed grass burnished amber by the waning light of an Indian summer dusk.
Subsonic pulses register in measuring devices throughout the state — in boreholes surrounding sag ponds in Big Pines and Lost Lake; in austere concrete vaults strung along abandoned railway through Donner Pass and on the peripheries of rest stops along Highway 99 through the San Joaquin Valley; and inside an array of seemingly derelict, rust-pocked, and listing corrugated-steel shacks smack in the middle of nowhere. Subsonic pulses register in instruments in firehouses, transformer substations, and the watershed property surrounding every dam in the state. In university labs and USGS offices, ink styli twitch against seismograph drums, unnoticed for now. In field stations, in Latrobe and Bear Valley and Mercey Hot Springs, the pulses are registering inside wideband seismometers, flat steel cylinders painted green and bolted onto bedrock outcrops, squat and solid as toads. In Colusa, in Cloverdale and Coalinga and Arbuckle, pulses are registering inside sleek steel-cased tubes stashed down sixty-meter boreholes. Pulses are registering in tubular, yam-size instruments embedded in grabens and scarps and streambeds in fault zones everywhere. The devices are called geophones, and their urethane casings are pumpkin orange, and there are hundreds of them pimpling vistas everywhere, from Cape Mendocino and across the geologic fretworks of the Carrizo Plain and down to the crusted shorelines of the Salton Sea, near marshes where migrating gulls think they are starfish and try to eat them.
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.