Earthquake country

I have lived in California for seven years, and in that time, I’ve only felt a handful of mild earthquakes—mild enough to really enjoy them. They’ve most often happened when I was in bed, and it felt as though someone was kicking the bed frame.

This—by that I mean the one that happened moments ago—was more like a series of small waves, less jarring than rocking. I was sitting at my desk, editing a book, and I suddenly felt as though my office chair had turned into a rocking chair, moving just barely forward and back at a faster-than-normal pace. “I wonder if I should get up and stand in the doorway,” I thought to myself, and by the time I stood up, it was gone.

When I moved into this apartment, after I signed the lease, the landlord told me that, when she bought the house the month before, she had a geological survey done and discovered that a fault line runs through the property. The earth could open up and swallow me at any moment, and in some strange way I take comfort in that, the way only someone who’s never truly suffered as a result of an earthquake could.

Copyright © U.S. Geological Survey, Earthquake Hazards Program

Goodbye to all that

I was back east the past few days, visiting my parents in Michigan and my sisters and newborn nephew in Chicago. I can’t visit my family without some drama or another; everything is heightened there.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

As my plane made its descent into O’Hare, two guys behind me, apparently native Californians, remarked on how green and flat the land was. That comment set the tone for me, in many ways, and I started seeing parallels between the landscape and my relationship to my family. The intensity of the colors mimicked the intensity of emotion; the flat land, my inability to hide.

Copyright © 2008 Liz Kuball

The first night I was home, I called S. and I was still myself. I had gotten out of bed in California that morning, and there was California dirt on the bottoms of my flip-flops. The second night I was home, I called S. from under the covers in my childhood bedroom and cried. Cried not because I missed him (though I did) and not because I missed California (though I did that, too), but cried because my sisters were both in Chicago and I was alone in the house with my parents, cried because my parents are grandparents now and my grandparents are dead, cried because I felt guilty for all the ways in which I’ve let them down and all the ways I’ve hurt them, cried because my mom said she wanted to sell the house before my dad died, so she wouldn’t have to move from it alone someday, and though that was all theoretical (my dad isn’t ill), it was also frighteningly real.

I’d brought Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album with me, and on the way back I read nearly all of the former. Didion makes for a great traveling companion, particularly when your destination is California and California is home. On our descent into Los Angeles, I looked out and saw muted shades of gray and brown, green and purple, and I felt better. I can’t live my life against a backdrop of such intensity. I need the chaparral and the palm trees, the dust and the sand, the marine layer and smog, and the smell of jasmine in the air. I need the ocean out the window, and half a continent between my past and me. I need to feel, as Didion writes, “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Copyright © 2006 Liz Kuball

Mythology

I posted a few days ago about the death of someone from my hometown in Michigan, and I deleted the post the next day—not because I said anything I regretted, but because it didn’t seem relevant to this blog. As more time has passed, the relevance is becoming clearer. The details about her life or my trying to make sense of why her death mattered to me weren’t so important. What is important is that when something pulls me in—intellectually, emotionally, or, preferably, both—that’s something I want to pay attention to, because that’s the nucleus of who I am.

I used to tell myself I was shy, and I used shyness as my excuse for not approaching strangers to take their portraits. In one week of confronting that fear, I found that I wasn’t shy at all. In fact, if you watched me approach strangers, you’d see someone confident and friendly, able to put people at ease and make them laugh. And I’ve done this without a struggle. It’s been fascinating to step outside myself and see me doing these things. But what it’s left me with are questions: What else am I telling myself that’s not true? What other myths am I perpetuating? And what are these myths keeping me from doing, keeping me from being?

This all comes together with the death of Mrs. Wyngarden in this way: I wasn’t close to her on a personal level. I hadn’t talked to her since high school, and though I knew she was ill, I didn’t expect to feel anything when I heard she died. Yes, it would be sad. But sad in the way it’s sad when you hear about the death of anyone. Instead, I couldn’t get it out of my head all week. Like a movie reel running through my mind was a string of memories from my hometown, my childhood.

I was stunned not only by my sadness over her death, but by the sense of connection I felt to that place and the people who live there. I love Southern California—I think I’ll likely live the rest of my life somewhere between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. But an essential part of who I am is where I’m from. It’s in the bio I wrote for myself (“and raised in the same town in Michigan where her parents grew up”), and as I edited that bio, I thought about deleting those words because they didn’t seem relevant, but the bio didn’t sound right without them.

I don’t have answers right now, but I think this is important—not just reexamining the things I tell myself, but looking at what where I’m from means in terms of who I am and what interests me.

What are the things you tell yourself about who you are? Are they true?

The Golden State

On life at Qualcomm Stadium:

Acupuncturists set up a makeshift clinic, and signs guided stressed evacuees to yoga and meditation sessions offered elsewhere in the stadium. Crisis counseling and massage therapy also were made available.

Organizers did their best to keep evacuees plugged in electronically, with TV monitors put up throughout the facility and a cell-phone charging station on the concourse.

via Reuters

Maps

New Yorkers have a Google Map of the hip gallery scene in the Bowery Arts District courtesy of the Jen Bekman Gallery:



Amy Stein fans have a Google Map of her Stranded series:



And Southern Californians have this, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times:

California dreamin’

When I drove home from Venice last night, I took the Pacific Coast Highway, and thought to myself how calm it was. Surfers sitting on their boards in the water, waiting for a wave. Bikers congregated at Neptune’s Net (and when I say bikers, I don’t mean the Northern California cyclists—I mean guys and girls on Harleys and Hondas and Yamahas). Blue water and blue skies and slow-moving cars with license plates from Colorado and Ohio and Nebraska, with drivers and passengers all staring out their windows to the west.

When I went to bed around midnight, the winds were blowing and the dog was pacing. I awoke to pictures of Malibu burning, and thought of these words, which I read for the first time when I lived in Indiana, and which now, having lived in Southern California for six years, I know to be true:

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sandstorms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to the flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather.” My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

—Joan Didion (from “Los Angeles Notebook,”
Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times