When Living on the Edge Becomes Stark-Naked Reality

I was all the way outside, waiting for the house to slide down the cliff, within the first five seconds; that’s traveling fast from the third floor.

John Espey stayed fast in bed up here in Topanga Canyon, following the tradition of Gertrude Stein’s uncle or dad, who, after sleeping through the Great San Francisco Quake, and on being awakened to hear the news, said something like “this will give us a bad name in the East,” and then turned over and went back to sleep.

My younger daughter lounged, stark naked and affable, in the doorway of her bedroom. She always thinks, at these times, of her elementary school teacher, a certain Mr. Russo, who so lovingly delineated his vision of doomsday--either by blast or by quake--that every fifth-grader left his class a gibbering doomsday idiot. Perfect training, it turned out, because every time the ground doesn’t open up, it’s very good news, and even as we pour coffee with trembling hands, we can take joy from how disappointed Mr. Russo must be, wherever he is today.

It’s not the disaster, ever , but how we react. It’s Jackie Kennedy bailing out of that convertible, or Cornelia Wallace throwing herself on top of her maimed husband. Good character has nothing to do with it; it’s destiny, genes, chance, circumstance. A man on KNX radio confided after the quake that he’d just thrown up. And on KNBC television Kent Shocknek and Christopher Nance kept disappearing under their desks, even as they defended themselves from directorial chastisement that they were “panicking people.”

The truth is: Life is so boring so much of the time that most of the time we forget that we are all going to die. An earthquake reminds us of that in such a wonderfully gracing way: We are here, only by the most marginal sufferance on the crust of the Earth-- it shakes , you know, irritably, like a dog that has had it with those pesky fleas, and we’re the fleas.

That’s our human condition out here; that’s our life on the edge.

There is something daring and wonderful about people who choose to live here, in the face of fire, flood, quake. This is extinction with panache and verve; hemispheres away from that stagnant gas that they had in Africa or the famines of Ethiopia and Bangladesh or the sad mudslide in Medellin. Here in Southern California we hang-glide through life--tempt the gods, joke with the gods, make friends with the gods. Every time we live through one of these, Mr. Russo once again is proved wrong, and we are once again alive.

After the San Francisco quake (a friend told us, at 8 a.m. Thursday in Topanga Canyon, jauntily smoking his seventh cigarette since the earth had given its petulant, coquettish puff), Native Americans were finally and completely convinced that white folks were nuts when they went back to rebuild their city: “After a warning like that!” Next door, at a macrobiotic learning center, a man in Levi cutoffs appeared at the top of his cliff. “Good Morning!” When we asked him if he felt the quake, he was cool. “A little roll or so. Sure woke me up, though!” Uh-huh.

So then we go inside, and we watch Kent and Christopher dive under the desk. The phone begins to ring. The aftershocks have just started, and we scan the horizon for possible fires. Those boys on TV! I’d hate to be caught in an elevator with Kent (but then he’d probably feel the same about me). We talk about prisoners in jails, patients in hospitals, all of the places we’d rather not be . . . .

Seventeen years ago my husband and I divorced. We were both young enough (comparatively speaking) to think that material things were not important. We ended up fighting only about a cat--a ceramic cat with flowers on it, bought in southern Mexico for $11. The fight was bitter. Two hours and 45 minutes after the quake, my ex-husband, remarried and back in the old house here in the canyon, calls up. We’re all right over here; they’re all right over there. His voice is exuberant. “You never know what you’re going to do,” he says. “I got up, stark naked, grabbed the cat, ran outside, and stubbed my toe.”

I’m so glad to hear his voice! Glad his son and my daughters are fine! Glad he stubbed his toe! Glad he still honors that dumb ceramic cat! Glad to see that Kent Shocknek is reduced now to pointing to those overhead lights in the television station as his reason for diving under the desk. (Doesn’t he remember those old moving pictures of W. C. Fields sauntering under lights during the Long Beach earthquake?)

“Stark naked” is where art, life and idealism meet during these quakes. We see what we are and how we act as we wait for the Big One. It’s better to live on the edge, to be reminded, to crack jokes, to keep in touch, to know for sure that we’re still alive.