California Tripping --Faults and All : In His Quest for Quakes and Quirks, Author Thurston Clarke Traveled the San Andreas

Thurston Clarke has a confession: He regrets not having been in Southern California for the Northridge earthquake. “Of course,” the 50-year-old Upstate New York resident admits with a chuckle, “I’m an optimist. When I went looking for an earthquake, I never pictured myself on the ground floor of an unreinforced masonry building. I was always standing in some field, watching the grass ripple and kind of surfing on the earth.”

Clarke’s seismic quest is at the heart of his new book, “California Fault: Searching for the Spirit of a State Along the San Andreas” (Ballantine Books), which traces a 750-mile odyssey down the length of the San Andreas, from Eureka to the Salton Sea. “I wanted a way to do a California book,” the author says, punching the words out with a precise Northeastern clip. “I believe that in travel literature you need a spine, you need a route to take rather than just aimlessly wandering around, and a route should have something to say about the place you’re traveling in.”

When a friend suggested he look at the fault, Clarke “ordered this huge wall map from the California Division of Mines and Geology. It’s enormous; it covers half of the wall, and it has this enormous pink, thick line. As soon as I saw it, I knew this was the route, because I could see right away it went under redwoods and it went under desert, and it was under suburbs and near cities. It was the perfect route.”

Clarke became interested in earthquakes in the late 1980s. The author of seven previous books, including “Lost Hero” (McGraw-Hill, 1982), a biography of Raoul Wallenberg, he was working at the time on “Equator” (Avon, 1990), which recounts his experiences traveling around the world.

“I was going to Ecuador,” he remembers. “I was going to fly in on a Saturday and take this bus down to the Amazon on Sunday. But I canceled, and they had a major earthquake where thousands were killed, and a lot of them were killed in these buses that were going on exactly this road that I would have taken.” Not one to be put off, Clarke subsequently was thrilled by a minor earthquake in Honolulu, where he was researching his book “Pearl Harbor Ghosts” (Morrow, 1991).

“California Fault” is a delightfully eclectic book, merging history and personality, science and the sociology of towns caught up in circumstances that have left them grasping for identity in a changing world. The impetus for the project, he says, was “this fad of bad news that became the surf music of the ‘90s. Suddenly the news magazines discovered this terrible news about California. . . . I was trying to see if things were as bad as the news had led me to believe.”

Clarke explicates California’s geography, outlining the relationship between millions of years of tectonic pressure and the lush valleys, mountains and rocky coastline that define the state. He spends a day with survivors of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and investigates the political maneuvering that kept the tragedy’s official death toll low.

At the same time, “looking for an earthquake guaranteed a certain number of eccentrics, the kinds of people who predict earthquakes in nontraditional fashions.” These include Olga Kolbek, whose Calistoga geyser changes eruption patterns in the days preceding a major quake.

And then there’s Jack Coles, who believes the grinding of tectonic plates produces “long-wave, low-frequency radio waves” that can be picked up by AM radio receivers. “On January 16, 1994,” Clarke writes, “[Coles] faxed a warning to the Associated Press predicting a strong Southern California earthquake. The following day the Northridge temblor shook West Los Angeles.” Coles has called a number of other seismic events, with a fairly good success rate.

For all its attention to seismology, however, “California Fault” hardly falls under the heading of what its author derides as “a stunt book, which is where one guy goes down the Amazon in a canoe and it takes him six weeks, and he comes back exhausted and writes about his diarrhea.” Clarke, after all, is a sober Ivy League gentleman whose demeanor reflects the measured pace of his prose. So “California Fault” is a piece of travel literature in which the fault line functions as a motif, a metaphor for the last-chance nature of the California dream.

To highlight this, Clarke weaves into the journey the story of his ancestor J. Goldsborough Bruff, a prospector and explorer who, in 1849, led a troop of men from Washington, D.C., to California, only to be deserted in the middle of winter high in the Sierra, near the Fandango Pass. Eventually, he made his way out of the mountains and spent two years prospecting before returning East. “Bruff didn’t realize that the rules had changed,” Clarke opines, “that he was in a place where here it was every man for himself.”

“California Fault” provides an interesting perspective on the way social ideals have shifted over the years. The book details the author’s experiences in small towns from Ferndale and Petrolia along the North Coast to Parkfield and Big Bear in the south.

These towns seem to strike Clarke as communities in crisis, besieged by developers and young urbanites bent on escaping the crime and pollution of the big cities. In Leona Valley, for instance, which sits on unincorporated land near the Grapevine section of the I-5, he finds a close-knit community of 2,500 fighting an enormous 7,200-unit housing development that would overwhelm the town.

Even San Juan Bautista, where local history is a kind of religion and the 19th century mission has been immaculately preserved, is subject to “feuds layered on feuds, a muck of hatred so thick it swallowed most newcomers. The main one pitted old-timers who wanted modest growth against newcomers who wanted none.” Now, Clarke says, “places like Point Arena, and Ferndale and San Juan Bautista, they’re threatened, but I think they’re still healthy communities. My sense is that people are fighting more.”

What gives Clarke hope for California is his belief in history, whether the geological history that’s essential for seismologists or the regional history that provides the roots necessary to keep a community strong. It’s no coincidence, after all, that so many of the housing tracts and developments the author laments are built right up against the fault line, as though they are symbols for some constant, anonymous present in which past and future are concepts too alien to be understood.

“A community,” Clarke suggests, invoking Wallace Stegner’s concept of a “deeply lived-in” place, “is built on history. It’s built on knowing that many other people, that generations of people, have put themselves into building a community, into preserving things.”

Still, as rancher and former junior high school history teacher Dan Lucas tells Clarke, referring to the forgotten pioneers of the California Trail, the state saw “the greatest mass movement in our nation’s history, but people living on the trail, whose ancestors traveled it, don’t know about it. We’ve lost our roots, and it’s probably the source of lots of our problems.”

This, of course, is where Bruff comes in, the personal connection that joins Clarke to his material in a way that all his visitor’s observations about California cannot. A century and a half later, the story of Bruff’s abandonment is nearly impossible to excavate, and for much of “California Fault,” he flits in and out of the author’s consciousness like an afterthought.

In the end, though, after visiting Bruff’s camp in the Sierra, Clarke has a moment when history begins to come alive. He never does reach a resolution, nor any real notion of why Bruff was abandoned, but suddenly, Clarke says, “I felt like 150 years was not much time at all. There was the grassy area that he’d described, just as he’d described it. The tree was gone. But there it all was. It took a long time to get there. There were no paved roads. And it was spooky. I felt that I’d really come back and done the circle.”