Destined to shake things up

“Let me tell you about the earliest earthquake I remember,” writes David L. Ulin. It was Easter Sunday, 1980; he was 18 and living on San Francisco’s Haight Street. “It was a period in which I spent a lot of time considering connections, pondering synchronicity, and the heady, if inaccessible, question of truth.” He went to the countryside, to Marin County. A joint was smoked. At the end of the day he headed home to his apartment on the third floor of an old wood-frame building.

“I felt a slight pitch and yaw, like a hiccup in the floor beneath me, and the whole room started to rock, gently, even easily, as if the world had been cast on rollers and was being shaken by a giant hand,” Ulin recalls. Thrift store coffee cups did a little dance on their shelf. The person on the other end of a telephone line asks him, “Do you feel that?” “[B]efore I could answer, the shaking stopped, leaving in its aftermath something like total stillness: no birds chirping, no wind rustling, not the sound of breathing even, just the squeak, squeak, squeak of my chandelier as it slowed its swaying, and the fine, high hum of the phone connection buzzing in my ear.”

So begins “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith,” a stunning, enchanting book that might as easily have been titled “Do You Feel That?”

It is a book likely to become a classic in those parts of the nation where the names Landers, Loma Prieta and Northridge say it all. It is a truly California book in that, common sense and damage statistics aside, it heaves and sighs to the slippage in earthquakes, acknowledging the vulnerability of infant sons as Dad merrily rides the Los Angeles subway, reciting his mantra, “Please, not here, not now,” even though deep down, this David Ulin (the one who is thrilled to discover that the Mayan god of earthquakes was called Olin) wants to experience the Big One.

No doubt a sensible part of you or me will flinch from that insinuation of careless rapture. If, like me, you came through Loma Prieta with a 12-day-old son or you felt the thrust of Northridge and have read the books, the horror stories, the matter-of-fact projections of a 7.2-magnitude quake on the Hayward fault or near San Bernardino and you’re still living in L.A. because you subdued the actuarial urges to move to a region where the crust was thicker, well, isn’t it in part because you can’t get that thrill out of your head?

This is Ulin’s first book as an author. But many readers know his literary journalism as a freelancer for The Times, and he is the editor of the literary anthology “Writing Los Angeles” as well as of “Another City,” a collection of writings about L.A. “The Myth of Solid Ground” is enriched by his wide knowledge of writing on California, but it is more than just a gathering of ideas.

This book is a subtle, personal and adventurous exploration of what an immense natural phenomenon means in our culture at large and in the imaginations of men and boys traveling the state.

The book isn’t an avalanche of statistics or a dense introduction to geology but a skilled attempt to identify what Ulin calls “geopoetry.” It is less the ultimate technical account of what an earthquake is, how it comes into being and what it does than a fascinating survey of what “earthquake” means to some of the most intelligent and passionate people engaged in studying the subject.

So it is cast pleasingly as a series of journeys to visit experts, authorities and earthquake maniacs. We meet Susan Hough at the Pasadena office of the U.S. Geological Survey, the church that issues the official descriptions of our temblors. Then there’s Caltech’s Linda Curtis, that calm voice that gives the public the Richter numbers and the epicenters. She is also a collector of predictions. Since California has been much given to religion and fantasy, you can count on a multitude of warnings or promises. Ulin tells us there has been just one day ever when the equipment at USGS in Pasadena and at Caltech recorded no temblors, and so, of course, everyone checked the equipment.

Temblor touters

The predictors have credentials and an air of confidence. Nearly every one of them, Ulin discovers (and he is generous with his praise), has had glorious home run days when they named a big temblor. At the same time, they have embarrassing failures, those sweet California days when nothing happened. The great test case of serene nothingness is along the San Andreas fault between the Central Valley towns of Parkfield and Cholame, a place where the ground is like a porcupine of recording devices but where as yet the earth is still.

Predictions are like plans for winning in Las Vegas -- you don’t believe them just because you win one day. Ulin is gentle and heartfelt in his abiding search for connections as he meets the theorists and explores their theories: the possibility that clouds may be crucial signals; the evidence of dramatically increased sound waves before some quakes; of surface water activity; the links between fault lines; dogs howling, snakes sliding for escape and birds falling silent. Some take note of the very hot, still weather on the day of Loma Prieta.

Ulin is fond of storytelling, and he realizes that quake predictions may be a Western art form like the movies or gambling and just as ambiguous or dangerous. He shows how creative and hopeful prediction is -- and how unreliable. And like anyone beginning to discover geology, he is amazed by the enormous perspective offered by geologic time.

Suppose earthquakes are like great movies or fabulous people. In other words, suppose that their obvious resemblances (their disposition to pattern and order) are trivial compared with what is unique about them. The metaphor is invaluable, for it teaches us not just how little we know about earthquake history but how close the outbursts may be to the life of our planet. Are they a danger to be guarded against or a life force, the necessary release of vast heat and energy from the orb we sit on?

What we know only teaches us what we don’t know. After all, there was once a riot of quakes in New Madrid, Mo., and there is a fault in northern Turkey that makes the San Andreas seem lazy. It may be that real authorities on seismology will cavil with Ulin’s book, and some who have suffered from quakes will be alarmed by his ease. On the other hand, I think his romance with the subject is not just sweet and airy but wise. This is a part of the world where we have a tradition of celebrating perilous things: Art Pepper on jazz and smack in “Straight Time”; Joan Didion on freeways and the air; Lawrence Weschler on the light; James Ellroy on violence; and Pauline Kael and a few others on the heady escapism of movies.

Ulin’s book has a place in that company. Not that he is a brave idiot: He has a wife and children and knows what there is to lose. Still, if you want one beckoning taste of what this book has to offer, read the author’s brilliantly mixed feelings about driving onto the Carrizo Plain near Bakersfield in search of the spirit of the San Andreas fault as he recalls that James Dean’s fatal car crash occurred there at the very epicenter of the great 1857 Fort Tejon quake.

“By now, it’s midafternoon, and the sun has gone all thin and reedy, like a candle burning toward the nub. I feel the faint chill of encroaching evening, and start to think about heading back. I want to be off the Carrizo by nightfall; I have no desire to wind up lost or exiled, nor to fall prey, like James Dean, to a fleeting figment of the light. Still, I can’t shake the idea that something is going on here, even (or especially) if the ground remains unmoved. To stand inside the San Andreas is like balancing on a line between control and chaos, the opposite of, say, the earthquake ride at Universal, an experience that isn’t manufactured, that contains every possibility, even that of nothing taking place. What happens next is, in the most acute sense, unpredictable; I won’t -- can’t -- know it until it comes. This, too, represents its own small miracle, a miracle of a particularly open-ended kind. I think about an earthquake propagating down from Cholame. I think about the Parkfield foreshocks. In 1857, that is how it happened, and in this empty landscape, it feels as close to me as my own breathing: the collapse of time, the eclipse of history, the Fort Tejon temblor rumbling again. I take a seat on the creek bed, feel a slight buzz of anticipation. And then, before I know it, I am lying full out in the fault zone, my heart pounding a rapid drumbeat, as for this one quick sliver of eternity, I set aside my hopes, my fears, my very identity, and wait, wait, wait to be delivered by an earthquake that does not arrive.”