Up the creek of seismic denial

It’s A CLOUDY DAY IN THE DESERT, AND I’M THINKING

dark thoughts about my china cabinet.

Larry Cunningham, a fast-talking fellow in a floppy safari hat and ancient hiking boots, is holding forth a few yards away. I stand above the twisted and shattered boulders, looking at a strange, lumpy line of wild palms and mesquite. The growth meanders across the dry sand and jumbled low hills like a half-secret boundary. Which it is.

“You’re on top of the fault here,” Cunningham says.

“Oh, wow,” says another one of the customers in our bright red Jeep.

“So this is it right here?” says a 30-ish man in the tone of one who expected a vast chasm, or at least something more exotic than a pile of gray clay and scattered plants. Perhaps we should carve some letters in the sand like a billboard for jet passengers: SAN ANDREAS FAULT. TROUBLE OVERDUE. Somebody call Christo.

“Yup,” Cunningham is saying. “If there’s a quake while we’re here, just sit down and take a ride.”

And so to the china cabinet. Twelve years ago, setting up house in a brand-new Los Angeles condominium, my wife and I were given a choice of carpet pads: 5/8 of an inch? 3/8? At last, here was a luxurious-sounding detail we could afford. Five-eighths, we said, pride swelling. Comes the quake of ’94. Our building shivers, glass shatters, power fails, the china cabinet’s doors pop open, and delicate doodads leap out. Across Los Angeles, bridges are falling, homes collapsing into dust, lives expiring. Yet all our doodads land softly. Not one crack. Absurd good luck.

Then a few years pass. Now we and the cabinet sit in a dining room with oak floors. If -- no, when -- the next big one comes, our little trinkets will land hard. Yes, we’ve stashed flashlights here and there, removed glass from a few picture frames, tucked away a first-aid kit, um, somewhere. But on the whole, our lives are arranged like the china cabinet, all souvenir saltshakers and grand seismic denial.

Now here’s Cunningham, upsetting it all.

“That’s the rest of the country,” he says, waving to the east. “It’s not going anywhere. This,” he adds, pointing down, “is the part that moves.”

The San Andreas fault system, more than 800 miles long and 10 or more miles deep, runs from the Gulf of California to the Point Reyes Peninsula. In a state full of parochialism, it’s one of our few widely and profoundly shared experiences, menace to Marin mansions and Hesperia hovels alike. And just as you can never really swim in the same river twice, you can never inspect the same fault twice, either.

Over the last century, with seismologists poised to speculate on every twitch, the west side of San Andreas (that is, the Northern Pacific plate) has been sliding past the east side (the North American plate) at about 2 inches a year. In other words, if you live west of the fault, by the time your mortgage is paid off, your house will be 5 feet northwest of where it began. Or maybe it’ll be 6 feet northwest, under seven feet of debris.

The land beneath our feet, an 850-acre piece of raw private property where our Jeep has visiting rights, lies above the San Andreas, including its intersection with the Banning-Mission Creek fault.

The company Cunningham works for, Desert Adventures, used to focus on Native American history. But when access troubles forced a strategic change about five years ago, the owner sensed an opportunity in fault-line explorations. Now the fliers promise “geology and jollity.” On this Saturday there are enough customers, at $69 per head, to fill three Jeeps. In mine, we’re all Californians.

“It used to be you didn’t want to hear this, because you were fearful,” Cunningham says. “But now we’re learning.”

I took this tour on a whim. But now I see that what California really needs -- besides the discovery of $14 billion under the couch cushions -- is a seismic tourism boom. Where we build, how we live; things could change.

To lead this new boom, we need not only seismologists but plain-speaking civilians like Cunningham, 51, who has a degree in biology and a history in the restaurant business. He’s been guiding tours in this valley since 1989, and his watchwords are “keep it simple. And use analogies.”

Maybe the boom’s already begun. In coming weeks, the Mountain Press Publishing Co. will release “Finding Fault in California: An Earthquake Tourist’s Guide,” a 368-page paperback by Susan Elizabeth Hough. (“Only in bad Hollywood disaster movies,” Hough writes, “do faults open up in great yawning chasms.”) Meanwhile, in Marin County, the Point Reyes National Seashore’s rangers are preparing to put up exhibit panels along a 0.6-mile, fault-line interpretive trail that gets 60,000 visitors yearly. “The whole peninsula is an incredible study in geology,” says park service spokesman John Dell’Osso. “It began down in the Tehachapi Mountains about 100 million years ago, and has moved about 300 miles since then.”

Back in the desert, the earth grinds beneath us -- this time, it’s our tires at work, not a catastrophe dawning -- and Cunningham fires off anecdotes and statistics. More than 50 subfaults branching off the San Andreas here. These gray lumps? They’re called “fault gouge” -- crushed rock, forced up from below. These palms and mesquite? A sign of a fracture nudging groundwater near the surface. Those power lines, strung across the fault? They hang low for a reason. The crews, Cunningham says, leave a little extra slack in case, you know, the earth moves in a big way. Hearing this, you can marvel at our ingenuity or shudder at our optimism.

Or you can do what I did after that desert tour: Go home and root around for that first-aid kit until it turns up in the nightstand drawer. Good. Now, how exactly do we quake-proof the rest of our lives?.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.