The Myth of Solid Ground... | Buy

From the first earthquake David L. Ulin experienced in San Francisco at age eighteen, he was fascinated with the daily lives of Californians, who seem to be going about their business with just an occasional rumbling interruption. But these tectonic shifts could easily wreak cataclysmic havoc, just as they did in the great earthquake of 1906.In The Myth of Solid Ground, Ulin explores how an unlikely collection of scientists, psychics, and apocalyptics have made startlingly accurate earthquake predictions based on everything from magnetic fields to the behavior of whales. In the end, Ulin uses the world of earthquake prediction to explore the deep fault lines of belief and the human longing to hold control, no matter how misguided, over a mysterious and deadly phenomenon that is as much a part of California as speed, youth, and celebrity.

David L. Ulin is the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology. He is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly; he has also written for GQ, the Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and the Chicago Tribune.

Three April Earthquakes	1	(33)
The X-Files	34	(40)
A Brief History of Seismology	74	(40)
Earthquake Country	114	(40)
Before and After Science	154	(24)
Shaking All Over	178	(37)
East of Eden	215	(21)
The Unified Field Theory of Everything	236	(34)
The Myth of Solid Ground	270	(13)
Index	283

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THREE APRIL EARTHQUAKES Let me tell you about the earliest earthquake I remember. It happened in the spring of 1980, when I was eighteen years old and living in my first apartment, on Haight Street in San Francisco, with two friends from high school, a collection of Grateful Dead tapes, and a glorious sense of aimlessness, of being adrift in a magical universe, where virtually everything I confronted in my daily life could be construed to harbor a hidden message of some kind. Later that year, over the Fourth of July holiday, I would ask for a sign of God?s existence; two days afterwards, a car in which I was a passenger went out of control on the 101 just south of Novato, slamming into a guardrail and rolling once, end over end, onto the highway shoulder, yet somehow leaving all five of us who?d been inside miraculously unhurt. I mention this neither to support nor debunk the God story, but simply as an illustration, to show the kind of boy I was, the things I thought about, the way I saw the world. It was a period in which I spent a lot of time considering connections, pondering synchronicity and the heady, if inaccessible, question of truth, awash in the quest for ultimate answers and the meaning that, I felt sure, was waiting, if only I could peel back the surface of the earth.Among the more self-aggrandizing legends to swirl through San Francisco in the days I lived there was one claiming that the city was a modern re-creation of the lost kingdom of Atlantis; both places, or so the story went, were ringed by water and anchored by large white pyramids with red blinking eyes at their apexes, and both (here?s the self- aggrandizing part) represented landscapes of enlightenment in a universe of human darkness, zones of fulfillment where people could exist as their most heightened, elemental selves. From the perspective of the present, I now see this story for the provincial fantasy it was, but I remain struck by just how often, during the spring of 1980, I happened to hear it, from people who didn?t know one another, people who had nothing in common, whose definitions of enlightenment could never have encompassed one another?s points of view. For one friend, it was a matter of mass reincarnation: San Francisco, she told me, was filling up with reborn Atlanteans?which, according to her scattershot cosmology, meant anyone who had ever been drawn to the city, or, in other words, nearly all of us. Another friend took things a step further, insisting that when all the Atlanteans finally reached San Francisco, the city would be destroyed by earthquake and tidal wave, just as Atlantis itself purportedly had been. The year this would happen, she told me, was 1982, although she couldn?t explain why, exactly, other than to say she?d heard it somewhere, from someone else along the never-ending daisy chain of myth. When pressed, she?d shrug her shoulders and point at the fog-swept hills or the bulge of Mount Tamalpais, reclining like a sleeping Indian princess in the soft green distance past the Golden Gate Bridge, and say in a voice marked equally by wistfulness and wonder, ?It makes sense when you think about it. This place is just too beautiful to exist.? In the midst of all this legend making, I was asked by another friend, a girl named Lauren, to spend Easter Sunday in Marin County, at her grandparents? house. Easter was not a holiday to which I paid much attention?too fetishistic, too stained by blood and obligation, not to mention that I was Jewish?but living three thousand miles from home, I missed the rootedness of family, the quality of belonging, of a past that extended further back in time than yesterday or last week. Because of that, when Easter finally rolled around, my roommates and I accompanied Lauren and her parents across the Golden Gate, through the rainbow tunnel at the north end of Sausalito, and up into the hills of Mill Valley, where her grandparents lived in one of those cantilevered Calif