Wild Horses, Wild Dreams

Unpublished stories, 1980-present.

People Like That Are Just Nervous Nellies

I'm not irrational. Not yet, anyway.

But I am no cool customer, either. I may become irrational, because this is a way of thinking, and you've got to calm it down, toss it out to sea. If you kept this up, you would lose your total grip, you would just be a mass of anxiety. What happened to the meditation practice? It seems to have hopped, skipped, left town on the five o'clock.

Nothing really bad has happened, at least not to me. But we are surrounded by disaster—Iraq, Katrina, Rita, the poor of Afghanistan, of Oakland and Berkeley. My fear-of what? Of dying? Of being caught unaware, of other people's denial? is a great sucking machine gobbling up disasters near and far, stringing them all together like a necklace of small rhinos.

The Girl Scout motto was Be Prepared. How could a child be prepared? For what? I guess the thought was to teach this as a concept, that wherever you were going, you should get your gear together, think out what you needed. At the time I didn't think, cynically, but they can't cover all the bases. They can't know about the friend on the top of Annapurna who's going to want to die and be left, and the problem of having to get her down the many miles of mountains on a pack frame.

I was a good Brownie, and a decent Girl Scout, for as long as the interest sustained — probably till about twelve. After that, it was the freedom of the Polly Pigtails Club, where I made up all the rules, and then joined the rules of dancing...ballet, where I persevered in chasing the illusion that I had control over my own body.

It strikes me now that even though I flew up and got my wings and could tie my yellow front kerchief on the same principle as a necktie, (right over left and under, left over right and under) and even excelled at Flying "G" Girl Scout Camp for a few summers, getting every honor and piece of achievement I wanted, that they were not suggesting to young girls Be Prepared for Everything.

Maybe it just made me wary, since no child could hope to know enough to really be prepared. You get exhausted long before you can make sure you're safe. In the end, more is out of our control than in.

We live on the Hayward fault. Not nearby, not in the corridor, that broad swath that also includes the Berkeley Hills and the University of California and the stadium and Greek Theater, but ON it. In The Big One I picture that the crack opens up, we fall in. Those tectonic plates slip a bit, caput! There goes my sister and my house, our major investment. Down come the houses above us, and the hillside, on top of our house.

We grew up in this house. Eight years ago when I came back to California, divorced and alone, and joined Thelma here I was consumed by the danger of living on the Hayward fault. I insisted the house be reinforced. Thelma looked on bemused and sometimes alarmed, while I worked with the engineer and the contractor, watching and understanding what they were doing, crawling under the house to look. We had the foundation bolted on the east and south wall. We had two hold-downs installed per running length of shear wall. We held in our hands a sample of the correct thickness of plywood for the shear wall (5 layers) and stared at boxes of the correct nails and observed their nailing pattern. The engineer and contractor (who did not get along any too well) described the joist ties they would anchor to every joist bisecting a shear wall and even to every other non-bisecting joist.

But the real jewel of the system, shown in three architectural drawings with the stamp of MJ Berenson, county structural engineer, was the installation of a steel beam over the garage. Sunk into concrete on either side, this voluntary rigid moment rigid frame was to provide seismic resistance for what was described as a "soft story condition" existing at the garage door. You don't want anything to do with a soft-story condition in your life. It's like not having a rib cage or a neck, just having your head float hopefully above your waist. The "soft story situation" was two stories resting on a frame with nothing beneath it, which is the most common design of houses in the Bay Area. Here we build UP on a narrow lot, rather than ramble laterally in a long ranch house on a wide lot. We remember the Marina houses which collapsed in the quake of '89... Ashes, ashes. All fall down.

So, we did these things, Thelma acquiescing to my demands.

We bought earthquake insurance, which now covers half of what the house is worth. Replacement value is different from market value. The contractor came up with a gizmo called a gas meter cut-off valve, not much talked about today, one of those items (like an atomic or nuclear bomb) which is hard to test separate from the reality. When tripped by an earthquake of 7.0 or more, a ball begins to roll from its pedestal, and drops onto a valve that closes the passage, blocking the flow of gas and preventing a fire. This is in case we're not here to turn off the gas, or are lying prone on the floor pinned beneath some large object or the ceiling, or dashing to get outside. Or where should we be dashing to? Are we supposed to be still standing beneath a doorway? Or ducking under a desk?

We strapped the water heater to the wall, and went to the beach.

Then I started an earthquake awareness group on my block, responding to a flyer put under my door. Oddly, I was the only one who responded. This was in 1998. I xeroxed sixty copies of various communiqués, hoping to have more of a sense of community. The state government sent material describing an elaborate scheme of neighborhood teams, which proved totally unworkable, way too much. There was a set of five classes to take, which when you completed earned you a certificate, a neon yellow mesh vest and a white plastic hardhat which said NEAT (Neighborhood Emergency Awareness Teams).

But out of sixty families on these two blocks, only about twelve or fifteen or at the most thirty came to talk about how to pull together as a neighborhood in an earthquake, and take care of our families. Perhaps they made their own preparations. Some of us took the NEAT course.

Eventually, I got exhausted and stopped my own participation, and then nothing happened. No on came forward to take hold of it.. I slunk back with the rest of my folks into the cave of denial, each in our own homes, getting up for work, going to work, coming home, the sports activities of the children, the care of the aging parents.

Denial of the earthquake is like the denial that your life is filled with racist reactions, if you're black. It exists, it's ghastly, but you can't be super-aware of it every day. You crawl into your cave, because the time when there isn't an earthquake, here, now, so dwarfs the vagueness of it might happen in the next fifteen minutes or the next fifteen years. Most people couldn't deal with that enough to want to sit in someone's living room and talk about it, and then go have drills and practices for what we were going to do, which takes thinking through every step of the occurrence and the response in a simulation. Or some odd reason, probably my attraction to theater and acting, I found this absorbing, and a worthwhile exercise.

But there was something wrong with my own process, of course. I had a box of supplies. Now that I'm much more scared, and have lived out of state for some months each year during the past five years, I have much more perspective. I have no denial at all. We need about four boxes or large garbage cans, one for camping equipment so we can live in our backyard for three days to a week, one for food and water, one for clothes and other necessities. After all, it's just my middle sister Thelma and me.

I haven't looked at my box in five years. What's wrong is that I find it much easier to think about the group, and update the roster with new emails, kind of try to get it going again with new leadership, than to go buy more boxes and fill them. Make a better kit.

And why is that? Because it's no fun to buy this stuff. And yet.

Now we call them kits. Since Katrina and Rita, emergency preparation is on the rise. Our terrific investment in real estate seems fragile indeed. After an earthquake, if these houses are badly damaged, they won't be worth diddlisquat.