We’re All on Shaky Ground

This morning, I’m listening to the birds outside my window. It’s a soothing sound, a harmony of chirping just above the level of background noise. Were I anywhere else, I might not even notice, but in Southern California, the simplest things often come loaded, carrying a weight far greater than themselves.

This is, after all, earthquake country, and in earthquake country, the story goes, birds stop chirping three hours before a major quake. Is that true? Probably not. But on both a conscious and a cellular level, I keep an ear out for the birds.

The idea that birds (or, for that matter, animals in general) can sense an impending earthquake is one of the oldest seismic myths I know of, going back to ancient Greece.

It’s also the tip of the, er, earthquake, because when it comes to seismicity, we can’t help but look for signs. We talk about earthquake weather, with its flat, dry heat, its sudden stillness; we prepare (or don’t) based on our superstitious natures, the sense that we might influence what’s going on.

In his 1946 book, “Southern California: An Island on the Land,” Carey McWilliams lists legends that emerged after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, including the supposition “that the earthquake was really caused by a moving mountain near Durango, Colo.,” or that it “was the first manifestation of an awful curse which the Rev. Robert P. Shuler had placed on Southern California, after he failed to be elected to the United States Senate.”

To some extent, such beliefs are not so different from those of the Chumash, who thought the Earth shook when giant underground snakes got tired and changed positions, or from the theories of contemporary earthquake predictors, who look to cloud formations or their own physical sensitivities and ailments to suggest when and where the next earthquake will hit.

Where do such impulses come from? And what do they mean? On the most basic level, they suggest our fear of the uncontrollable, our need to erect (if only psychologically) elaborate protective systems for ourselves. With seismicity, however, there’s another dimension, for what we know has a way of shifting underneath us, like the Earth, continually altering the nature of our belief. Of the three main pieces of folklore that McWilliams catalogs -- the notion of earthquake weather, the fear that “tall buildings are particularly perilous in a quake area” and the idea that “earthquakes are caused by the drainage of oil from the bowels of the Earth” -- the latter two, have, over the last 60 years, gained at least a measure of credibility as we learn more about how earthquakes work.

By the same token, it’s no longer entirely unreasonable to claim that there might be something to earthquake sensitivity, since we recognize that temblors disrupt the Earth’s electromagnetic field, which may produce headaches in some people by affecting the magnetite in their brains. This is also the logic behind anomalous animal behavior, that birds or dogs or horses are disturbed by electromagnetic variations before a quake. It’s a bit of a stretch, but the same was once said of an idea called earthquake interaction, which, as recently as 1992, seemed the stuff of science fiction. Then the Landers and Big Bear earthquakes struck just hours apart in the same corner of Southern California, forcing seismologists to accept that one temblor might help set up another one, that earthquakes develop out of a complex process of stress alignment among a region’s faults.

In the broadest terms, what this suggests is that science may simply offer another angle on earthquakes, a more intricately nuanced type of myth. Because you can’t create a temblor in the laboratory, when it comes to studying quakes seismologists are as much at the mercy of the elements as the rest of us, waiting for the Big One to arrive. That’s why so much earthquake science has tended toward the practical: framing stronger building codes, for instance, so that when a quake comes, fewer houses will fall down. It’s hard to argue with this kind of thinking, because the one thing we know in Southern California is that earthquakes are in our future, even if we can’t pin them down.

All the same, I’d be lying if I said a building code could comfort us, at least in the way a legend can. Faced with the uncertainty of an earthquake, we need the myths, the stories, the larger frame of reference that speaks to our imagination and our fears. We need, in other words, to make sense of the incomprehensible, to come to terms with seismicity by giving it a context we can recognize.

Not that any of this will protect us. But in the buildup to the next earthquake, it may provide a measure of solace, a strategy for coping, not all that different from listening to the birds.

*

David L. Ulin’s “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith” has just been published by Viking.