Visit the earthquake capital in California – Telegram Press

Parkfield is a city that is out of time. Or perhaps it is more true to say that it exists in its own time, geological and human time, in which the minutes are mainly distinguished in terms of waiting, waiting for an earthquake that never comes.

An unincorporated community is found in Monterey County northeast of Paso Robles and southwest of Kualinga, and the entire place has changed through the process, but in another way, it has hardly changed at all.

If this sounds like another contradiction, then the contradiction may be the most fundamental to the way we live in California, which is why I traveled three hours north from Los Angeles, to find out if I could trace a pattern of reconciliation in a landscape suspended between myth and science. The length of the hard fissure of the San Andreas Fault.

The tricky thing about San Andreas is that after more than a century of fame, it exists just as much as terrain and icons, by transforming it into a dividing line both physically and psychologically. Even though it all might cut a “dramatic wound,” a “notorious fracture,” I can count on the one hand on people I know and who have already seen him – except, those in the seismology community.

Instead, despite a looming horizon in the psyche of Californians, the error continues to occupy most of us our imagination territory, like a gigantic geological bogeyman.

Above my desk, beside a seismic map of the Northridge earthquake, hangs an enhanced image, taken from the Space Shuttle Endeavor, of San Andreas as it walks along the San Gabriel Mountains near Palmdale. In the center of the shot you can see the rift, see meandering and hillside as it rises to its sides, and see the terrain unfolding like some strange runic languages, and hieroglyphs of indeterminacy.

However, even though I study that image a lot, stare at it, touch it, and even turn my finger on the image of the error trail, there is a way in which the image is blurred into abstraction, revealing less than meets the eye. I love pictures of earthquakes, I love to contemplate them, and dream my way under their two-dimensional surfaces. But in the end, if my investigations taught me anything, it’s that the photo can tell us a lot, after all.

In Parkfield, though, you don’t need to think about photoshoots, because San Andreas is everywhere. It’s the first thing I see upon my arrival and the last thing I leave behind when I go.

From Cholame Valley Road, turn right and head straight into it, a winding serpentine rolling under a single-lane bridge reinforced with concrete towers, where a torn metal sign declares: “The San Andreas Fault. Now Entering North American Platter.”

Here, the San Andreas River looks nothing like a dry riverbed, about a hundred feet wide, covered with gravel, lichen, mud and brush bits, with a slight picking of water cutting a dirty chasm through loose rocks and debris.

This is very different from the way it looks in the Redlands – wider, flatter, less … well, subtle. But when I leave the car, I realize the same prevailing air of silent dread. Immediately, I want to dive into the bug, and dive into it; Although there is an old fence that points to the edge of the rift (rusty wooden poles wrapped with barbed wire, and the signs “No hunting or trespassing” hanging like empty warnings), it is so broken that I have no difficulty sliding through a gap and climbing on a couple of The feet. There, something is stopping me from moving forward, which is almost my limit of apprehension, and the feeling that I am about to go overboard.

I take a deep breath and feel the landscape swells around me, feeling the tremendous weight of its possibility, the uncertainty of it, the idea that I’m on the edge of a seismic precipice, where it all begins and ends.

From afar, behind the sun-scorched hills, I heard the low-pitched drone of a helicopter, while somewhere in the vast whiteness of the sky, birds chirped like reassuring little ghosts. However, despite all this helping me to keep me rooted in the present, I cannot help but notice how the present fades into a later thought before the eternal stillness of San Andreas, a stillness that exists beyond any myth or science, absolute and inevitable as all those forces slip within And out of balance in the depths of the earth.

The idea that I am hovering on the edge of infinity lingers even after I get back in my car and cross the bridge to Parkfield, which is a city, it turns out, only in an archaeological sense. As I drove the car, I saw another sign –

PARKFIELDPOP. 37 Elf. 1530

A very small number, I have to stop and read it twice. This is the smallest community I’ve ever lived: one narrow road, no more than four or five blocks long, faced by a concise collection of one-story homes and a gift shop called Parkfield Log Company, which is closed.

The Parkfield Inn and Parkfield Café, an identical set of rough timber structures, each adorned with rusty florets made from antique train parts, which were painted with antique faux letters, and variations in the slogan, “World Capitol Earthquake. Parkfield, California.” Be here when that happens. “

Behind the cafe, there is a row of mailboxes, and behind that, a gazebo; At the far end of town, just before the road returns through San Andreas, is an abandoned railroad side carrying an old Santa Fe freight car and nightmare. In the other direction, the trailer doubles as a library, while the low, flat building functions as a one-room school, 500 feet from the fault.

A few kids run around the dusty playground, screaming and chase after each other, but amidst the hype, their voices sound as weak as whispers, and the whole scene becomes even stranger when I realize that there are no adults around. Even the USGS surveillance station, a trailer pulled off the road, appears empty and closed, silent like San Andreas itself. Although many of these buildings have clearly captured their share of earthquakes, Parkfield feels ephemeral and two-dimensional like a theater set, as if the only thing non-temporary is in error.

If Parkfield has any particular message to offer, it is that the Earth is lasting longer than us, and that issues of influence, tension and interaction will continue to arise on this scene long after we have disappeared, with all our frivolous ego. In this respect, Parkfield may be more important as a microcosm, a metaphor, not for earthquakes – not exactly – but for how we live near them, the double vision they require, and the subtlety.

I’m not saying we should read Parkfield through the illusion filter. There is nothing imaginary in San Andreas, which carries the city in its arms like an ancient ancestor, a soul in the earth.

No, what makes Parkfield compelling is the exact opposite, it occupies an area beyond illusion that even a one-hour visit is to experience strange clarity, and a deep appreciation for the way things are. Such visibility can elude you in Los Angeles or San Francisco, where it’s surprisingly easy to keep earthquakes at a distance.

When the San Andreas River passes through your backyard, however, you have no choice but to stare at the instability of existence on a daily basis, to “accept, consciously or unconsciously,” “in the words of Joan Didion,” an extremely mechanical view of human nature. “

Didion was referring to Santa Anna’s winds when she wrote that, but she might also have been discussing Parkfield, because what it says (and what Parkfield means to tell us too) is that in California, we dwell less in harmony with nature than it deems appropriate.

Ignoring this means ignoring not only the danger of living in the rift zone, but the very nature of our position here, and the fragility of being in an ever-changing world.

This is excerpted from “The Myth of a Solid Earth: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Rift Line between Reason and Faith” (Penguin Books, 2005) by David L. Olin.

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