37—Juan de Who?

As I stood staring at the box springs wedged at a hopless angle in the doorways between the living room and narrow side room, I heard a scratching sound at the other end. cd was watching from the back of the sofa. Damn. The anxiously persistent little tuxedo cat now trapped in the side room was trying to claw her way out. I pictured the covering on Chuck’s box springs shredded.“Hang in there, sweetie,” I called in my most confident voice. A moment of silence was followed by a yowl, then a kind of tussling. Her claw was stuck. “Lift up, sweetie,” I called. A rip was followed by more scratching.

On Chuck’s fifteen-inch TV, a man was droning on to the Tillamook County Commissioners about Juan de-Someone. “Well, let’s shut him the fuck up,” I said and was reaching for the POWER button when a map of North America appeared and a red laser dot began tracing the coast line from nothern Vancouver Island to northern California. Suddenly words started popping out of the droning—Juan de-Fuca . . .  not a person but a plate. A tectonic plate converging with another plate in the Cascadia subduction zone . . ." Whoa!. ". . . twisting clockwise into the subduction zone . . . conflicting with oblique subduction under the North American plate fed by the divergence . . . earthquakes . . . volcanos . . . the worst case scenario—devastation of the entire west coast of North America . . .” 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Fuca_Plate

Holy fucking son of a bitch shit. But then the droning spoke of the blow up of 5600 B.C. that collapsed Mt. Mazama into Crater Lake. Oh, well. Ancient history. I reached again for the POWER button. "And more recently the eruption of Mt. St. Helens." At which point, the droning came to the upshot and bottom line:

Studies showed earthquake activity occurred roughly every three hundred years. It was not if the plates slip but when—the last recorded disaster January 26, 1700. 

Following that quake estimated somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2 on the famed scale, the very coastline where I was standing had collapsed. Trees with ring counts ending in the year 1699 showed that entire forests had fallen into the sea. Records of a tsunami in Japan occurred at the same time with no other seizmic activity evident in the Pacific Rim. 

Feeling light headed, I realized I'd stopped breathing.

MITTS began yowling.

“And right in the center of the disaster zone—” the drone went on as the red laser pointer hovered over familiar ground, “Tillamook County.” 

Thonk, I heard down the long corridor of my terror. 
cd rushed the window and hitting it, rattled the glass. 
The bird shrieked. cd puffed up and hissed. The bird departed. 

I looked out at the sun setting over the Pacific. At any moment, the ground might not just rattle the Richter at 9.0 but liquify as the entire coastline fell fifty feet. And while the ocean would be sucked out for fifteen minutes or so, a hundred-foot wall of water would then come rushing in. Holy fucking son of a bitch shit. What had I done to myself. I couldn’t even get out my damned door to make a run for it.

A knock at the door scared the hell out of me. 
It was Chuck. I opened the bedroom window that looked out into the hallway. His wife had been visiting relatives in South Carolina and was coming home tomorrow. He’d bought her a necklace and wanted to know if I liked it. 

Within minutes, he’d helped me unwedge the springs then angle the mattress forward, after which we backed it into the hallway then slid it right into the side room and laid it on the bed frame. We then followed suit with the mattress.

Freed, MITTS had darted into the bedroom and escaping into a closet had toppled a box of pencils, pens, and other office sundries onto the floor.

“We live in a 9 earthquake zone,” I said while surreptitiously checking out the damage to the springs MITTS may have caused. Only a few loose threads.

“Oh yeah,” Chuck said then laughed as he snapped open the blue velveteen box to show me the necklace. “It’ll give us something to tell our grandkids.” 

The necklace was lovely.

That night as I lay staring at the ceiling listening to the sound of the sea, I could feel the vibrations of the incoming tide of the great primordial body lapping at the bottom of my hill. 

To this moment, living on the existential edge had been nothing but a philosophical option. 
That edge having suddenly become real, I realized how nothing I’d learned in all those years in school had prepared me for the quaking and collapse of the ground under me followed by a hundred foot wall of water.

The cats had fallen asleep on either side of me. Their dead-weight always felt like a body cast but tonight was the only comfort I had in this world. 

Where, I wondered, did the bird go at night?


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