On Wondering When 'The Big One' Will Hit

By Shustov (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

"Are you afraid of earthquakes?"

I was having lunch with a friend from New York City who I hadn't seen in probably 15 or more years. Now that he's moved to LA, too, we have lots to talk about.

And questions like these inevitably come up.

"I'm not afraid of 'The Big One' per se," I told him, "but I'm afraid of how people will react in the aftermath."

The stuff of my nightmares is the run on gas, the traffic jams, looting, and generalized mass hysteria. The actions of others feel so beyond my control.

I did, however, have one clarification to make: "I'm afraid of an earthquake happening and me not being home with my cat. I'm really afraid of my cat being home alone during a big earthquake."

Unfortunately, unless I become a shut-in, there's nothing I can do about that.

I approach our seismic precariousness with a fair amount of scientific interest and healthy skepticism. I've explored the San Andreas Fault in more than one section. I've seen firsthand how past earthquakes can ravage buildings, landscapes, and roadways.

I have, in some way or another, walked in the historical path of destruction of Long Beach, Sylmar, Landers, Whittier, and more.

So, the threat of a geological, geophysical, seismological event on a massive scale is pretty real to me. My lack of fear doesn't come out of ignorance.



Or does it?



We know very well that we're overdue for an earthquake whose magnitude is at the upper end of the Richter Scale.



The last one of that category to hit Southern California was on January 17, 1994 at 4:30 a.m.



Although the epicenter of that one was located in the San Fernando Valley community of Reseda (technically Los Angeles), it was dubbed the Northridge Earthquake.

It occurred along a previously unknown fault, also later dubbed the Northridge blind thrust fault.



Most of the twisted wreckage from nearly a quarter-century ago has been cleared—except in one place, where it's been turned into sculptural art as a memorial for the victims of the earthquake.



That's on the campus of California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where the Lauretta Wasserstein Earthquake Sculpture Garden pays tribute to the destruction and devastation that hit a little too close to home (about a mile from the epicenter).



All the buildings on the campus had been damaged by the Northridge earthquake.



Those that weren't brought down by the initial jolt and aftershocks erupted into a fiery (and sometimes toxic) blaze.



And yet artist Marjorie Berkson Sievers (a CSUN alum) and landscape architect Paul Lewis managed to see beauty in the rubble...



...converting disembodied columns, pillars, stairs, and walls (mostly from a collapsed parking structure) into a kind of artificial reef for nature to twist itself around...



...vines to crawl through...



...and plants to inhabit.



Of course, the damage brought on by the Northridge earthquake wasn't isolated to the West Valley—it stretched for 85 miles. But to really grasp what happened in the middle of the night in January 1994, you've got to go back to Northridge and look at some of that rubble.

That is, until something similar happens again.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: Facing Our Faults
These Tremors of the Night
In Search of the Epicenter
One of Many Firsts: Earthquake

The Silence Is Deafening

I'm the kind of person that needs a lot of sonic distraction.

I can't sleep out in the middle of the country unless there are wolves howling, trains chugging, or the wind whipping. Absolute silence keeps me awake at night.

In college, I didn't just listen to music while I wrote a paper or studied for a test. I listened to music while on the London Tube or sitting in the middle of a Burger King in Leicester Square.

Some might consider listening to the radio while driving a distraction. As for me, it's a good way to focus on the task at hand.

So, imagine my discomfort today when I attended a puppet show that had practically no soundtrack at all.

I might as well have been watching a show of mimes. Only the mimes were wearing costumes that looked like giant hands and carrying umbrellas to look like jellyfish.

The problem, however, wasn't that the auditorium was silent. It's that the lack of sound coming from the stage meant that all the other sounds in the house were amplified.

All the coughing children and their fluish parents.

The stuffy-nosed child behind me lying on her father's lap.

The tike who insisted on narrating the show with his observations, like "He's counting how many!" and "Pink!" and "There's two of them!"

Thanks, buddy. We know. We're watching the same show as you.

The woman sitting next to me was wrestling with a plastic bag and eating trail mix out of it. The smell of chewed peanuts intermingled with some personal care product she'd used that reminded me of industrial-strength public restroom air freshener.

The silence was making me nauseous. I was dying for some music or dialogue.

Mummenschanz had been haunting me for the greater part of 30 years—or even more—after watching the TV commercial for it on repeat as a child. I never knew exactly what it was.

And when I saw the troupe of dancers-slash-contortionists-slash-puppeteer-mimes were performing locally, I figured it was time I found out.

But in the end, I couldn't watch it.

At least, I couldn't just watch it.

I'm sure this falls under the category of "It's not you; it's me." I take the blame. Others seemed to be enjoying the show.

But I couldn't even concentrate on the show with all that hacking and sniffling and rattling and chatting and vibrating of a cell phone two seats down from me.

I got a brief reprieve when one of the skits was about a frog trying to catch a fly. Thank god for the buzzing of that fly.

But once it ended, I knew I had to leave. I couldn't take it anymore.

At least now I know.



Related Posts:
Dark Matters
The Sounds of Silence
Dulling the Senses

A Specter of Light and Glory in Days of Darkness

"Bottle houses" were a thing back in the Old West, during the Gold Rush and in the heyday of mine camps. The men there drank enough booze to make enough raw material available, and they mortared those green, cobalt blue, and clear bottles together into structurally sound shacks that, thanks to the translucence of the glass, let in plenty of natural light.

But nobody in California needs to use bottles for building anymore. Our glass recyclables are collected regularly, and our building materials are cheap and mass marketed far and wide. We have electricity and solar panels. And when all else fails, we repurpose shipping containers.

So, those glass bottles that remain—the ones that haven't been replaced by plastic—may have lost their architectural utility, but that just means they've been reclassified.

Now, they're art.

circa 2014

Bottle art is usually more associated with folk artists like Grandma Prisbrey of Bottle Village or Elmer of Bottle Tree Ranch...

circa 2014

...but those are examples of traditionally untrained commoners (hence, the "folk" in "folk art").

circa 2014

And although they—as well as others, like Simon Rodia of Watts Towers—serve as a major inspiration for Randlett Lawrence...

circa 2014

...the "Randy" of "Randyland" in LA's Echo Park (near Dodger Stadium) was already an incredibly talented builder when he began erecting the glorious and monumental bottle art sculpture in front of his house.



But when he's not building sets for Hollywood productions, he's been paying tribute to the Virgin of Guadalupe—in colored glass bottles, rebar, and wire (including her wings, which are cobalt blue).



And, like much of his folk art predecessors and contemporaries, Randy is constantly changing it.



The basic approach is simple and consistent throughout the sculpture's iterations: Take a teardrop-shaped bottle, fill it with water, harness it in a wire cage (akin to, say, the wire cage that protects the cork on a bottle of champagne) and string it up with a bunch of others.



You can see the so-called "Phantasma Gloria" sculpture from the street, of course (that's part of the point)—and at certain angles at certain times of day, the sunlight shining through it is certainly brilliant. But it's a really rare and special experience to climb up the stairs and find yourself behind it.



And that's when you get to meet Randy.



Randy calls the bottles "lenses" and, years after making his discovery in a "blue blaze of light," still marvels at the inverted images inside created by their convex shape.



That's why this bottle mosaic is more than a "suncatcher" or a "lightcatcher."



In fact, Randy calls it a "Sky Catcher"—because each "lens" becomes something of a crystal ball reflecting the world back at us.



And, if not our actual world, then some parallel, upside-down universe.



And he never gets sick of finding new ways to look at it—or look at the world around him through it.



Depending on the time of year and the angle of the sun, there are certain peak times to view it to get "maximum refraction"...



...but honestly, it's the kind of thing you could sit and watch all day, as the colored light beams shift position and different aspects of the mosaic get illuminated at different times.



It changes dramatically, even just over the course of an hour.

And as you watch it, you get the sense that it is watching you, too.



And everything looks better through the lens of beauty and art and color and light.



But for some of us, the natural inclination is to dim and darken, to enable our myopia rather than embrace the colossal.

Thank goodness for people like Randy who are here to set us straight on what's important.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: Bottle Tree Ranch
Photo Essay: Bottle Village (Updated for 2016)
Capturing Particles of Light in Three Dimensions
Meditations on Chroma

Kidding Season [Updated for 2024]

[Last updated 11/16/24 3:27 PM PT—Angeles Crest Creamery is no longer engaged in any commercial enterprises, so you can no longer pay to visit for a ranch tour or a hike with the goats.]

Why can't I have a baby goat?



That was my lament this weekend when I returned to Angeles Crest Creamery in the Antelope Valley to meet the new kids on the ranch.



But I didn't mean, "Why can't I have a baby goat as a pet?"



I was more bemoaning the fact that I couldn't be a mother to a baby goat. If I were to ever become a mother, thanks to my anatomy, genetics, and evolutionary legacy, I'd be stuck giving birth to a human.



It's always so interesting when there's a new herd of kids—and how, even at their tiny size, they're OK being away from their mothers, as long as they're together.



The mothers, however, are not.



The does are beside themselves if they can't see their babies in the herd, and they're relentless in calling out to them.



But all it takes is getting them within view ever so briefly, and all is calm again.



There's some Darwinian adaptation that certain animals (like humans) have that make them attracted to babies—to want to have them, take care of them, and ensure their survival.



I seem to only have that with kids of the cloven hoof—not kids of the sucking thumb variety.



I don't know why, really—because they're not all that different.



One of the baby goats at Angeles Crest this weekend took to sucking my thumb, since it didn't have one of its own.



It pressed my finger against the hard palate of the roof of its mouth and worked its tongue against the underside, while its lips puckered around it.



All goats—regardless of age—can be a bit nibbly (as evidenced by the chewed-up hem of one of my shirts), a behavior you don't want to necessarily encourage in them...



...but I was so happy to be a human pacifier for that kid.



Goats just naturally look like they're smiling...



...but I think at Angeles Crest Creamery, they truly are happy.



And that's more than I can say for most babies who eventually learn to stand upright and walk on two legs.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: Hiking with Baby Goats
A Mother-Not-to-Be