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.
