Before the Shaking Starts
Illustration: Connor Heckert We chased the fault line south of Salt Lake City, just past the Cottonwood Canyons, to a small ridge that overlooked a reservoir as silver as the sky. It was October, during a cold drizzle, and the sun was lofted behind the clouds like a shineless mothball. My brother, a Ph.D. student in geology, explained that what appeared to me as indistinct knolls and dips were “expressions” where the fault had deformed the Earth above it. I had spent the day looking at the ground or aiming my eye down my brother’s extended arm to identify subtleties like this. When my gaze finally returned to the Wasatch Mountains, the vision was fresh and horrifying. They were monster-like, tyratnnizing the skyline with their beauty. Under their jagged eminence, my brother and I felt burdened with our knowledge of the region’s fate.
Earthquakes had invaded my dreaming. I sometimes lay awake, panicked by the slightest tremble of my nightstand or groan from the innards of my home. I pictured the Earth shattering in twilight, then, in seconds, my girlfriend and me struggling to breathe under the rubble of our house. Our dog squealing. Distant sirens echoing through the old neighborhoods south of the city. The Wasatch Front, a regional section of the larger Wasatch Range which carves and rolls from Utah into Idaho, is due for an earthquake that will dwarf the quakes of Utah’s last century—at least 7 on the moment magnitude scale. One seismologist puts the quake’s odds at one out of two in the next fifty years, meaning the risk cannot be relegated to unborn generations. Every day, I stared at the mountains and wondered what they had in store for the living.
In the autumn of 1883, some years after an earthquake in Owens Valley, California, killed over two dozen people and injured many more, the legendary geologist G. K. Gilbert warned readers of the Salt Lake Tribune that fault exposures created by earthquakes were “conspicuously absent” along the Wasatch Fault near their city. By Gilbert’s reasoning, this meant there hadn’t been an earthquake there in a very long time. “In this period the earth strain has been slowly increasing,” he wrote, “and some day it will overcome friction, lift the mountains a few feet, and re-enact on a more fearful scale the catastrophe of Owens Valley.” Proof of Gilbert’s portent followed over the next century, in the form of lesser earthquakes: Mt. Baldy (1901), St. George (1902), Sevier Valley (1921), Hansel Valley (1934), Cache Valley (1962). “What are the citizens going to do about it? Probably nothing,” Gilbert speculated, imagining them unlikely to abandon seismically weak materials like brick, stone, and adobe. He was right. He was also correct in assuming that an advanced geology would be little help in predicting exactly when the quake would occur, for “it is only by such disasters that we can learn” about the fault in question. By the time we acquired such knowledge, Gilbert concluded, “Salt Lake City will have been shaken down, and its surviving citizens will have sorrowfully rebuilt it of wood.”
Today we know far more about the machinations of the Wasatch Fault, and we are, by Gilbert’s calculus, that much closer to the historic quake. I had come here to live with my brother on a coin flip, making that 50 percent chance feel like a particularly cruel irony.
To leave such a great shift in my life to a clichéd performance of chance was, I believed, to dramatize what was already the case. I arrived in Utah obsessive and neurotic, believing the world hostile to modern creatures like me, who experienced life as a perpetual contradiction between the volatile realities of existence and our impulse to control it. My immune system had nearly killed me; whatever I was calling a “career” seemed wholly fruitless and irrelevant; the social and political realms in which I hoped to find respite from my cynicism were themselves withering in the hot winds of an era of anger and dissonance. I survived by disengaging, by placing great and unnatural distance between myself and the chaos of the world. My life had become a kind of epiphenomenal drama, something always reeling away.
I had promised myself I would not become such, I thought, . His inner turmoil had darkened his vision of the world and its fate.
