Parkfield is a town caught out of time. Or perhaps it would be more honest to say that it exists within its own time, a time both geologic and human, in which the minutes are marked primarily in terms of waiting, waiting for the earthquake that never comes.
An unincorporated community in Monterrey County found northeast of Paso Robles and southwest of Coalinga, the whole place has been transformed by such a process, yet in another way, barely transformed at all.
If this seems like one more contradiction, it might be the contradiction most fundamental to the way we live in California, which is why I’ve traveled the three hours north from Los Angeles, to find out if I can trace a pattern of reconciliation in a landscape suspended between myth and science, along the hardscrabble incision of the San Andreas Fault.
The tricky thing about the San Andreas is that, after more than a century of notoriety, it exists in equal measure as topography and symbol, by turns a physical and psychological dividing line. For all that it may cut a “dramatic gash,” an “infamous fracture,” I can count on one hand the people I know who have actually seen it – except, that is, for those in the seismological community.
Instead, despite its looming omnipresence in the psyche of Californians, the fault continues to occupy for most of us the territory of imagination, like a giant geological bogeyman.
Above my desk, beside a shake map of the Northridge earthquake, hangs an enhanced photograph, taken from the space shuttle Endeavour, of the San Andreas as it runs along the San Gabriel Mountains near Palmdale. In the center of the shot, you can see the fault, see the scarps and ridges as they rise on either side of it, see the terrain spell itself out like some strange runic language, a hieroglyph of indeterminacy.
Still, although I study that picture often, stare at it, touch it, even run my finger down the image of the fault trace, there’s a way in which it blurs into abstraction, revealing less than meets the eye. I love earthquake photos, love to ponder them, to dream my way beneath their two-dimensional surfaces. But ultimately, if my investigations have taught me anything, it’s that a photo can only tell us so much, after all.
In Parkfield, though, I don’t need to think in terms of photographs, because the San Andreas is everywhere. It’s the first thing I see upon arrival and the last I leave behind when I go.
From Cholame Valley Road, I turn right and literally drive straight into it, a winding serpentine that unfurls beneath a one-lane bridge reinforced with concrete pylons, where a battered metal sign announces: “San Andreas Fault. Now Entering North American Plate.”
Here, the San Andreas resembles nothing so much as a dry riverbed, about a hundred feet wide, covered in gravel, lichen, mud and bits of brush, with the merest trickle of water cutting a dirty chasm through the rocks and loose debris.
This is utterly unlike the way it looks in Redlands – wider, flatter, less … well, nuanced. But as I leave the car, I recognize the same pervasive air of silent awe. Immediately, I want to sink into the fault, to immerse in it; although an old fence marks the edge of the rift (wooden posts wrapped in rusty barbed wire, “No Hunting or Trespassing” signs hung like empty warnings), it’s so busted up that I have no trouble slipping through a gap and climbing down a couple of feet. There, something stops me from going further, a nearly physical edge of apprehension, the sense that I’m about to cross a line.
I take a deep breath and feel the landscape swell around me, feel the sheer weight of its possibility, its uncertainty, of the idea that I am at the seismic precipice, where everything begins and ends.
In the distance, beyond the sun-seared hills, I hear the low drone of a propeller plane, while somewhere in the sky’s vast whiteness, birds chirp like tiny reassuring ghosts. Yet for all that this helps keep me rooted in the present, I can’t help noticing how the present fades into an afterthought before the eternal stillness of the San Andreas, a stillness that exists beyond either myth or science, as absolute and ineluctable as all those forces sliding in and out of balance deep within the earth.
The notion that I am hovering at the brink of infinity lingers even after I return to my car and cross the bridge into Parkfield proper, which is a town, it turns out, only in the most vestigial sense. As I drive in, I see another sign –
PARKFIELDPOP. 37 ELEV. 1530
– a number so ridiculously tiny, I have to stop and read it twice. This is the smallest community I’ve ever been in: one narrow road, no more than four or five blocks long, fronted by an abbreviated cluster of single-story houses and a gift shop called the Parkfield Log Company, which is closed.
Also closed are the Parkfield Inn and the Parkfield Café, a matched set of rough wood structures, each dressed up with rusty planters made of old train parts, on which have been painted, in fake old-timey letters, variations on the slogan, “Earthquake Capitol of the World. Parkfield, California. Be Here When It Happens.”
Past the café, there is a row of mailboxes, and beyond that, a gazebo; at the far end of town, just before the road arches back across the San Andreas, a derelict railroad siding holds a vintage Santa Fe freight car and caboose. In the other direction, a trailer doubles as a library, while a low, flat building serves as a one-room schoolhouse, no more than 500 feet from the fault.
A handful of kids run around the dusty playground, screaming and chasing each other, but amidst the immensity, their voices sound as thin as whispers, and the whole scene only becomes stranger when I realize no adults appear to be around. Even the USGS monitoring station, a trailer set back from the road, looks empty and shuttered, as silent as the San Andreas itself. Although many of these buildings have clearly ridden out their share of earthquakes, Parkfield feels as ephemeral and two-dimensional as a stage set, as if the only thing that isn’t temporary is the fault.
If Parkfield has any particular message to offer, it’s that the earth outlasts us, that the issues of influence and strain and interaction will continue to play out upon this landscape long after we, with all our petty vanities, have disappeared. In that regard, Parkfield may be most important as a microcosm, a metaphor, not for earthquakes – not exactly – but for how we live in their proximity, the double vision they require, the delicate pas de deux.
I’m not saying that we should read Parkfield through the filter of illusion; there is nothing illusory about the San Andreas, which holds the town in its embrace like some ancient ancestor, a spirit in the ground.
No, what makes Parkfield compelling is precisely the opposite, that it occupies a territory outside illusion, that even to visit for one hour is to experience a peculiar clarity, a visceral appreciation of the way things are. Such clarity can elude you in Los Angeles or San Francisco, where it’s surprisingly easy to keep seismicity at a distance.
When the San Andreas runs through your backyard, however, you have no choice but to stare down the precariousness of existence on a daily basis, “to accept, consciously or unconsciously,” in the words of Joan Didion, “a deeply mechanistic view of human nature.”
Didion was referring to the Santa Ana winds when she wrote that, but she might as well have been discussing Parkfield, for what she’s saying (and what Parkfield means to tell us, also) is that in California, we dwell less in harmony with nature than at its discretion.
To ignore this is to ignore not just the risk of living in a fault zone, but the very nature of our place here, the precariousness of existence in an ever-changing world.
This is adapted from “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith” (Penguin Books, 2005) by David L. Ulin.
