LETTERS FROM HOME: SAVING GRACES

Jan. 20, 1994

I am writing in the hope that the mail will get through even when phone calls can't.

DC and I have been reminiscing -- if that is the correct word -- about our earthquake experiences. She was living in San Francisco during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, and I was just 20 miles to the south in Redwood City, less-than-blissfully oblivious to each other. She was sharing a house with some people. None of them closed their doors for many nights afterward, and they slept in their clothes. The ground shook often, and the sirens never slept.

DC said she eventually went walking, hoping to escape the scenes of destruction all around and to find the sun. There was so much rubble to step around, she said, that she didn't have time to look up.

Familiar landscape seems foreign, as if you had been roughly shaken awake for a pleasing dream. But beyond the broken buildings and stricken faces of her neighbors, DC found the sun and life as she knew it were much the same.

Normality will return, I know you know, though maybe sameness does not. And that might be good.

The Gaia in me likes to look at earthquakes as wake-up calls, and you know I need those from time to time. Poison -- the kind of deadliness that surfaces in riots as well as that which glows in the dark -- must be unearthed and expelled if the organism is to survive.

We're getting better on the environmental front. When I lived 60 miles to the north in Eureka during the early '80s, two pulp mills were spewing noxious fumes over the city day and night, bringing dangerous shipments of chlorine into the bay, and releasing a dioxin-flavored ooze into the ocean. A coalition of environmentalists and surfers sued the multinational corporations, and won.

Now the companies have switched to making a chlorine-free product, which is not quite as white as the paper products people are used to. Their environmental consciousness now raised, the companies are trying to establish chlorine-free as the industry standard. One plans to begin making the raw material for child-friendly diapers. Life can be so ironic.

Watching the pictures of those mangled L.A. freeways, I wonder where all the cars will fit now. Would there be enough parking spaces if everybody just stayed home? I mumbled something about the opportunity to establish mass transportation in the city. "Uh-uh," says DC, who doubts just about everything. But I don't strongly object, remembering that every Angeleno has a Thomas Guide street map in their unoccupied passenger seat.

Joni Mitchell said it's the city of the fallen angels, and I reckon she's always been right about a lot of things. Like the need to call someplace home, even if the living ain't easy. And our need for each other. Our saving grace.

Rodney King pointed out the ways our differences separate us from each other if we make too much of them. An earthquake makes playthings of hilltops and valleys alike, and drops all colors and creeds to their knees. Now the fear is not of each other, but of facing such a god-powerful force alone.

Fog is hiding Bear Butte this morning, but I know it's still there, sheltering the town from the westerlies off the Pacific. The sun is hidden too, but will appear about midday. When I finish writing, I'll replenish the woodpile on the porch and fire up the bread-maker (I do love the 20th century.). Those who need a home away from home for awhile, come.

Love, Sam