"Camping on the Faultline"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley

As spring drew closer to 1969, rumors began circulating -- in the commune, at the book shop, on the street. A prophet named Edgar Cayce predicted that a earthquake would occur on Good Friday of that year, and it would wreak cataclysmic destruction on California. This rumor was repeated everywhere -- no one I knew knew which of Cayce's books it actually appeared in -- yet the corroboration from conversation to conversation was remarkable.

Robin was the only person in our group who was scared at first. But since the other three of us were all in love with Robin to one degree or another, and since we were all smoking pot and were extremely susceptible to frightening ideas, we began to invest in the principle of destruction as well. The capper came one night in March, when a traveling psychotic named Jedediah stopped at our fires, and told us, with dramatic, unblinking, unhumorous intensity, that he had seen a vision of our tattered paradise disappearing under the blue-capped waves of the Pacific.

We were stoned to the gills when he made this prediction, and we were never quite sensible on the subject again. I gave my notice to Pickwick. Robin and Michael packed up our things -- stereo, records, clothes, guitar. Worth finished up at the ocean-in-a-bottle factory, then the two of us went to U-Haul and rented a van for the upcoming weekend. Thursday morning we loaded everything up and drove east to the Joshua Tree National Monument.

We camped along a stony outcropping a stone's throw from the Chicken Ranch -- we didn't want to be there in case bikers returned, or another group like Manson's. We put up a lean-to shelter of some tent stakes and bed sheets, and crouched next to rocks through the afternoon. At night we started a fire, sang songs, and speculated on the time that the earthquake would occur, whether we would be able to hear it from 150 miles away, etc.

Morning came, and the sun began its slow ascent. By noon we were baking in the sun. By two in the afternoon we were dizzy from the heat. By three we were starting to wonder about our ability to survive through the quake. But after three, we decided it had probably happened, and that it was too far away for us to have felt. We walked down the outcropping, down to the highway, then walked another two miles to a filling station, and plunked quarters into the Coke machine.

A genuine desert old timer was watching us from the counter. He had a radio on, and it was playing something pretty square. I asked him if there was any news from Los Angeles.

"Los Anagaleze? I don't think so. What are you expectin'?"

"We heard there might be some sort of earthquake."

"Gee, not that I heared. Here, let's get a city station on for you." He spun the tuner and played a few seconds of several metro stations. Business as usual on the airwaves.

"Where'd you hear about this earthquake?"

"We heard that there was going to be a Good Friday earthquake, that the San Andreas Fault would come apart and California would slide into the ocean."

The old man laughed. "San Andreas, you say? Hee hee hee!" He pointed up toward the outcropping we had walked down along. "You see that line up there, going on up into the Monument? That's your San Andreas faultline right there. If there was an earthquake, a big one I mean, well, everything along that line'd probably just disappear. We'd be the first to know about it."

We all looked at each other. We had parked about fifty feet from the fault line we were fleeing from.

We drove back into Los Angeles with heavy hearts. Sure, there was probably a silver lining to the failure of the earthquake to destroy California and kill millions, but we couldn't see what it was, not yet. We had all lost our jobs, given notice on the flat where we worshiped, and had no money. Worst of all, now we would have to pay for the van rental.

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