Waiting for the Big One

One thing that is certain about Oregon’s north coast is its tempest of changeable weather. From hour to hour, the temperature rises and falls. On Neahkahnie Mountain, it’s not uncommon to experience a temperature drop of twenty degrees or more and powerful gusts of wind that suddenly come from nowhere. A boiling sun is often quickly shrouded in fog.  And there are many types of fog. Some fog is so dense you can hardly see your hand stretched out in front of your face. Other fog is as light as frothy air and blows out to sea with the wind.  This is a place of where contradictory senses compete for your affection. You can fall in love with the sensation of the hot sun warming your skin and still, at the same time, fog-like cold steam is tickling the tip of your nose. You can count on fog being present here as surely as you can count on following the constant of the Northern Star, which on a clear night is most certainly visible in the coastal sky.

Clouds on the coast are like no others on earth and form the shape of ordinary objects you might recognize as teapots, beards, birds, snow domes, whales, sea lions, old men smoking pipes and potbelly woodstoves.  The shapes of these colossal coastal clouds only belong to the realm of the familiar because your own imagination makes it so; otherwise these clouds are strange, other worldly and hang eerily in the balance somewhere between wicked beauty and frightful signs of a squall, a storm or maybe even The Big One. Hanging high or dipping low in the horizon, riding fast or slow, floating like a wad of cotton stuck in a fence or racing away like planes, ships, trains, cars and horses, jettisoned by fast moving air currents, their shapes are only familiar to our senses because they have been fueled by our own imagination. We want certainty in our lives and our imagination will always help us find the salvation of thinking we are secure—at least for the time being.

My husband Joe always comments on the moon here. On clear nights you can see the Milky Way—that much is incredible and for certain. On our first night here this summer, there was a deep red colored full moon. My husband Joe, who survived a tour in Vietnam and more than one mortar round, has lived on the cusp of Waiting for the Big One.  Every time he walked point in the jungle, there was the certainty that The Big One could be the next bushwhack.  He knew of some men who did not make it back, and others who were wounded so badly they wished they hadn’t made it back. “It’s a red full moon,” he commented. “The red is from all the brush fires in California, but that doesn’t stop it from looking magical.”

As human beings, we want to make the strange and magical seem more familiar and certain so it’s not scary or unpredictable. It’s why we tend to believe with great certainty that a big puffy cloud looks more like a fancy pail in a child’s sandbox than the first sign that a really bad storm is moving in. This is one reason why no one who lives here or visits here is Waiting for The Big One to happen. No one really believes that this magnificent coast will be one day swept away by the largest earthquake in the history of the Pacific Northwest or maybe even the world. 

The first night Joe and I moved into our coastal home we foolishly lumbered down the long trail to the beach. It took us longer than we thought to get there but coming back up was even more vexing and not magical at all. We counted seconds instead of minutes. It was a big climb from the beach to the middle of the mountain.  From moment to moment, we did not know what we were doing. The climb up the hill is that steep and has some tricky switchbacks. Now that I mention it, the climb is more than steep. Most people who live here do not climb this hill, nor do they mount the hill in the fog, late at night, not knowing where they are going or how to pace themselves for the long climb.  We were doing all of these things. The fog set in thick like threads of sharp icicles clinging to the night air. It was December and it was cold. Between the fog, the night and the cold, we could not see. 

Except Joe had a large flashlight, the square kind that takes eight batteries to shine so that it never runs out of juice. As we made it to a flat plane in our climb he shone that light and then we saw them as plain as if it had been day. About twenty feet away there was pair after pair after pair—sets of dark eyes reflecting light from the beam of our flashlight that was filtered through a wave of floating mist. In our innocence, we had stumbled into the heart of a large herd of elk. They looked at us but they did not move. I am certain if I had been one of the elk, I would have looked at us with mild disdain. After all, we worry about the eventuality of The Big One and they do not. As we continued the final leg of our climb, the entire herd of elk formed a line in single file and trotted slowly away and down the hilly trail as if they were bored with us. 

The north coast of Oregon is a feast for more than all of your imagination. Your senses grow more acute here. From minute to minute, what you see sharpens into focus. From Neahkahnie Mountain I see miles and miles of the Pacific Ocean clear down to Tillamook Head. And while my eyes are spanning the distance I don’t miss one stray detail even if it is a lone chipmunk racing across the pebbled road to avoid being seen by an enormous hawk that sits perched in a fir tree like a royal despot who rarely moves until it is time to swoop down upon his prey.  Year after year, it seems to be the same hawk. I do not know how to distinguish one hawk from another. I am certain though that a hawk always sits atop this same tree.  I am equally certain it is not the same chipmunk running for cover. I guess I am certain of the laws of nature. Hawks are awfully good at swooping up small rodents and chipmunks have short life spans.  Of this I am certain.

They, those who are certain, say this windswept Oregon coast is a young part of the earth, geologically speaking, but there is another name for this place. This is God’s country where time stands still, sort of, and waits for no man or woman. And no one, man, woman, child, beast or bird knows the hour when The Big One will finally arrive, or if it will arrive at all. 

We don’t often choose when and where we will die. Some of us who are lucky enough, die surrounded by loved ones or the luckiest of us all die in our sleep. Dying in your sleep is considered lucky, I guess, unless you are my cousin Kathy who went to bed one night and never woke up, leaving behind a new baby boy, a toddler girl and a devastated husband. She was 25, an award-winning athlete, and unbeknownst to all had a serious heart condition that was discovered for the first time post- mortem during her autopsy. 

Okay, it’s far more dramatic to talk about a natural disaster that kills thousands of people and leaves months of carnage in its wake than it is to talk about my dead cousin Kathy whom you did not know.  Let’s talk about manmade disaster for a moment.  I frequently travel to New York City and always ride the subway.  For some time now, terrorists have been quiet.  Maybe they are toiling away unseen and undetected waiting for the right time to hatch The Big One.  One thing is for certain. I’d rather die looking out from Neahkahnie Mountain than in a stalled subway train stuck in a deep dark tunnel beneath twisted metal and concrete. 

I’m a citizen of both coasts, east and west, but more importantly I’m a citizen of the world. The world is a dangerous place, and no one, but no one, gets out alive. Whether you die in a 9.2 magnitude earthquake, or you die underground in a subway tunnel, or you die in your sleep makes no difference. One thing is certain: When you’re dead, you’re dead.

All of this talk about the certainty of an awfully big earthquake occurring here and soon has made me think about what we really know and what we will never know. Every day on the coast, I see a mélange of birds of all sizes and species flutter by and flit from tree to tree to the tops of roofs and boats, and somehow I’ve never seen them fly into each other. What do they know that we don’t know? We drive cars and ride bikes and even walking, we make the mistake of not looking where we are going and collide into one another. We don’t always watch out for others even when we occupy the same time and space. How can we be certain of anything?  

I can be certain of the fragrance in the coastal air that comes from the constant rush of ocean wind blowing through fir, pine, blackberry brambles, mounds of tall sea grass and wood smoke from makeshift fires dotting the beach.  Even with all of the wood fires burning on the beach, your hair and clothes never smell too smoky. The sea air sweeps smoke across the surface of the water like a rite of purification until it is gone. My skin feels clean and scrubbed as if it has been kissed by the sun and sea, or maybe the wind. 

I, who can’t be certain of anything, am always amazed to see tall green grass and the sweetest small purple flowers sprouting up from the sand and growing in a place where flowers should not be able to grow.  This is the windswept Oregon coast, full of mountain cliffs and jabberwocky rock creations ambling high to the sky like smoke stacks or forming flat planes of natural benches for a place to sit and wait to watch the sun go down. No one here is waiting for The Big One. My advice to all of you: Go there before it’s gone. See it with your own eyes.  Trust your own instincts. Take an indrawn breath of the pure Pacific coast air. Chances are you won’t die in an earth-shaking catastrophe, but if that should happen, there is no better way to go. Of this I am certain.

##

Patricia Vaccarino owns Xanthus Communications, a national PR firm,and the internet company, PR for People®, where people share their news with the world. Patricia Vaccarino has written award-winning film scripts, press materials, and content. In her spare time, she writes books, essays and articles. “American Spin” is her fourth published book. “Waiting for the Big One” is a new work waiting for a home. Email: patriciavaccarino@gmail.com phone 206 979 3380.