February 23, 2005 – Witnessing an abusive relationship

February 23, 2005 – Witnessing an abusive relationship

California has been under siege by Mother Nature the past several days. A stationary low pressure system set itself up off the central coast of the state and its counterclockwise rotation continued to catapult moisture coming up from the warm waters of the southern pacific ashore. The location of the low-pressure system drove the bulk of the rain into Southern California, which for the year has experience near record rainfall totals. The result, of course, has been stories of flooding and mudslides. To listen to the national news broadcasts from NBC, CBS and ABC, the whole of California was caught in a devastating inundation of rain.

Anytime a California catastrophe gets national news attention, the spectacular mudslide caught on video at the coastal town of La Conchita that killed 10 people last month, or the recent mudslides over the weekend, I get a call from my mother. My mom is a terrible worrier; has been all of her life. And she wants to be reassured that her grandbabies and great grandbabies have not been hurt or injured and are not in harm’s way. I reassure her that her babies are all safe and dry and not threatened in any way by the storm. When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit back in 1989, she demanded to hear her granddaughters’ voices to reassure herself they were safe. It was the one time that our youngest daughter was in the middle of the disaster, stranded at U.C. Santa Cruz. I have to admit, that time, my wife “I” and I were beside ourselves with worry.

The storm of the past weekend was just another in a continuing series of nature’s forces that plague the Golden State. Perched atop the Eastern Rim of the Pacific Plate, California along with Baja California, Washington, Oregon, the British Columbia and Alaska form the castle wall that holds the great Pacific at bay, keeping its waters and the weather fronts it spawns from inundating the mountain states. California and its neighbors are also locked in continual combat, wrestling with the Pacific plate, which continually presses up against the entire western landmass of the North American Continent. The two resembling determined Sumo wrestlers neither willing to give to the other.

The people who populate this state are well aware of the many forces at war here. Many have been affected by the conflict, flooded out, hurt in modest to severe earthquakes, injured in the firestorms that follow in the wake of the winter rains—the former producing fuel for the latter, or blown away in the occasional burst of gale force winds that hammer the coast when conditions are right. Why do we choose to live in such a place? The answer might be that California is alive geologically. This is not your placid plain that only has to cope with freezing snow and violent thunderstorms. This state is literally evolving geologically in human time. You only have to watch the progress of a fault line over a decade to see how much movement has occurred. Part of California is being carried North to Alaska on its way to Asia.

When that wall of mud careened down the side of the cliff that had held it fast these many hundreds of years in the town of La Conchita, you were witnessing the geology of the state transform the land in an instant. The ongoing series of rock slides on Glacier Point and elsewhere in Yosemite National Park change the completion of the landscape in an instant. And though I did say that California continues to battle the Pacific Plate, I should also have said that California is yielding to the Plate as the height of the Coast Range continues to rise being pushed upward by the relentless force pressing against the edge of the continent.

If California and the Pacific plate were people their relationship would be considered an abusive, co-dependent one, which no amount of intervention will ever solve. These two have the ultimate dysfunctional association. Neither can walk away, both are compelled to continue to engage and suffer the abuses one heaps on the other. The inhabitants of this land can only stand by and helplessly watch these abuses continue and marvel at the ability of both to coexist without one destroying the other.

God I love this country.