05 IV 2003 - 18:36 - venine domum? veni. o mihi nuntii beati!

Two things were visible as the plane broke through the clouds on the descent into the City.

The first was essentially Marc Reisner's point when he wrote 'A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate,' and would have been more completely had he lived to finish the editing process. Men have no business living in California, not with the infrastructure that balances atop the network of faults that underlies both major metropolitan areas of the state. Life here is indeed one spent mostly in denial of the knowledge that at any moment could come the earthquake that serves us all our doom in under a minute. One might, when one's library gets a copy, read Reisner's book; taking a flight into California, then, he would find it easier to spot the thin network of aqueducts and freeways overlying the faults and the way buildings and other works of man have done their best to cover up the edges where earth slips past earth.

Almost: I am still disconcerted every time I look down and see two long and narrow lakes on the Peninsula -- the reservoirs that lie in depressions formed by a fault. And because all the great buildings I grew up with are little grey smears on what might as well be a very general map, in that moment, nothing seems as important, as worthy of awe and trembling, as the force that might have wrenched those two lakes into being.

The second is no less related to geology, but traffics much less with foreboding -- it is the joy at seeing all this rich land spread out beneath you, at seeing familiar outlines once again. From a great height, there is Point Reyes and the fault-carved track of Tomales Bay (where Hitchcock filmed 'The Birds'); there are the broad Central Valley and Delta with their cattle and their farms; there is the sight of the sun striking any of the giants of the Coast Ranges. Mt. Tamalpais, Mt. Diablo, the Berkeley Hills -- all rise impressively from the land and yet here you are, in the air, about to join this glory again. And if you should be coming from Wisconsin, and if you should have left behind you temperatures near 0 degrees Celsius, it would be almost inconceivable that your heart should not lift at the sight of the sunlight on the broad bay and the city on its hills, and that you would not feel within that spring had come at last.

Or, in other words: it's good to be home.