The McConnell quakes; the electric hearth blazes - reaction to 1994 Southern California earthquake - Column - Cover Story

Commonweal, Feb 11, 1994 by Frank McConnell

Monday, January 17, 1994, 4:32 A.M. The McConnell, back late Sunday night from an exhausting New York meeting of the National Book Critics Circle, is sleeping soundly, dreaming-he hopes---of Audrey Hepburn. His wife Celeste starts up in bed, says "Earthquake!" and leaves the room. The McConnell, perhaps at least in pan because Celeste so much resembles Audrey, slips happily back into REM placidity.

At 9:15 A.M., finding himself being groomed by an adoring half-Siamese kitten, he comes to full--such as it is--consciousness. Slouching kitten-from and kitchen-ward for coffee, he passes the den where Celeste and his mother-in-law, Dolores, are watching TV, expressions rapt and anxious. Dolores? Oh, yeah: during his NYC junket, Celeste had had her mother come up to stay with her in Lompoc. Lompoc is 150 miles from L.A. Her father, Carl, stayed behind in their home in Agoura; and Agoura is in L.A.: did somebody say something about a quake? Coffee. The One Thing Needful right now is coffee.

Californians, most of the time, maintain or impersonate a throwaway sangfroid about quakes, a what-the-hell nonchalance. The McC, after ten years in the state, does not. Quakes-- except for dinosaur-killer meteors--are the last survival of what must have been humankind's aboriginal, god-spawning awe at a capricious, maybe malevolent Nature. Tornadoes and hurricanes, even to a degree droughts and floods, we can now map and predict; they're subsumed into the realm of human discourse; we can go to the cellar, stock up on canned soup, do whatever we can do to at least try to make it through. But a quake is like a unmotivated slap in the face, like what Abram must have felt when Yaweh, for no special reason, called him by name. Warning? Forget it. To experience a quake is to understand Genesis, and to parse Wallace Stevens's stunning observation that "The sea is a form of ridicule." For, in its bad moods, so is the earth.

And this was a Big One: six-point-something-high on the exponential Richter scale. And its epicenter (that's ground zero in quakespeak) was in Northridge: twelve miles, being generous, from Celeste's parents' home. Celeste, being like most wives more there than their husbands, had, feeling the faint tremor at 4:32, called her dad in Agoura to ascertain that he was still-- well--alive, and he was. And only then had she awakened Dolores to tell her what had happened. What the McC would have done he chooses not to examine. (There's a serious reason for this obtrusively third-person narration, by the way: bear with me.)

So what do you do? You watch TV. By 9:00 A.M. the phone lines to L.A. that aren't down are as mobbed as O'Hare Airport on Christmas Eve. (Humans are wonderful: The guy comes on the Tube saying it's a serious emergency and we should all keep the lines clear, and what do folks do? Run to the phone, of course, to see if all the loved ones are okay.)

So the phones are down. The e-mail is down, and so is the Infonet. The planet has just rared up and bitten you on the ass. Who you gonna call? Nobody, Jim: you're gonna watch TV, as did, the whole day long, the McC and his worried wife and mother-in-law.

KNBC in Los Angeles, to be precise, where the day-long coverage was orchestrated by a very talented anchorman named--you gotta admire God's gift for irony--Kent Shockneck. Now self-appointed media pundits like Neil Postman and the appalling Mark Crispin Miller love to talk about the numbing, dehumanizing effect of the Tube, turning "real life" into mere entertainment: "Big Brother is you, watching," as Miller preppily sniffs. Maybe. Unless, as with the quake, you're close to but too far from people you love who are in a disaster zone and you're worried sick because the aftershocks keep coming. ("Aftershock," by the way, is the PC of quakespeak, like calling "blind" "visually challenged": when you're in the damned thing, it's another earthquake.) Then there's nothing numbing about the Tube at all. It's an otherwise-impossible connection with the eye of the storm. It's a welcome palliative to anxiety: as long as the broadcast is on you know, at least, that L.A. hasn't been swallowed whole. It may not be McLuhan's idyllic global village, but it is something like the small-town thing where, when your house is struck by lightning, the neighbors come by just to let you know they're there. It comforts Celeste and Dolores and the McC is grateful.

And of course there's voyeurism involved: TV is, after all, a human medium, and since Lot's wife--the first TV junkie?-- that's been one of our best things. At 2:45 P.M. the McC becomes angry. Some guy has been trapped in his car in a collapsed parking garage, his legs crushed. The paramedics have been trying for hours to break through the roof and get him out, all covered from a telecopter. And as they're about to make it, KNBC does a phone interview with "Doctor Bruce," some M.D. talking from his home miles away, about the varieties of trauma, for crying out loud, while the guy is still in pain, and when they finally get him out, the ground camera crew tries its level best to get the lens up his kazoo while he's gum eyed into the ambulance. "Prurience!" snorts the McC, "the pornography of catastrophe," and huffs back to the kitchen, not this time for coffee.