I heard the windows in the Garder store creaking and twisting it seemed to me, and then looking up at The Tribune building I could see the top of it a kind of swaying, it looked as if the cement or plaster was breaking loose from the brick. There was dust coming out in clouds from the side of the building. Everybody on the sidewalks ran to the middle of the street. Many of those who were in the restaurants rushed into the street with the napkins still adorning them—the meal was forgotten, they were seeking a place of safety … .
—Roy Worthington, quoted in the [Salt Lake City] Daily Standard of May 23, 1910, describing his experience on Main Street during the Salt Lake City earthquake of that date, which was estimated at 5.5, felt intensity (Mercalli scale) VII. His observation of dust coming out of the walls of the building accurately describes the disintegration of mortar during moderate earthquake-generated shaking of a brick building in which no bricks are displaced. During each subsequent earthquake, however, such bricks are increasingly likely to move, being held by only fragmental mortar, compressive load, and force of habit.
The sand of preference used by masons is all of one size. In years past, masons used dune sand, because the winnowing action of the wind serves as a natural sorting mechanism. Unfortunately for the resulting masonry, dune sand is exceptionally well rounded. When the cement in such older buildings is shaken into dust and blown away from the sand, each brick becomes an individual projectile riding on a layer of miniature ball bearings, just waiting for the next earthquake to send it flying.
AS I LED AGENT JACK ACROSS THE PARKING LOT AND INTO the building from which the Utah Geological Survey operates, I noted that its flag was flying at half-mast. “In honor of the departed director?” I asked.
Agent Jack was still playing Bubba. “Huh?” he said, looking formidably dull.
The UGS is located on West North Temple, a few miles out from downtown Salt Lake City, past a thicket of burger stands, quick-lube shops, down-at-the-heels strip malls, the Utah State Fair Park, and the concrete-lined banks of the Jordan River.
That’s right, the Jordan River—not the one that flows through Israel, but its namesake, an urban park—type prettified drainage that you might miss if you weren’t looking for it. No aspiring saints baptizing up-and-coming prophets here.
Anyway, the UGS has a truly wonderful salesroom just to the left of the entrance, and it was jam-packed with books, maps, reports, CDs, and all the other goozily things a geologist just drools over. Better and better, the UGS had recently been directed by a man named Lee Allison, who understood not only the need to develop understanding of the geological hazards and resources of the state of Utah but also the parallel and inextricably intertwined need to provide the information in forms that its citizenry could access. Which meant that he got his geologists to produce more comprehensible materials, and that these materials were now attractively displayed in full-color covers just dripping with eye appeal and user-friendly lead-ins.
One of the goodies the UGS provides the public, at no cost, is a series of seismic-hazard maps covering all the counties through which the Wasatch fault runs. I had to wait in line to ask the store manager where to find one. He was busy helping half the rest of Salt Lake County’s jarred residents find that map and such popular tomes as The Homebuyer’s Guide to Earthquake Hazards in Utah, which has a nice photograph of a hundred-year-old cottage sheared off its foundation by a 1989 California quake
on the cover. Finally, he turned his large chocolate brown eyes on me and gave me a bright, earnest display of his brilliantly white teeth. “You need some help finding something?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m a geologist, and I’m trying to get a better grasp on the seismic picture here in Salt Lake.”
The man led me around through the display stands, pointing out possibilities. “We’ve got the big-scale maps over here—just a few left—and you might also find something of interest in some of these.” He handed me a couple of technical papers. One was entitled Paleoseismic Investigation of the Salt Lake City Segment of the Wasatch Fault Zone at the South Fork Dry Creek and Dry Gulch Sites, Salt Lake County, Utah. He hurried onward. “Or if you want greater detail, here’s the USGS map.” He handed me a folded map in the kind of plain manila envelope preferred by the federal government, on which was emblazoned Surficial Geologic Map of the Salt Lake City Segment and Parts of Adjacent Segments of the Wasatch Fault Zone, Davis, Salt Lake, and Utah Counties, Utah.
Agent Jack peered over my shoulder again. “Wuzzat?” he inquired.
“A geologic map,” I said, passing it to him. “Geologists are not known for brevity where it comes to thinking up titles. See, here they’re telling you exactly what’s covered.”
He ran a thick finger along the face of the map folder. “Twenty-six words,” he said. “Any pictures?”
I wasn’t following him. Gullible cretin that I am, I said, “Well, it’s a map. I guess you could say it’s all one big picture.”
Jack’s face lighted up with a goofy grin. “Well then, where’s the other nine hundred seventy-four words?”
Definitely Jack was no idiot. Reminding myself to keep in mind that the slack-jawed bit was an act, I moved on.
I wound up selecting two reports, the USGS map, and the giveaway map published by the UGS: Selected Critical Facilities
and Geologic Hazards, Salt Lake County, Utah. I bellied up to the counter to pay for them with my sad old credit card, but Jack slapped a twenty down on the stack and grabbed the receipt. On the way out to the car, I asked, “Does that mean I don’t get to keep them?”
Jack glanced skyward. “You duke that out with big Tom. C’mon. He’s waiting.”
“DOES FAYE KNOW you’re investigating the developer that built her house?” I asked my erstwhile mentor.
Tom shook his head. “Doesn’t bear on the case. Just a coincidence.”
“Sure.”
Tom shot me an angry look, then turned away. After a few moments, the bad temper seemed to drain from his face and he said, “Sorry, I’m … a bit off today. I’ll admit I am concerned about Faye’s house, but please keep in mind that I found out about the problem in the course of being concerned about all our good citizens’ homes.” He leaned back in his chair and seemed to collapse inward. I noticed how tired he looked, and how … unyouthful. Sensing my eyes on him, he added, “Good work on this file review. I … I’ll call you if I need anything else, okay?”
“I’m not done yet,” I said. “I’m going to work up an understanding of the local seismic picture for you, a sort of thumbnail sketch of what sort of due diligence should be observed before and during construction near the Wasatch fault.”
Tom still didn’t look at me, but his posture suggested that he was in pain.
Ideas flooded into my head as I spoke, and I felt an old enthusiasm rise, the cavalry scout’s call to action. “I picked up a map at the UGS and I’m going to mark those developments on it and so forth. My curiosity is up now, especially after this morning’s
quake. I have only the vaguest understanding of what size earthquakes can occur around here and where and why and to what effect, and I’d like to know. And what exactly are the building regulations? I want to know if this developer has skipped any steps, or whether it’s considered completely kosher to build in a fault zone in this town.”
Tom nodded his head. “Okay. Fine. I’d be curious to know what you get.”
Our eyes met. He looked worried as hell, and I knew it had nothing to do with the job at hand. I thought of saying, It’s okay—she likes children. But I knew better than to get started. What did I know about the anxieties he must be feeling? I’d never had so much as a bad scare regarding accidental pregnancy, and I was involved up past my eye sockets with a man who practiced the most bombproof form of birth control known: abstinence. But needless to say, the whole topic had me thinking thoughts, and feeling feelings.
Tom cleared his throat, his face now devoid of emotion. In his schoolteacher voice, he said, “Procedure.”
I sat up straighter and did my best to respond to his request. He had been trying to teach me to think ahead, to have a plan. To understand that having a plan was the first defense against getting myself in a jam. Trouble is, I’m not a person who plans ahead. It seems to take the fizz out of the champagne of exploration. And it just doesn’t seem to apply in certain areas, such as knowing what questions to ask when going on a fishing expedition like this. Besides, preparation is tedious and boring. But I said, “Ah, I’m going to read these maps and reports, figure out what I know and don’t know about the Wasatch fault and public policies concerning building on or near it. Figure out who might know what I don’t know. Talk to those people. Revisit my understanding, repeat as necessary.”
He tapped the small stack of maps and papers I had purchased at the UGS. “What sources will you use other than these?”
“I’ll start with my undergraduate textbooks. Good summaries, but no doubt out-of-date. Move up to the university library. Maybe get into GEOREF.”
“Which is?”
“On-line search engine for geoscience publications.”
“How are you going to contact people?”
“I’ll try the government pages of the phone book first, see who the flak-catchers who answer the phones send me to.”
“What are you going to tell them about yourself? Remember, cover is one of your weak places.”
“I know. If I tell the truth, say that I’m just sniffing around, I stand out like a sore thumb. But if I tell a cover story, such as that I’m a grad student at the U, then I open myself to easy cross-check of my story.”
“And worse yet?”
“Worse yet, I am likely to forget my cover story, because I am at heart a lousy liar. Under pressure, I tend to remember only what makes sense, or is true, or, worse yet, I get confused about who I am. Being prone to identity crises being a problem of mine.”
Tom smiled kindly, amused at my self-evaluation. “Correct. Know thyself first; then get to know thine adversary. Otherwise, thine adversary will teach you about yourself the hard way. And what’s the best way to tell a lie if you have to?”
I recited, “To attach it to the truth. That way, if I’m caught lying, I can say that I was wrong on that part but see this other part is right as rain.”
“Yes. So tell me again: What is your cover story?”
I thought for a moment, then laughed. “I am a geologist. I guess I don’t have to tell them anything beyond that.”
Tom gave his desktop a swat of approval. “Very good. But what if they ask?”
My imagination soared. “Then I’m with EBH Consultants, a small firm out of Wyoming.”
“EBH?”
“Yeah, that’s my initials. Emily Bradstreet Hansen. At least half of all geological engineering firms are three-initial names, very forgettable. And I am out of Wyoming. And I don’t have to be making money to call myself a geologist, damn it!”
I HEADED TO my apartment, figuring I’d sit and read awhile, maybe slide a peanut butter sandwich between my teeth, but, to be honest, my real reason for going home rather than to the university library was not hunger, but the hope of a message from Ray. I knew he had to go on shift in the afternoon, which meant that he was due back in Salt Lake City anytime now, so I was thinking that he might just call me. Or should I say, I was hoping he’d call. A month or more ago, a phone call at such a juncture would have been a foregone event. But things had begun to change between us. To drift. To become … less predictable. And not in a good sense. Our “engaged to be engaged” status was beginning to feel more like simply “stuck.”
There was no call from Rayon my message machine.
Trying to tell myself that this didn’t mean anything significant, I kicked off my boots, flopped down on my bed with the maps, and tried to absorb some information from them. But I soon rolled onto my back and found myself staring at the ceiling, that tried-and-true, near-featureless expanse where certain kinds of answers can be found if you can just figure out what, in fact, the question is.
My gaze focused on a crack in the plaster.
A gap had always existed between Ray and me, at least on some levels, and it had begun to widen at Christmas. On the face of things, the rub was that he was Mormon and I wasn’t, but, in our case, this difference wasn’t just a matter of where we went on Sunday mornings. To a couple of overly serious types like Ray and me, this difference carved down through peculiarities of
lifestyle, on through habits and rituals, and right down into personal philosophies and the question of whether or not we could indeed proceed as a couple. Ray was a big-time family man. His mother, Ava, was a widow who had not remarried. Being Mormon and the only male of Ava’s five children, the eldest, and therefore twice over patriarch in charge since his father’s death, Ray knew that his presence—and, in fact, his authority—was required at all family events. And if family were a class you took in college, I’d get an F.
My mind followed the crack in the ceiling north and east into Wyoming, up the Sweetgrass River, down the Platte past my grandmother Hansen’s place near Casper, and along the Front Range to Chugwater, to my parents’ ranch. We had been a family, hadn’t we? But a family that needed the wide expanses of the short-grass prairie to get along even as poorly as we did. My parents had gotten on best when Dad was way out in the farthest paddock, miles from the house, mending fence, and Mother was on the couch in one of her silk robes, sleeping off the excesses of another hair of the dog that had bitten her the night before. And where was I? Hiding in the barn, or out talking to the grasshoppers that dined on the forage we needed for the cattle. They never answered, just hopped away, green and yellow speedsters who didn’t need words.
The few times I saw my mother and father walk out together across the ranch, he’d be looking outward across the sage brush, checking the grasses, watching for coyotes, and she would look inward, back through the early death of their son and into the loss of her own frail sense of belonging back East, where she had lived as a girl.
She had looked westward after college, thinking it would save her. He had married East, enthralled by the stiff presumptions of a culture that could measure itself back farther than a hundred years. Adventure can die a sad death if the heart is not strong enough.
And I had risen from that ground propelled only by a longing to reach for the sun. Our family had died. Like the adobe soil we tried to tame, it had crumbled, frozen by too many harsh winters, baked every summer under a pitiless sun, chewed at by the wind, and beaten under the hooves of a hundred thousand witless animals driven to the slaughter for too few dollars.
I closed my eyes, my mind going empty from the cold blast of memory. How I longed to be part of a family, and not just a small collection of hard-bitten individuals who couldn’t bear each others’ pain. I wanted smiles on arrival, tears on farewell, laughter at the tales of my adventures, joy in my accomplishments, a man to embrace in the dark warmth of sleeping, and, if I could believe the tingling that had been set off by Faye’s early morning surprise, I wanted children. I wanted to look into their eyes, stroke their hair, and teach them what they needed to know to find more love than hatred, just as soon as I learned it myself.
Six months earlier, Ray had asked me to marry him, thinking I would convert to Mormonism and become part of his life. I’d said maybe to the marriage part of the idea, but made it pretty clear that I never had, and could see no reason I ever would have, any interest in joining his religion. It just wasn’t me, and I’m a person who doesn’t do things for show. But thinking I could meet him halfway, I had moved to Salt Lake City a month later, right in the middle of the summer heat. We had managed to get through the frivolities of Labor Day weekend, the circus atmosphere of family birthdays, and the observance of perhaps half a dozen Family Home Evenings (the weekly Mormon home study and prayer gathering; I’d gotten out of the rest because he was on shift for six others, and I was … otherwise engaged). And I had finessed the secular holiday of Thanksgiving by thinking up a reason I needed to run up to Wyoming to see an uncle. But then came Christmas. Christmas is the ultimate in family holidays, a bucketful of joy if you have an ecstatically wonderful, supportive, loving family, stressful at best if you’re in the other
99 percent of reality. On Christmas, the rivets in our relationship had begun to pop.
On that date, it became clear that I was not only ignorant of the all-important family traditions but also congenitally bereft of any talent for adapting to them. I showed up in slacks, only to find Ava and all Ray’s sisters in floor-length dresses and tinselly hair ribbons. I presented a little prepackaged assortment of dried fruits and nuts as the sisters proffered artistic basketfuls of home-baked goodies dripping in chocolate, the Mormon cheat street into the pleasure of caffeine. I sat mute and unmusical as everyone crowded around the piano to sing carols. I was relegated to setting the table while the brothers-in-law played with the children and Ava and her daughters laughed in the kitchen. I lifted my fork before all the prayers were said at dinner, screwed up and asked for coffee with desert, and longed for a good old cowboy shot of schnapps to calm my nerves as we cleared the special Christmas dishes and I dropped one. And all eyes focused on Ray and me as we opened each other’s gifts.
I had bought Ray a ski sweater in the exact shade of indigo that flashed from his wonderful eyes. He loved downhill skiing, so I thought this might be a suitable peace offering, since I had screwed up a month earlier by admitting that I much preferred the solitude of cross-country skiing, could barely stay upright on downhill skis, and detested the congestion and high-priced show of ski resorts.
Ray had smiled politely at the sweater and awarded me a chaste peck on the cheek. His mother had made a study of an object on the other side of the room. As he handed me his gift, his sisters’ postures had shifted, their heads swiveling like so many radar dishes, tracking the package, measuring it, burning holes through the paper with X-ray vision, their eyes widening and contracting as they noted that it was a big package, not a small one. Not a ring. Little smiles flickered across certain faces. I avoided Ava’s eyes but stared down each sister in turn, unable to hold my
defiance in check any longer. I wanted to say, He offered me the ring last summer and I said not yet, but such candor was inappropriate, then and perhaps forever. Reining in my anger as best I could, I managed to smile as I yanked the ribbon off the box, tore off the paper, slid it open, and saw … a ski sweater. A vivid, rose pink, soft, fuzzy ski sweater. Ray patted my walking cast and said, “This comes with ski lessons.” I said, “Thank you” and “I love it,” then returned the peck of a kiss to his handsome cheek. With stiffened fingers, I touched the mass of pink fuzz, pretending to admire its softness, but I could see only how sallow my hand looked against the color. As I set the box aside, Ray’s sister Katie managed to catch my eye. Katie is the number two sister, about twenty-five years old and already the mother of three. She looked smug. “See, I told you she’d like it, Ray. You just leave that shopping to me,” she purred, grandstanding her prior knowledge, her complicity. I spent the next hour trying to imagine a way to rip the putrid pink mass into strips and knot it into a vengeful noose. I even picked out a beam from which to hang a rope that I could loop around Katie’s deceitful neck, and imagined her kicking as she swung. It was a long, bitter afternoon, during which I reproved myself continually for my paranoia and inability to let things roll off my back.
Extracting myself once again from the delicacies of this fantasy and touching down briefly in the present moment, I found a new crack on the ceiling of my bedroom, this room that Ray had never entered. Had this new rift been there the day before? Had the earthquake caused it?
Suddenly, I could no longer stand to be alone.
I jumped up and threw the UGS materials and my freshman physical geology textbook into a backpack along with a sandwich and a bottle of water, put on some hiking boots (I was beginning to feel self-conscious about the red ropers), and then headed out to the street where I’d left Faye’s car. I was soon once again hammering all that horsepower up the hill toward her house. She
would understand. She would help me through the coming hours. And she had many more immediate worries under whose weight I could bury my fears.
This time as I ascended toward her house, I took much greater interest in the surrounding topography. Surprising how much more menacing those boulders on the rampart above the development looked now that I could no longer assume that the developer had done his geologic hazards homework. Was that slope sufficiently stable to ride out a truly big earthquake, or perhaps even a springtime mudslide?
I was so involved with reading the landscape that I zipped right past the place where my truck had died without noticing that it was gone. Or perhaps it was a combination of the landscape and my need to be in the comfort of my friend’s company. Or just call it denial.
And Faye was not home.
I stared numbly at her front door. If she wasn’t there, then I urgently needed something to do. I remembered the maps and books. I pulled the backpack out of the Porsche and headed up the road.
It was only a short distance to the foot of the rock-strewn slope above. At the end of the pavement, I passed a parked pickup truck bearing official state of Utah plates and stepped onto a path that led into the “open-space corridor,” that steepening slope I hoped the city or county officials had deemed unsuitable for building.
The ground rose steeply into arid scrub land as I followed the zigzagging trail, noting the sizes of boot and dog prints that had become implanted after the several cycles of freezing and thawing that had visited the area since the last snowfall. Something in me soon found this concentration of so many people’s journeys annoying, even intolerable, and I stepped off the path, crunching through the crust of old com snow. I stomped straight up the slope, dodging only as I reached the more sizable rocks or arrays
of stunted oaks. I marched resolutely toward the biggest boulder in the neighborhood, a slab of sandstone the size of a small truck, figuring I’d sit on it and read. It lay at the edge of a great train of boulders that filled the slope immediately below the mouth of a narrow canyon above.
Somewhere in there, I realized that I was following tracks left very recently by another adult human. The afternoon sunlight glinted in gemstone flashes off the snow, an array of whiteness rhythmically disrupted by the blue shadows that filled the shallow boot prints. Laid over the icy crust of the snow were small sprays of older, more powdery snow that the boot-owner’s strides had brought up from underneath.
I decided the footprints belonged to whoever had parked the pickup truck at the end of the pavement below.
It was not long before I caught up with a man about my age, who was dressed much as I was: blue jeans, hiking boots, and a down parka. He had heavy shoulders and a wide face to go with them. His nose was broad and rounded, terminating neatly over a thick beard that curled away from his cheeks. Together with his high, boxy cheekbones, the combination of nose and beard gave him the air of a kindly lion I remembered from a picture book I had had as a child. He was leaning jauntily against one of the boulders, making notes on pages fastened to an aluminum clipboard. His jacket was open down the front, exposing a plaid wool shirt and a telltale cord that led down inside his shirt toward a small round bump about an inch thick in the middle of his chest.
“Doing some geology?” I asked pleasantly.
He looked up abruptly, feigned surprise, and then set to examining himself as if he were covered with some odd substance. “Does it show, really? I mean, I can never understand how people guess so easily,” he replied, in a perfect deadpan. Then he gave me a sly grin.
I smiled back. “It’s the hand lens around your neck, the basic
pragmatism of the attire, the ‘I set my own fashion’ beard, the chapped hands, the stoical use of a metal clipboard even on a cold day, the ease with which you sit on a nice hard rock. More comfortable here than on an office chair, your posture suggests. Add to that the pickup truck down the hill, the fact that I’m finding you out on a potentially unstable slope the afternoon after an earthquake, and—”
He held up a hand. “That’ll do. But tell me how do you know these things, O ye who climbed out of a Porsche even though you look like you’d be more at home on a horse.”
I grabbed the side seams of my jeans and dropped a prim curtsy. “Because I also am a geologist.”
He somberly put his lips together and whistled the tune that goes to the words, “You can see by my outfit that I am a cowboy.”
Smiling at his musical quip, I acknowledged the rest of his observation. “And yes, I’ve done my time on horseback. The fancy car belongs to the friend who also belongs to the house. My pickup truck fell on its sword this morning as I was driving up here to check on my Porschely friend, who was not as sanguine about the trembling of terra firma as I.”
The man nodded. “Ah. Yours was the twenty-year-old beige half-ton getting towed.”
I winced, then looked down the hill toward where it should have been. “I guess some chichi neighbor reported it abandoned,” I muttered. “A towing bill. That’s all I need.”
“Imperialist swines. Need some help?”
I let out a long sigh. “No. I guess there’s really nothing that can be done.”
“A venerable beast,” he said sympathetically.
“Just getting broken in. A mere pup.”
The man pulled his cap off and held it briefly to his chest, put it back on his head, then hopped off his rock and presented me with a hand to be shaken. “Logan de Pontier.”
“Em Hansen.”
His hand was surprisingly warm, considering his lack of gloves and the metal clipboard he’d been handling. His beard was clipped closer than the slightly wild hair that curled over the back of his collar, and his eyes were bright green and wide-set, giving his leonine face a mystic, walleyed look. There was something disquieting about standing so close to him that I could see the subtleties in the color of those eyes. I withdrew my hand and used it it to gesture at the slope.
“What are you looking at?” I inquired.
“Oh, just checking for movement on this landslide.”
“This is a landslide? It looks more like a talus slope.”
“Technically, a debris flow, which is of course a type of landslide. Like someone opens up a cement truck at the top of the hill and lets it rip. Only, as you can see, the chunks here are the size of trucks themselves. Talus would be just the chunks, no finer sediment.”
I looked up and down the slope at the tumble of rocks that formed a narrow, steep cone projecting from a notch in the mountain face above. “So you’re an engineering geologist?” I asked. It was occurring to me that this man might be able to save me a lot of reading with a nice quick lesson on faults and the landslides they can trigger.
He smiled for the first time, a brief flexure of the whiskers that exposed more lip but no teeth. “Right again.”
“Utah Geological Survey?” I asked, recalling the official state license plate on the truck.
He nodded.
I said, “Sorry about your boss.”
He closed his eyes briefly. Opened them. “Yup.”
I paused a moment, observing what I hoped was a proper solemnity. “So I’m a petroleum geologist by training. After this morning’s quake, though, I’m thinking I ought to get a handle on the seismology of the area.” Almost bungling this perfectly
natural reason to be questioning him, I added, “Don’t need to explain to you that I’m just good old-fashioned curious,” then brazenly put forth another question. “So this is a normal fault, right?” I asked. The plane of a normal fault slants toward the valley; another way of saying it is that the plane of the fault parallels the mountain front. As the valley drops, it slides down and away from the mountains, and the mountain front is essentially the fault scarp. I point this out because some faults—called thrusts—move in the opposite direction, thrusting the mountain up over the valley, shortening the ground. On still others, the two sides grind past each other laterally.
Logan de Pontier nodded and said, “Well, yes, the Wasatch fault is normal for the most part.” He pointed downhill to the west first and then uphill to the east. “Valley block down, mountain block up. But of course a fault system this large isn’t just one single tear in the Earth. The Wasatch branches and breaks into segments. And, of course, it’s part of a much bigger picture. It’s the eastern end of the whole Basin and Range province.” He made a panoramic sweep to the west with one hand. “Extensional faulting clear west to Reno. Reno’s moving away from us about one centimeter per year. The rate your fingernails grow. About a third of that motion is taken up right here along this mountain front. In fact, it’s what’s forming this mountain front.”
I translated this mentally into images. He was saying that between Salt Lake City and Reno—a distance of four hundred miles—the Earth’s crust was pulling apart like a giant accordion, and that as the two towns moved away from each other, large blocks of the Earth’s crust were settling, literally falling into slots along big parallel fractures, forming valleys. “So the Wasatch fault is a huge feature.”
“Yes. It’s about three hundred miles long, but like I said, it’s broken into segments.” He gestured at the Salt Lake valley. “We call this the Salt Lake segment. It’s one of the more complex sections, broken into many branches.” He moved his hands
around to illustrate this, making a series of angled chops through the air like plates stacked on edge in a dishwasher, but then remembered his clipboard and began to sketch. What he drew was a cross-sectional view of the Earth that would only make sense to another geologist.
I smiled, amused that I could interpret his scribblings.
He said, “See, instead of just one fault plane, it steps down in sections that look parallel on the surface, but the planes can curve at depth. How it’s all connected down below is a big question.” He drew a question mark where the branches of the fault appeared to converge. “Wait a minute,” he said, and pulled out his own copy of the geologic map I’d just bought. He unfolded it. “See, here’s the nearest branch, running right along there.” He pointed to a dashed line that ran just above Faye’s house. The dashed line indicated that the fault was covered by surface deposits at this location. And million-dollar homes. So much for ritzy acreage.
“I thought this break in slope was one of the old wave-cut benches from Lake Bonneville,” I said.
“It is. But right here, it’s also a fault scarp.”
Realizing the I was standing so close to such an active fault made me feel almost itchy in the soles of my feet. “So this morning’s quake was one of these branches letting go?” I asked.
Logan opened another fold of his map. “Not this one. It was probably on the branch we call the Warm Springs fault.” He pointed to a parallel line, this one solid, that started north of downtown and stopped just short of the state capitol.
I gulped in a burlesque of nervousness. “Well then, I’m glad this morning’s quake wasn’t any bigger. I was inside the City and County Building for the first time today, and I wouldn’t want to have seen a seismic retrofit of that much stonework.put to the test.”
Logan nodded. “The City and County Building isn’t immediately on the Warm Springs fault—unless it goes even farther
south than I think it does—but it may go past or under a lot of the larger buildings downtown. And neither would you want to see the Convention Center, or the new Assembly Hall, or, for that matter that brand spanking new stadium cut in half if you had a quake big enough to break surface.” He held his hands together to indicate the two sides of the fault, then dropped his valley-side hand abruptly—wham. “Nice three-foot scarp’d crack your foundation like a twig.”
“How big a quake would that take?”
“Six point five or better. Maybe a seven. This morning’s was a five point two. The actual rupture was downstairs a few kilometers, if not ten. Just made all that lake-bed sediment the city’s built on jiggle like jelly.”
“Did this morning’s quake give you new information you’ve just added in there?” I asked. He had penciled in a section of dashes that continued the line of the Warm Springs fault to the south, from just west of the state capitol downtown toward the Convention Center and most of the other tall buildings in Salt Lake City, just as he had said.
“No, that’s some mapping that was done years ago. It got left off of this map.”
“Why?”
Logan de Pontier fixed his green eyes on me and gave me a probing look. “That’s a good question,” he said, his voice suddenly tight. “That’s a really good question. Guess you’d have to call it a difference of opinion.”
“A scientific disagreement?”
Logan did not answer me.
I turned and looked out across the Salt Lake valley. A valley filled with a network of cracks just spoiling to rupture. A valley in which perhaps a million people lived, most in houses made of unreinforced brick. I drew in a breath and released it. I asked, “Quake that size, how many people killed?”
“Official estimate? Up to eight thousand immediately, another
forty-four thousand injured. Twelve billion in damage, six more in economic losses.”
“Homeless?”
“I don’t even have that number. Say also thirty percent of businesses fail within the next year. Families separated, dispersed.”
We stood in silence for a while, burdened by our knowledge. Finally, I said, “But this morning’s quake was a little one.”
Logan’s chest moved with a deep sigh. “Yes. Let’s just hope it was the main event and not a warm-up for something bigger.”
I SETTLED IN on the rock next to Logan and asked him all the other questions I could think to ask, but after a few minutes, I had exhausted my knowledge of earthquakes and what causes them and decided to angle for a business card and call him later, when I’d read a little more.
Down below, I saw a taxi moving up the road toward Faye’s house. It pulled up by her walkway, then stopped. Faye climbed out, turned, paid the driver.
“That’s my friend,” I told Logan. “The one who owns the Porsche and the house. I guess I’ll go on down and see what’s happening.”
“Wait, I’ll come on down with you. I’m done here for today.”
We started down the trail together. As Faye started up the walk toward her house, she looked up and spotted us. Pilots have good eyes. I waved. She stopped and waved back, changed her course for the foot of the trail, and arrived perhaps a minute before we did. As I got close enough to see her face, I saw that her lips were swollen from crying, although those who had not met her before might think she was possessed of the kind of bee-stung lips women pay plastic surgeons big money to create for them. Her eyes were hidden behind a set of aviator sunglasses.
She presented one of her more formal smiles. “Hi, Em,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”
I made the introductions. “This is Logan de Pontier. He’s a geologist with the Utah Geological Survey. He’s checking to see if you’re going to get a new rock garden in your living room.”
Faye tipped her head forward and gave me a “Drop dead” look over her sunglasses. “What are you saying, Em?”
I made a sheepish gesture toward the hill. “Landslide.”
“What landslide?”
“That landslide. Don’t worry—it’s not expected to come this way anytime soon. Right, Logan?”
Logan slipped into his official tone. “Technically speaking, it’s a debris flow.”
Faye looked from Logan to me and back again. “All I need.”
For a man who had been so garrulous, Logan was quickly growing terse. “Well …”
Still not smiling, Faye said, “Well hell. Why don’t you come on in and have a beer and tell me all about it?”
“I’d like to, but I can’t.” He turned toward me. “If you want … I could … you know …”
Faye continued to stare at us over the tops of her glasses. “Just give her a business card, Logan. I’ll make sure she gets in touch with you.”
I snapped my head toward her and gave her a dose of storm cloud with my eyebrows.
She indulged herself in a snarl. “Em, I am having one hell of a day. You are having one hell of a life. Mr. Fellow Geologist here has some information for me, and God knows what he has for you. We want to stay in touch with him, now don’t we?”
I could feel heat and pressure building across my forehead and hoped the blush would not show.
Logan cleared his throat and quickly pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. “The UGS is in the book of course, but here’s
my card, and please do call if you have any more questions.” Having rediscovered his aplomb, he added, “As a matter of fact, a bunch of us are getting together after work for some beer and pizza, kind of compare notes on our observations today. Be glad to have you—ah, both of you—ah, join us.”
Palming his card, I said, “Thanks, Logan, but—”
“But I’ll make sure she shows,” Faye said, completing my sentence for me.
Logan smiled absently. “Pie Pizzeria. About six. Look for the motley crew in the back.”
I jammed the card into my back pocket with considerable force and grumbled, “Make mine artichoke hearts and Canadian bacon.”