July 19, 2015

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A long essay from The New Yorker on the earthquake that could destroy the country’s northwest coast.

When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. As the shaking started, everyone in the room began to laugh. Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Then everyone in the room checked the time.

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A minute-long quake is in the high sevens, a two-minute quake has entered the eights, and a three-minute quake is in the high eights. By four minutes, an earthquake has hit magnitude 9.0.

When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three. The conference was wrapping up for the day. He was thinking about sushi. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The earthquake was not particularly strong. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The shaking intensified. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside.

It was March. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The quake passed the two-minute mark. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. Goldfinger lurched over to take a look. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. He thought better of it, and lurched away. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going. …

 

… we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle. …

 

 

 

 

A Chicago Cubs fan struggles with the idea of winning.

The Chicago I grew up in was a place of distinction. Everyone was boasting. All the time. We had the biggest, deepest, grandest and most storied everything. Tallest tower—Sears. Largest outdoor illuminated fountain—Buckingham. Bloodiest stockyards—Union. One of our baseball teams had thrown the World Series, and the other was the Cubs. At Wrigley Field, I saw a kid, a little kid, the sort that might be damaged by such a thing, wearing a shirt that had big words (Chicago Cubs World Champs) over tiny numbers—1908. Whenever I meet complaining Mets or Yankees fans, I tell them about some of the things that have come and gone since the Cubs last won the World Series: Communism and fascism, disco, moon boots, grunge. Of course, the bleacher bums take pride in it. If you’re going to suck, you might as well suck longer and harder and in a more serious fashion than anyone has ever sucked before—that’s the Chicago way.

My father, who grew up in Brooklyn, warned me not to fall in love with the Cubs. He said a Cubs fan will have a bad life, as such a fan will come to regard defeat as the natural end of all human endeavor. …

 

… By accepting the inevitability of defeat, a Cubs fan can actually live a better life, become a better person. A Cubs fan is a Buddhist. He or she knows that life is suffering and that relief from that suffering comes only by giving up all expectation and desire for victory. In its place, you receive the gift of right now, which is Wrigley Field on a perfect summer day when a breeze is wreaking havoc in the ivy. …

 

… Thrilled as I am about the prospect of victory, part of me dreads winning. It’s a pathology, a condition caused by all those years of misery. Like lots of fans, I’ve come to depend on losing. I need it and sleep with it and desire it and explore it. It’s shaped me, and made me special. A Cubs fan is unique and even necessary, a symbol of defeat in a fallen world, a world where everyone will eventually perish. If my team wins, they will become ordinary. If my team wins, they will later lose. Then they will have become just another team that has won, not very long ago, but is not winning anymore. In winning, the Cubs will make a lot of people happy, but the happiness will fade, and, once it’s faded, what will we have given up? The certainty and distinction and grandeur of epic failure. The humility and holy rags of degradation, the very quality that sets a Cubs fan apart and above. Gone will be the chance to prove the purity of our love for the game. Anyone can look good while winning. Only an aristocrat can be graceful in defeat.