Whose Fault

After building my log cabin in 1975, I split six consecutive summers living there alone after first living in a leaky trailer in collegiate Eugene, Oregon. Then in a studio apartment in artsy Mendocino, California.

During these academic seasons, I completed a three-year certificate at the Mendocino Art Center Fine Arts Program and a BA at Antioch University in San Francisco. With two diplomas in hand, I was hired as a seasonal arts administrator, a job allowing me to spend June, July, and August on the mountain. Before returning, one late spring, I acquired a companion for Arthur, my eight-pound rat terrier, named after my dead father, though the two bore absolutely no resemblance.

Mary Alice, a bird-boned black miniature poodle, had been abandoned under a mildewy porch. I named the six-week-old pup after my own mother, who had also left me at a young age, though not on purpose like the pup’s bitch had. Though they would never measure up to a pair of supportive parents, Arthur and Mary Alice were barky, tail-wagging kindred, shoring up my lack of a two-legged clan. In Mendocino, while I was working a nine-to-five shift in an office, modeling in the evenings for drawing classes and gardening for an elderly couple on the weekends, Arthur and Mary Alice were confined to my one-room apartment in a two-story complex with a no-pet policy which I managed to flip in our favor.

One foggy morning I wake with a parched throat holding in words to a premonition that had shaken me from sleep.TODAYISTHE BIGONE! As I bolt upright and tear back the covers, both dogs kerplunk off the single bed we share and stare up at me as I repeat, “TODAY IS THE BIG ONE!”

The San Andreas fault line runs parallel to the sandstone bluffs a skip and jump away from my apartment. Premonitions about it cracking wide open had been fracturing my dreams for hours. Subliminally, I’d seen the coastline peel apart like a layer cake and tumble into the Pacific Ocean just beyond my window. Once I am clearly awake and brushing my teeth, besides my stupefied reflection in the mirror, I see that my slumbering images would materialize later in the day and that I have to drive inland to avoid being swallowed by an earthquake.

As a native Californian, I’d felt the fault line let out an occasional earthshaking burp. When i