The Myth of Solid Ground

Four and a half years ago, when my wife, Rae, was pregnant with our first child, I got a firsthand taste of such a strategy, after Rae developed her own uncanny talent for prediction, accurately calling three earthquakes in a couple of months. The way she describes it, she would actually feel the shaking, as if a tremor had just rolled through the ground beneath her, and within a few hours, the sensation would be followed by an actual event. The first time it happened, I shrugged it off as coincidence, but by the third, I had grown to trust her instincts, and I waited out the interval between premonition and payoff in an exquisite tension of anticipation. To a certain extent, it was as if my entire life had been cast into suspension, a situation complicated by the fact that Rae would never get a sense of magnitude, big or small. But what I remember most is that strange edge of connection, as if, in knowing that an earthquake was coming, I had been given a place within something greater than myself, as if I were not merely subject to the planet and its vagaries, but a part of it, after all.

This, it seems to me, is where the issue of prediction leaves us, not with certainty, necessarily, or understanding, but with a feeling of enlargement, of belonging to the world. In that regard, the degree to which it makes for sound (or unsound) science may be entirely beside the point. There's a way, after all, in which science fails to apprehend the bigger picture, focusing more on fact than on meaning. That's a contradictory notion, but then so is the idea of inhabiting a seismic zone, where the simplest bits of business -- driving beneath a freeway overpass, putting your children to bed -- become extraordinary acts of faith. In such a landscape, the only thing we know for sure is that the earth is moving, which makes us long to feel stability even more. We put our roots down wherever we can secure them. We look for solid ground.