Earthquake

Example One. I’m having some jaw pain this week. I’m pretty sure that I can track it back to dental work I had done about eight months ago. Other dentists have wanted to take out that oddly placed eyetooth since I was about twelve years old. It was never really in the way, wasn’t doing anything, but my new dentist thought that its absence would help me clean in a less crowded location.

Well, of course, all the other teeth around it had been held apart for fifty years, leaning against that harmless little canine wedge. So now that it’s gone, everything else is moving a little bit. (That’s the principle behind orthodontics, of course, that your teeth can be moved at glacial pace.) It hurt a lot about three or four weeks after the removal, was fine all summer and fall, but now we’ve hit a new moment where those subterranean forces have reached a tipping point and need to find a new resolution. Invisible and unnoticed for six months, and then all at once, an uncomfortable week of motion. 

Example Two. One of our neighbors attempted suicide last week. He wasn’t successful, for which we’re grateful, but it took all of us by surprise. But now that we’re hearing from his family about what’s gone on over recent years, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone at all.

He always seemed pretty close to his animal nature, doing the same thing day after day, week after week, season after season. He worked around town, mowed lawns, plowed driveways, unchanged for the dozen or more years I’ve known him. But on Thursday, he hit a new moment where his subterranean forces reached a tipping point and needed to find a new resolution. Invisible and unnoticed for a decade, and then all at once, an uncomfortable night of truth.

Example Three. On December 20 and then four days later on Christmas Eve 1940, two earthquakes occurred beneath Ossipee, New Hampshire. There was a lot going on underground, of course—anywhere there are mountains, there’s been some kind of geological thrust. But it seems also that there had been: 

• a collapsed volcano 120 million years ago which made vertical breaks in the stone; 
• the perimeter of the former St. Lawrence Sea or Mer de Champlain, which would have borne the weight of trillions of gallons of water but has been relaxing since the sea’s recession ten thousand years ago; and 
• a likely meteor strike in Charlevoix, Quebec about 45 million years ago, which formed permanent shear fractures in the rock structure for hundreds of miles.

But in December 1940, all of those subterranean forces reached a tipping point and needed to find a new resolution. All of it invisible and unnoticed for millennia, and then all at once, an uncomfortable week of shuddering.

Why Are We Talking About This? Everything that happens has precursor events. Some we know about, some we don’t. But as narrative writers—whether fictional or memoir—we have the difficult task of making moments of great change simultaneously surprising and inevitable. 

“Foreshadowing” is a technical term that makes it seem like we’re winding up a music box that’ll play some tinny tune when we lift the lid. John Irving’s The World According to Garp has always struck me that way, cleverly designed but devoid of lived care. What we’re really doing, I think, is following our characters’ concerns—within the social context around them—to their logical conclusion. The work of narration is selecting from the details we’ve found to highlight the ruptures that will ultimately fail, the subterranean forces that reach a tipping point and need to find a new resolution. All of it invisible and unnoticed, and then all at once, an uncomfortable moment that reveals what everyone had hoped would be unseen. Or maybe never knew at all.

Of course, the event of rupture is followed by something. There is an aftermath of an earthquake, both collectively and individually. We rebuild the way it was, or we remodel from what’s left, or we leave town altogether for some place where the land seems more stable. 

Think of how much stress we can bear, right up until the moment we can’t. And then think about all the work it takes to move forward from the collapse. That’s where the emotional weight of the story lies.