October

The Rolling Stones doing Wild Horses--computer radio. Headsets drive the eardrums to the center of the skull. Foreigner does Hot Blooded. It all sounds great if you crank it up so you can hear the riffs. Rock and Roll lives. Ground Control to Major Tom.

I saw an earthquake once that changed my mind about stuff. Rocks are rocks and ground is ground, and when you go in the water the rules change. But it's orderly. When in Rome, grope the Romans, and they'll grope you. Sometimes the Cosmic Muffin changes the rules.

Everything was pale gold-white because of the dim moon. Blue green lights at midnight, across a broad expanse of wild orchids--they grow like grass on the Hilo side of the Big Island. The land seems almost level, but we lived at about fifteen hundred feet elevation or so, on the slope of Moana Kea. Or maybe it was Moana Loa. One of the Moanas. From our house the land seemed level, because the gentle slope of the mountain's side was so unrippled, like a slanted prairie. The wild orchids were maybe eighteen inches high, and grew as dense as good wheat for thousands of acres in all directions. A mile downhill from us, and near to the ocean, was a strip of macadamia trees, part of a local orchard. On the other side of the order were some farm houses, with banana trees growing in the planting spaces running along their porches. I say porches because all the houses had large, covered porches. Each house's yard was about a two-hundred foot square, and the property squares ran along beside the water for miles in either direction. North along the coast only a few miles was Hilo. Around the bend to the south you eventually get to the leeward side, to Kona.

We were almost asleep when the house awoke--it groaned like a live thing. I could actually feel it quiver. Seven of us lived in the house--a married couple and their two adolescent daughters, me, an exjarhead named Curtiss, and a hippy named Brent. We all went to the windward windows, looking out across the orchids. The macadamia trees were a dark line between the pale expanse of orchids and the sea. The old moon was behind us, to the south and east, and the sea was the color of an old rifle barrel--grey and slick. Pale blue clouds were small patches in the sky, and the stars glared.

Above the line of macadamia trees, huge glowing blue/white balls bounced on some invisible thing above the macadamia trees. I was transfixed by the image.The fields of pale orchids rippled under subtle puffs of wind from the shoreline. I could hear the breakers, smell electric salt. The house groaned again, and began to tremble. The macadamia trees heaved—I saw them move and didn't want to admit it. The rules had just changed.

The expanse of land holding the thousands of acres of orchids turned liquid, began to float before my very eyes. Pali shuddered, a wave of land radiated from a point in the macadamia orchard. The wave came up the hill at an alarming rate. It charged, covered the mile or so from the in orchard to the house in a matter of seconds. I could already see a second wave coming before the first one arrived. The house screamed and shuddered. I’m not a superstitious man. I did hear Pali whisper to me—so soft, and such a low frequency that my human ears didn’t hear her voice, but I felt her trembling with my entire body. The house creaked, surfed over the wave as it passed us, a rolling motion. That first wave was about three feet high. So was the next one. Several more. The house mumbled and groaned constantly throughout the rest of the night. More burnt salt. The pale floating lights were gone. The waves of land stopped coming, but nobody went back to bed.

The electricity never did go off. At some point the house stopped mumbling, and groaned only when the waves of land passed under us.

I like earthquakes better than I like tornados. With tornados you can always harbor the illusion of survival. The twisting finger of the funnel might not reach out for you in particular, but you never know, and have to stay on your toes until it leaves the area. Nerve wracking. But the earthquake changes the rules that let you distinguish between liquids and solid ground. You might as well surrender at once, enjoy the ride. It will touch you. The weight and mass of the entire earth wil focus on you for those few heartbeats, and you wil experience with perfect clarity the mass of your ass on a scale of one to 300 gigazillion.

More internet radio. Rock and roll forever.

EOM