When I was a kid, my family drove down to Louisiana to visit my Uncle Dorr. He lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by swamps and literally steaming in humidity.
Uncle Dorr used to wrap his arm around my hips as I walked past, pulling me close. "You see that?" He would say, pointing at the swamp. "Another submarine. They made it up this far."
Then he would let me go and rub his fingers - so grimy you could see every wrinkle and crack - down his chin. "Goddamned Nazi submarines. "
He believed Nazi submarines hid out in the Gulf of Mexico, watching. Germans waiting for the right moment to charge the shore.
It was 1984.
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I fell in love with New Orleans, so different from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Here was a place without time, without tomorrow, without yesterday. Everything was of the moment. In New Orleans, I realized cities had souls.
And the soul of New Orleans was pure fatalism. It was not defiance. Not denial. Not resignation. But a joyous, boisterous, salacious, sexy embrace of death & damnation.
Which also made it intensely spiritual.
In New Orleans, people used to joke that Lake Pontchartrain would become Lake New Orleans if a big enough hurricane ever hit.
Fatalism. The Big Easy. I wanted to be like that.
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Fast forward to 1989. I met a Dead Head who told me you could literally reinvent your life in San Francisco. That you could start anew and nobody would know or mind. That you could fall off the map there, too. Not even the government could find you.
The idea of going missing out west, of starting anew, sounded magical. I wanted it. I wanted to step onto a bus with the name Karrie, and step off with something else entirely.
And then I saw the live coverage of the World Series quake. I saw bridges collapsed, cars smashed in between upper and lower ramps. And I immediately crossed San Francisco off my list.
Total devastation wasn't worth it. I wanted redemption with my reinvention, the chance to live the new life I would create.
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2000. My husband and I need to move out of Iowa, but where? At first, we settle on New Orleans. If we can make it in the Big Easy, we can make it anywhere. We revel in the idea of southern heat and humidity.
But then I remember Lake Pontchartrain and the levee. How the city sits below sea level. How a hurricane could slam right into it. Drowning has always been one of my worst fears. I picture the city streets raging with dirty rapids, dead bodies flushing through the streets, the water a toxic gumbo.
We decide on Portland, Oregon. In that city, we have heard you can start anew, too. But with the chance to live out that new life. No earthquakes. No hurricanes. No Lake Pontchartrain breaking the levees.
We pack up our belongings and head west. We feel brave, heading into a strange city. No jobs. No connections. Just an apartment, and lots of hope.
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Our first day in Portland, we learn our apartment tower sits directly atop a fault. And the fault is alive.
Few of the buildings here were ever retrofitted, and nobody seems to accept the possibility of devastation. Total destruction.
I tell a friend we are headed for utter devastation, and he laughs. "It is not like California," he says.
That is what everybody says.
But that is precisely the problem: Portland is not like Los Angeles or San Francisco. It is not a city of fatalists, accepting the possibility it could be wiped off the map. Fatalists at least spot the acopalypse on the horizon - even if they do stick around for the show. And they prepare. Los Angeles & San Francisco build to withstand temblors.
Portland is not like that. Portland is a city in denial. Denial sometimes seems like fatalism, as people shrug off disaster and seem to live without a care. But denial is different. It is not about the now; it is about the tomorrow. It is about wanting tomorrow so bad you cannot accept the possibility it might never come. It is the precise opposite of fatalism.
We are overdue for a 9.0 earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and when it comes, Portland will literally shatter - masonry suddenly fragile as glass.
Most people here do not even believe the 9.0 could ever come. Or that it would harm us if it did. Seattle will bear the brunt, they say. Not us. I have been teased and laughed at for obsessing about the faults, for writing doomsday essays and preparing for the worst.
And this strikes me as the essential characteristic of Portland:
Portland is the city where everything is planned. Everything. And not just the urban renewal. But every party, every lunch, every event. One thing that drives me nuts about the place is its utter lack of spontaneity. It is not of the moment; it is of the plan.
And yet, it fails to prepare for the Big One because it denies it can ever happen. Destruction at that scale makes no sense in this rational, planned city. Portland cannot accept the irrational on any scale. Just look at the tight, perfect downtown grid. That says it all.
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2005. I watch the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and I can't hold back tears. If New Orleans is lost, then something essential to America's character is lost, too. A dark little corner of its subconscious.
Even if the city rebuilds, I wonder if its soul will ever be the same. Update: I am not the only one.
Someday, I had always hoped to overcome my doomsday fears and live in the Big Easy. To embrace that fatalism and smile at the apocalypse on the horizon, even as I prepared for the worst. To live in no time at all.
If a city disappears, does its soul disappear, too? Or does it haunt the landscape like a ghost?