They are called P-waves. They are the primary waves, the first and the fastest, moving at up to six miles per second, near top speed through the fold and furl of basalt layer and slowing when they hit the granite massifs, the slabs of continent borne upon magmatic flows inside the earth’s crust. P-waves are sound waves that move through solid rock and compress and dilate the solid rock they move through, coming at you peristaltic and slinky-like, radiating upward and outward from the seismic event. S-waves follow four to twelve seconds later, depending on where you are from the epicenter. L-waves follow soon after. These are the slowpokes, the long-period surface waves that arrive like laggards in the seismic sequence, languid and weary, but powerful enough to do all the damage you will read and hear about when it is all over. But the P-waves come first.
When they hit, rats and snakes hightail it out of their burrows. Ants break single-file ranks and scatter blind, and flies roil off garbage bins in shimmering clouds. On the Point Reyes Peninsula, milk cows bust out of feed sheds and bolt for open pasture. Inside aquariums in dentist offices and Chinese restaurants and third-grade classrooms, fish huddle in the corners of their tanks, still as photos of huddled fish. Inside houses built on the alluvial soils of the Sacramento Delta, cockroaches swarm from behind walls, pouring like cornflakes out of kitchen cabinetry and rising in tides from beneath sinks and tubs and shower stalls. Crows go mute. Squirrels play possum. Cats awaken from naps. Dogs guilty of nothing peer guiltily at their masters. Pigeons and starlings clatter fretfully on the eaves and cornices of buildings, then rise en masse and wheel away in spectacular rollercoaster swoops. Pet-shop parakeets attempt the same maneuver in their cages. In the San Francisco Zoo, every single Adelie penguin dives and swims around and around in their Plexiglas grotto, seeking the safety of what they believe to be the open ocean. Big cats stop pacing, tortoises drop and tuck, elephants get antsy as pee-prone toddlers. The chimps on Monkey Island go ape-shit. Horses everywhere go mulish and nippy. Implacable cattle get skittish as deer. And a lone jogger on a fire trail on Mount Diablo gets lucky, for the starving cougar stalking her gets spooked by the subsonic pulse that rolls under its paw pads, and breaks off the hunt and heads for the hills, bounding silent and unseen up a hidden defile and leaving behind only a shudder of knot-weed grass burnished amber by the waning light of an Indian summer dusk.
From “Shakers,” which can be found in Daniel Orozco’s Orientation. The book recently won William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.
