Overdue

You hear an earthquake before you feel it. The dishes in the cabinet start to rattle, the wood joists in your house scrape at each other. Then you feel the rumble and stumble to keep your balance as the floor shakes. Thirty seconds, a minute — more if you’re unlucky. Regardless, it feels like an eternity, and afterwards it takes minutes for your adrenaline levels to settle down.

That was my experience, at any rate, in the years that I lived in Los Angeles. Some of the quakes I experienced were of the dime-a-dozen variety, but then there were two in one day that were the strongest in forty years. Nothing in my vicinity was damaged in these temblors, but I gained stories to tell at dinner parties and learned to mimic my quake-experienced neighbours, who often pronounced, “It’s the price of living in paradise.” And, like a true Californian, I did nothing to prepare for the next one.

Those two things — the inevitability of earthquakes and the reluctance of...