Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved the work of Diana Wynne Jones. Kage never lost her affection for children’s books, not her whole life long – she read Ms. Jones’ books avidly as an adult, because that was when a lot of them were published. (During Kage’s putative maturity.) Her favourite was Archer’s Goon. She was pretty thrilled by Howl’s Moving Castle, too: both the written original and the wonderful Miyazaki animation.

Kage sent Ms. Jones her own, only, children’s book for a review about 2 years ago. We were collecting cover blurbs for The Hotel Under The Sand, which was in pre-production after a long, insane fight with an editor who shall remain nameless (because Kage refused to say his name out loud after a while … ). Jacob Weisman (wonderful man!) of Tachyon Publications finally took over and brought out a perfect edition of the book.

Kage was tremulous about sending it to Ms. Jones, partly because she hated asking for blurbs from anyone; but also because she genuinely revered Ms. Jones’ writing and was in terror that she wouldn’t like Hotel. But what Ms. Jones said about Emma’s story was this:

“Wow! I read The Hotel Under the Sand with delight and  joy. It’s wonderful, wacky and spooky and serious and FUN . . . it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out to be a classic and went on down the ages along with Alice and Oz and the very few others that have become immortal.”

Kage danced around the room.

She danced slowly, because she was already becoming ill with what turned out to be her own, fatal battle with cancer – but man, she danced! It was one of the best moments of her writing career, to win such praise from a writer she had loved since her youth. In fact, Ms. Jones’ is the very first blurb on the blurb page, at Kage’s specific personal request.

One of the last things Kage did professionally was a reading in San Francisco, at one of Rita Weisman’s (she is Jacob’s lovely wife, BTW) highly wonderful SF In SF readings. Rita and Terry Bisson put these on monthly at the Variety Arts Building on Market, and they are grand events. It was Kage’s only reading from Hotel – she died only 4 months later – but it was in the company of our niece Emma Rose, for whom the heroine was named and the book was written.

Emma was thrilled. She loved the book her aunt wrote for her, and was also pretty zooed to be asked to autograph copies of it that night. There are a few folks up in the Bay Area who have very rare copies signed by both the author and the heroine of Hotel Under the Sands … Kage kept opening the book to the blurb page and saying excitedly: “Look! Diana Wynne Jones! And she liked it!”

Now Diana Wynne Jones has died. Aged 76 – a goodly age – after the traditional long battle with cancer. The world is a poorer place whenever a songbird or a writer dies – it is a much poorer place when a children’s writer of such skill and delight as Ms. Jones dies.

My deep condolences go out to her family and friends, and my enduring gratitude as well: you made my sister Kage very happy, many many times. Best of all was when you liked her book.

Sleep well, gracious lady.

Kage Baker loved grey spring days like this one has been. Though it’s  only technically spring, for all that the plants are verifying it enthusiastically – the earth is still as cold as stone. Clouds have roofed the sky with stone as well, occasionally lifting to show last night’s snow low on the hills above Pasadena. The wind has risen steadily in force, and dropped just as steadily in temperature.

There was frost on the porch steps this morning at 6:30, when I staggered out to see if the Gawdawful screeching that had woken me was the little black cat being eaten by a coyote.  She was, fortunately, asleep in the curve of a neck pillow in the overstuffed armchair. The ruckus turned out to be a raccoon being driven out of a 3-story cypress tree by an hysterical raven. The raccoon Groucho-loped away in the eredawn, the raven stopped screaming, and I fell back asleep for a while.

So would Kage have, and then interrupted her writing all day to scout suspiciously for returning raccoons and soothe our outraged parrot. She would have wandered down into the garden, restlessly pulling weeds and checking to see which roses were budding early – as the Purple Tiger is doing even now. She’d have trimmed some dead wood, moved some planters, maybe planted out a flat of pansies or primroses. It would have taken the threat of hypothermia to drive her indoors today, when the lure of the words in her head finally overpowered the perfume of the dark earth turning under her spade.

I had errands to run, too, before writing. Duty calls even on Saturdays, though we obey happily in the service of personal projects. I was off to the host nursery of Tomatomania – the glorious Tapia Brothers in Encino this weekend – and returned triumphantly with a baker’s dozen of exotic and heirloom tomatoes. Red, pink, orange, black, purple – gonna be serious sandwiches and carnivale sauces when these beauties set fruit.Got some gorgeous early strawberries, too, damn near as big as eggs and breathing perfume like lumps of frankincense.

Then I went to Pasadena for tea with some old Faire friends. We ate melon and prioscuitto and home-made scones, and sipped good black tea from china cups; while gleefully recalling the days when we were all young and careless of our underwear, and tended to lose things  in the woods at night … it’s good to discover one can still howl with laughter and play Do You Remember? with your friends, no matter how much we all resemble staid matrons these days. It lifts one’s spirits to find that all the grey hair and creaky joints and ladylike behaviour are a mere gloss over the Maeneds one grew up with.

I can still discern those nymphs peeking out, Chris, Sandra … they peer from behind all our bifocals like startled does through the ferny brakes of old Chipping-Under-Oakwood. It’s an image I took back to warm me through the grey-granite evening tonight. The power went on and off, keeping me from writing until just now, but I feel very calm about it. Must have been the company of good ladies with whom I was once a part-time bacchante, warming up the tired old blood in my faltering heart.

Kage kept a fire like that burning all the time in her head and heart. I have not quite learned the trick of it yet, myself. Days like this one help me learn, though. I can sit by the fire now and look back on the day with a certain satisfaction. Not a lot of work done, but some limbering up in the area of joy; some much-needed practice in the arts of relaxation and remembrance. Really good scones and 13 amazing tomatoes plants.

Not bad for a grey cold Saturday.

Kage Baker attributed her writing success to incredible good taste in selecting friends. Without the wonderful people she knew, she always said, none of her stories would have gotten past the “Stuff I write in legal pads for home consumption” stage.

Personally, I disagree – but it is a fact that Kage was blessed with the companionship and good will of some truly fine and talented people. Many, many of them contributed to convincing her that her writing was worthwhile, and then actually gave her practical help. Anyone can – and does – wish an aspiring writer luck. It’s a rare person who will lend out her own class notes or resource books.

I had dinner with one of these Good People last night – Athene nee Mihilakis, quondam quod posterus APQ* and general avatar of the grey-eyed goddess herself. Athene, who not only writes but studies the art as well, once long ago shared with Kage her notes on how to write and market a book. (Kage, being her obsessive self, absorbed the information.) She encouraged Kage to forge on past the rejection notices, and now to recognize the ones that are actually encouraging. She even edited the very first draft of In the Garden of Iden (the version with several passages written in Latin …) – and there are few greater tokens of friendship than editing the maiden manuscript of someone with whom you hope to stay on speaking terms afterwards.

It is not exaggeration at all to state that without the aid of Athene, Kage would never have sent her work to an agent; never tried her hand at a short story; never conceived of a story arc that encompassed 8 novels and more of human history than humans have gotten round to recording. It’s just the truth. It’s why that first novel was dedicated to her.

Since I moved back to Los Angeles in the wake of Kage’s death, Athene periodically invites me out to dinner. Her kindness was initially the only social interaction I would consent to; I had holed up in my sister Kimberly’s house and was contemplating staying in bed forever. Athene made me put on grown-up clothes and come out. She listened to me carry on, let me cry (in a restaurant! I am so ashamed now.) and insisted on staying in contact with me.  I haven’t exactly been a social fireball since I came back here, but I would have devolved to something between a hermit and a shelf fungus by now, if not for Athene coaxing me out of the house every few weeks.

Thanks to her, I will even be going to my second annual Tomatomania** event tomorrow – thus ensuring another summer of fresh-picked heirloom tomatoes and many summer nights of BLT dinners. Black Zebras, Berkeley Tie-Dyes, Pineapple, Zapotec Pink Ribbed, Vintage Wine … the world of tomatoes is a phantasmagoria of delight. Even plain old Romas far exceed grocery-store ‘maters; not to mention the incalculable benefits of home gardening …

If I am coming back to life – or at least sending up some new shoots from my shell-shocked root stalk – Athene is one of the reasons. Just as she was one of the primary reasons Kage spread her wings and leaped off the cliff of hobbyist-writer to fly free into the light. And if I manage to keep Kage’s work going through my own (I have finished the sequel to Nell Gwynn!) there will need to be another grateful dedication to Madam Athene.

Or at least a chicken dinner. I’m buying next time.

* Actress Playing the Queen

**  http://www.tomatomania.com/ I recommend this highly, Dear Readers. There are stops all over the state.

Kage Baker, amid the several pre-writing rituals she espoused, included checking earthquakes every day. She used http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/, which shows a nice swatch of California and Utah and all the tremors that have occurred recently. She took a look every day, just to see what was shaking along our little section of the Ring of Fire.

It’s on my mind lately, as it would have been on hers. While fairly calm about our local disasters – earthquakes in California are like tornadoes in Kansas, you know? – Kage did keep a weather eye on them. The Japanese quake of last week will be an ongoing emergency for months, and is nowhere near being resolved; and this morning a 6.8 hit Myanmar nee Burma. Myanmar’s reclusive military government is not releasing many details, but you can’t hide a Richter 6.8 from the neighbors: the whole Pacific rings like a bell when one hits.

So Kage studied the local patterns. So do I. And patterns do show up if you look at the map every single day: lots of little quakes all over the place that never make the news. Places like Hollister and Parkfield are well known for having a sort of constant background static of earthquakes going on; seismographers study them, mostly learning over and over that they don’t know how to predict earthquakes … But Californians are so blase about earthquakes that unless you do check a site like this, you never hear about the majority of them at all.

There is always a bunch of them down at the southern end of California, in those empty places where the San Andreas Fault surfaces like a military earthwork. There is always a cluster up in the Bay Area – not only does the San Andreas point like a spear right at San Francisco, the whole area is really nothing but faults held together with dirt … The far northern end of the state gets a lot of quakes, too; up near Petrolia, it’s apparently always rocking and rolling, though most of them seem to happen off the coast.

The map also shows where quakes don’t happen. One of those places is the Central California coast around Pismo Beach. Ta da! The out-thrust snail horns of Point Conception are usually unmarked by earthquake sign; in the many years we lived there, the only quakes we felt were ripples from big ones somewhere else. And really, we only felt two or three of those. Though the one in Paso Robles was enough to empty all our bookshelves, and send both Harry and a box full of a deceased friend’s ashes into the branches of our Christmas tree …

However, growing up in Los Angeles gave one lots of opportunities for earthquake participation. Grownups told stories about big ones before we were born – it seemed like everyone’s parents drove into cracks in the earth during the 1930 Long Beach quake. Los Angeles Harbor was damaged by a tsunami in 1960.There was a huge one the day Kage was born, but it happened way up in the Tehachapis, and only the cattle along the Grapevine must have noticed; though it cracked the Pismo Beach city hall in a way we could still see when we moved there 40 years later.

We were there for the big quakes in 1971, 1987, 1994 … in my personal experience, earthquakes usually happen in the early morning when I am wearing an ugly nightgown. Or, more likely, nothing at all. Might not be scientific, but it’s been a steady pattern through all the earthquakes in which I have participated.

I’m too old now to be caught out sleeping in the nudes when the hills begin to dance. I wear clothes to bed, and that really is one of the reasons why. For all I know, I am single-handedly holding off the Big One by wearing decent gowns to bed.

Parrots, by the way, are no use at predicting an earthquake. Geese, ducks, chickens and anonymous crowds of tropical birds leaping out of palm trees in the movies are all talented at this: not Amazon parrots. What Harry does feel, though, are the super- and sub-sonics of the quake, things humans cannot detect: and he screams like a little girl when he hears them. Since this is just about the time the quake can be felt, it’s not much use as a precursor – but the insane shrieking does lend a certain drama to the event.

The cats tend to vanish just before a quake. However, every one who lives with cats knows they’ll vanish anyway at any pretext; just because the moggies have all leaped out the window is not a dependable quake warning. They might have done it anyway. And the Corgi is such a cautious and paranoid little soul that he expects a major disaster is coming just about every night. So far it’s been raccoons and coyotes at 3 in the morning: I am sure he’ll be as surprised as we are when the next quake hits.

One just cannot worry about it, though. Not here in California, where the hills walk and the ground ripples like a carpet, and someone in the San Joaquin Valley built a shopping outlet named for St. Emedio, the patron of earthquakes. All one can do is watch the patterns and make sure the emergency kits in the garage are up to date: because some day it will happen.

As Kage used to point out practically, at least we don’t have an annual season for earthquakes.  Quakes aren’t really real until they happen. Tornadoes and hurricanes come every year. I don’t think I could take that.

Kage Baker would have given up on this blog site after its continuing shenanigans lately. She was ordinarily possessed of a dragon-like patience: she could wait out anything to get what she wanted. But misbehaving technologia incensed her, especially since she had no faintest clue about what to do about it. It was all magic, and she had no charisma over electronics.

WordPress, a usually exemplary platform, continues to display little eccentricities today. The usual paths to the usual work sites don’t load; I am having to find little sideways and backdoor routes to get things done. I even took an hour or so to update and compress and delete all manner of crap on my own hard drive, just in case stale data was adding to the situation – or something. Stale data was a favourite explanation of Kage’s for programs being uncooperative …

Since the times when her computer failed almost invariably involved the sudden loss of several hundred words of prose, the emotional stakes were high. It was never a casual problem, but a huge and ravening maw of malign mystery. And for Kage, it was most definitely personal. And probably deliberate on the part of some distempered entity. Half of her frustration at times like this was her inability to find an appropriate nose to punch.

She also frequently stated that cosmic rays were impacting her computer with more-than-usual frequency and ferocity. It was a statement hard to argue with – I mean, cosmic rays do (theoretically) sleet through all of us and our gear all the time; if they can manage an occasional side-pocket hit to our chromosomes, maybe they can kick the odd 1 or 0 out of place in our computers as well. My only problem with this idea was that Kage felt someone ought to be able to do something to prevent it …

Cosmic rays are hard to stop. The most adamantine substances are, to the average jaunting particle, as a mist or frail smoke. People who are very interested in catching cosmic rays in the act put their collecting sensors in deep, deep mines: just to make sure nothing but the desired heavy-duty particles will reach them. There was nothing I could think of that would do the necessary fending-off trick up here at ground level. Not even lead foil, if lead foil were still available at the grocery or hardware stores …

Kage knew this about cosmic rays, of course. I know she knew it; I’d given her the information myself. How she ordered and interpreted it inside the  wunderkammer of her mind, I do not exactly know … but she did have some basic understanding that exotic sub-atomic particles were not daunted by shiny reflective surfaces. Like foil. Or two miles of coal-bearing strata, for that matter. And she felt that was a very poor way to arrange things.

Kage also understood, though, that it was not the shininess of foil that would be protective, anyway – it was the heaviness of the substance of which it was made. Thus her contempt for tin-foil, which has nothing much going for it but a high gleam and ready availability. Lead is a good shield because it is a dense metal; ditto for gold, which has been highly used in the space program for that very reason.

Were we able to produce neutronium or the like, it might suffice – but it’s a theoretical substance of ultimate density: what the hell could one mount it on, that it would not plunge right through? And all those rare earths like einsteinium, curium and fermium are way off at the far end of the periodic chart, anyway: off in whack-a-doodle land, as Kage would have said. No one’s ever seen more than a few atoms of them anyway. Production of foil is doubtless unlikely in the near future.

In any event, I don’t think the naughtiness of computers is as much due to the impact of cosmic rays as Kage often claimed. I think it was up there with blood thinning, or the weight of my hat on beds tilting the laws of probability. It was a label for an annoying and ungraspable problem; cursing Higgs bosons and cosmic rays was preferable to hauling off and kicking a malfunctioning hard drive. It let her interact with something she couldn’t fix and blow off some steam and frustration while I rebooted the computer.

Though I am not certain that she wasn’t dead serious when she installed a jar of sea water and jade pebbles above the computer on her desk. She claimed positive ions and crystalline structures would help ward off errant particles. It might have been up there with potatoes causing tularemia … on the other hand, she did have fewer problems afterwards. And while I’d prefer to think she was  heeding my advice on avoiding aberrant key commands, one never knew with Kage …

Maybe I ought to put back the jars. I mean, what could it hurt?

Kage Baker would have been amused at the date – it’s rife with symmetry and mathematical posing. It ought to mean something. Does it? It adds up to 5 from both ends … might mean something. But it’s actually a meaningless artifact, a bit of pattern that means nothing at all, except that it is symmetrical enough to catch the eye.

Kage would not have been pleased, though, at the day-long failure of trusted artifacts I’ve faced today. She regarded the computer as magic; it was supposed to work whenever called upon. No excuses allowed. And something called a “server” was definitely never off the hook.

And yet … this is the first time today I have been able to get on to WordPress – their signs say their servers have been misbehaving, and say that it’s probably Mark’s fault. Curse you, Mark!

In the meantime, I’ve found other things to do. I am deep into knitting – have just finished 2 1/2 inches of detestable ribbing in a lace weight yarn and a teeny tiny gauge, and escaped into the wider world of stockinette stitch. My needles are flying! So that’s the part of the evening I am in now.

Our story will resume tomorrow – unless Mark screws up again.

Kage Baker always opined that calling the Vernal Equinox the first day of Spring was simply a courtesy – at least in California. There’s no argument with the fact that it’s an Equinox: the lengths of the day and night are not changeable by either public opinion or legislative fiat. But the season doesn’t much care about the marks on the calendar, either.

In the meantime, this post is just for pretties.

Spring here in Southern California began two months ago, when the hills began to turn green. We had our first generous rainstorms, and the meagre half-inch of soil on the Hollywood Hills became a carpet of lush fertility. The wild poppies have been springing up everywhere, incandescent golden-orange; over the last month the lupin has joined in as well. Lupin grows in ragged places and in every colour of the spectrum, and now there are patches of blue, yellow, purple and silver springing up on every free foot of wasteland.

Ceanothus is blooming, too, and its blues are even better than the lupin’s. It comes in white, a perfect bridal-veil , sea-foam white, but its dozen blue shades are the best display: cerulean, powder, baby, navy, royal, ultramarine … it’s a more civilized plant and is often seen in gardens But the wild white form grows all over the Hollywood Hills, outlining the slopes and sheltered places, and it’s called deer-candy then. The mule deers come down right beside the freeways and nibble the bouquet-shaped blossoms, demurely eyeing the motorists zipping by.

But the private gardens of Los Angeles are a mirror of the world: damn near anything will grown here, given enough water and sunlight. And it does. Roses to rival any English garden are blooming already; even the slower bushes are covered in shining new leaves. The spear-heads of iris and tulip are sprouting; wysteria and honeysuckle are in bloom. Citrus trees are ubiqitous; there’s a dwarf lemon at least in every apartment court and an orange tree in each back yard. They’re all in bloom, and the perfume is paradisial. Even our baby plum tree has a blossom, like a first tooth.

The storm that is now drifting off was a right gully-washer, and we have a fine crop of mud and rocks slides here, too. And there is more rain due in a few days. The chill is still deep in the earth and stone. But the sun is bright between the squalls, and given half an hour’s uninterrupted work will warm the air into the 70’s. The balance of the seasons has changed for good. We may yet have floods and the skiing isn’t over yet – it’s snowing on the Tehachapis right now – but Winter’s hold is broken. When the snow above Gorman melts, the hills will emerge like glowing coals: gold and scarlet and gas-flame blue and the tenderest pale silver-green …

So while the Earth spins in one place, neatly balanced on one toe like a ballerina, the most subtle shift of weight is taking place. The plants have the jump on the rotation, right now, and the weather is lagging behind them both. But it’ll all even out. The days will  be longer than the nights, now, the perfume in the air will grow stronger, the earth will warm to the air. We are falling every faster toward the sun, and the colours of the bright Midsummer burning are beginning to show on every slope and hilltop.

“Plant when danger of frost is past” say the instructions on all my new seed packets. I think that’s … right about now.

Kage Baker might have spent a day like this is turning out to be writing assiduously and furiously. She could be both dutiful and obsessive with very little effort. Spring won’t actually start until roughly 11:20 tonight, but the energy of the Equinox often possessed her ahead of the calendar.

On the other hand, it’s been raining like hell in a sieve since well before dawn here, and the Los Angeles Basin is slowly filling up. We’ve got wind, high tide and area flood warnings, and the Cricket O’Doom is chirping on my Weatherbug program. Mid-morning, we got one humungously enormous and deafening clap of thunder, that set off all the car alarms in the neighborhood. I gotta admit, I thought for a moment that the Big One had really come and I was going to end up in the ocean covered in rue, embarrassment and dead fish …

Also, it is cold. The cats and the dog whine and cringe and complain before they will go out on Necessary Errands, and then they come back in and walk on me with icy little feet. Icy little wet muddy feet. And accusing looks on their furry faces. The fiendish parrot laughs at everyone involved.

I suspect, though, that what Kage would have done today is more or less what I am doing: watching Tivo-ed television, exclaiming at the rain, posting intermittently on Facebook and surfing news sites. I have added knitting to this list, in an attempt to sound like I am doing something useful. And, of course, posting this teeny little blog just to make the appriopriate hashmark on the list.

Stay warm and dry, folks. Eat sweets and have beef stew for dinner. Light a nice fire and snuggle somebody. It may be technically Spring in a mere few hours, but right now it is still thoroughly winter.

Kage Baker kept close watch on unusual natural phenomena – rains of fishes, lost cities found, comets and bolides and mysterious sounds in the wilderness. They fascinated her – partly because they were fair game for plot points, if no one managed to explain them adequately.

She rather hoped for the inexplicable anyway, as there are too few everyday mysteries in life. It always thrilled her to know about a new one; she liked the oddities that could not be easily explained, even though she felt there were really very few of them to be seen. No matter how peculiar a report might be, the odds were high that a good close look would reveal a logical reason for, say, blue and red striped sheep being reported in rural Marin County.

(And there was – old-fashioned breeding on a new sheep farm, using a chalk tally technique unknown to the neighbors and the local press. Details provided, for education purposes, on request.)

Tonight’s “Super Moon” is a lovely example. This is not a rare event, since it occurs every 27-odd days when the Moon is at perigee – that is, closest to the Earth in its monthly orbit. The only unusual thing about tonight’s perigee is that it happens when the Moon is full: that hasn’t occurred in about 20 years. It means the Moon will be brighter than usual. But it will only be as close as it was … last month. Or next. Not really very exciting, except for the people letting their own innate primate hysteria rise to the top of their brains to overpower their cerebrums.

Kage would have liked this because it was rare; because it will be very pretty, if the skies are clear at sunset/moonrise; but most of all, because of what it reveals about humans in general. To wit, a depressing number of us are still operating emotionally at the level of chimpanzees doing a thunder dance, hooting and howling and banging branches on rocks to intimidate the scary stuff in the sky.

Chimpanzees do that, you see. And so do humans, though we swing bigger branches and make more noise. It’s one of those places where the 5% difference in our genes makes no difference at all. We may stand up straighter and have less hair, but our reaction to celestial spookiness is pretty much the same as our cousins. We’re pretty gleeful about it, too – there are an astonishing number of doomsayers on line about this, happily predicting the end of the world. Or at least the end of Japan and California.

I’ll admit, I will be ever so embarrassed if the big one hits tonight and I end up at the bottom of the Catalina Channel with the dead sardines. However, I am confident that if I do, it will be one honking huge coincidence, born of the fact that I live in earthquake country and sometimes the dice come up snake eyes when we do that old do-si-do with the Pacific Plate. It’s damned unlikely, though – in fact, with the way the plates arranged around here, it’s slightly more likely that the USA east of the Rockies will subside, rather than that California will fall off its own edge.

Alas, I probably won’t even get to see the Super Moon. Clouds are pouring into the Los Angeles Basin right now. It rained this morning; it’s due to rain much more heavily tonight. It will be a marvel of icy light and frozen waves atop the storm, but we down under its lid will miss it. Unless we get some thunderstorms, it will just be one very wet, cold, dark Saturday night. Sigh …

Kage would hope for a break to the East at moonrise, and a thunderstorm over the sea. We’d light candles and listen to the thunder and she’d tell me what happened to Lord Ermenwyr one time when he was running a dinner-and-sex club in some city of the Children of the Sun; when the cook quit and the Runners’ Guild was picketing the place and the head croupier got light-fingered with the gaming chips …

Now, that would be exciting.

Kage Baker loved to explore ruins. But she hated disaster footage.

She was fascinated with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake all her life – part of her also life-long romance with The City, and one she would  weave firmly into her Company universe in the novella Son, Observe the Time. She researched it in obsessive detail; we drove many complex routes through San Francisco, tracing extinct streets and searching for the footprints of destroyed buildings, until Kage had a map of The City a hundred years ago clear in her head. But the first time she watched the 1936 movie San Francisco, she burst into hysterical tears.  There are several rare, invaluable films of the disaster in progress, or its aftermath – it took Kage years to work up the courage to watch them. Even the stills upset her.

On the other hand, she romped eagerly through the ruins of the Sutro Baths out at the ocean end of San Francisco, as well as the park that surrounds the ruins of Adolph Sutro’s own palatial house across the street. The Hollywood Hills, where we grew up, are full of shattered foundations and crumbling walls – Kage knew them all, they were her playground. Ruins appealed to both the pirate and the archeologist in her. It was the process of things becoming ruins that upset her so badly.

Kage had the native Californian’s sang froid about being in an earthquake. She’d roll over and sit up (they seem to occur disproportionatly pre-dawn) and state, “Maybe a 6. Maybe a high 5. Do we have power? Turn on the computer, let’s check it out.” Her guesses on magnitude were usually right – you get a feel for these things, you really do – and it was all accepted as just a part of life. We’re pretty used to the hills dancing, in California.

But she couldn’t bear watching the footage on the evening news of the same quake she’d just blithely shrugged off. Being in a shaking building was simply one of those things. Watching buildings come down around you – that was a violation of natural order. I don’t pretend to understand it, I just learned not to linger on earthquake or bomb footage while channel surfing.

When huge and appalling disasters happened in the world – like Aceh, like Japan – Kage would follow the news anxiously: but while she wanted information, graphs and charts and such, she didn’t like the live footage. She had to steel herself and work up to watching it; some things, she never did watch. I know that she could not have watched the Sendai footage as the tsunami rolled over the rice fields; had she seen, as I did, the cars that drove blindly into the waves’ path and vanished, she wouldn’t have slept for days. (And I must admit, my sleep has been troubled mightily by that image ever since.)

And … she’d be fretting something awful now. The Ring of Fire seems to be sputtering to life all around the Pacific Rim. California is part of that; but we haven’t had much to comfirm our membership lately. Is the San Andreas getting ready to boogie down through the Central Valley? Will the Bulge at Mammoth Lake pop? Mounts Shasta, Lassen, and Ranier could all decide to return to an active phase. And then there is Yosemite, under which sleeps uneasily a Sea of Fire.

Seismologists monitor the natural gas bubbles in the La Brea Tar Pits these days – the bubbles in the tar are taken as seismic precursors. That amused Kage no end; but then, growing up here, seeing the Mastadon Family perpetually having their day ruined at La Brea (“George! Throw me the keys!”), we children of the Basin have a tendency to giggle at gas jokes. Especially after that day the methane reservoirs under Wilshire sent a Ross Dress For Less to the moon and hundreds of blue flames rose up through the pavements of Fairfax like ghostly flowers.

So Kage would have done what she always did in these awful disasters: averted her eyes from the ghastly pictures from Japan, while demanding I describe them to her. Read the text accounts, studied the graphs, raged about the callous and self-righteous and fearmongers. Made donations and notes and a novena.

And maybe we’d have driven out to some of the hot springs and tar seeps that dot the hills around Pismo Beach (there are lots) and cast a few roses from our garden into the steaming water. It never hurts, Kage believed, to offer a little attention to the giants under the earth.

George, throw me the keys!