Fault Lines by May Wilkerson

On sobriety and LA’s natural and human-made disasters.

When I told people about my decision to move to LA, they told me I was “brave.” I was actually just high. One night after smoking a 1/4th of weed in my apartment in Brooklyn, I impulsively responded to a Facebook post from a stranger who was subletting her “sun-drenched” studio in Santa Monica for a “great deal.” The “deal” was I pay her slightly-reduced rent and take care of her three cats. I messaged her, “I’m interested!” After a brief back-and-forth that took less than fifteen minutes, I was in. Without consulting anyone, I purchased a one-way flight to LA.

A month later, I arrived at LAX with everything I own in two rolling suitcases. That night, after taking the strongest edibles they sold at a nearby dispensary, I looked around the 500-square foot sublet I was sharing with three actively-shedding cats, the scent of urine-soaked kitty litter hanging in the air, and I thought, this is it. I’ve made it.

Six months later, I hit rock bottom. In April, 2019, I got sober after a debilitating panic attack on top of Runyon Canyon. The most Los Angeles way to hit rock bottom.  

I don’t get high anymore. Turns out, mind-altering substances aren’t something I can do casually. Still, I don’t blame weed for this. I’m actually grateful for my two year brown-out. It got me to Los Angeles. Maybe you need to be a little bit high to move here. Whether it’s delusion, or drugs, or hope, or some kind of desperation. For me, it was all of those things, and also weed. It disconnected me from reality just enough to make me think moving across the country was a good idea. In the end, it was.

On some level I always knew I wanted to live in LA. I was drawn to the fantasies of creative success that pull so many people here. But I was afraid to admit to myself and others that I believed in myself enough to think I had a chance. Maybe that’s what people meant by “brave.” I was in my 30s, with zero entertainment industry connections, and I was chasing dreams with an inordinately high risk of failure. But failure didn’t really scare me. I’d experienced it enough to know it wouldn’t kill me. The worst it can do is confine me to bed for a few days watching reruns of Frasier.

I also wasn’t scared of loneliness. “Moving to LA can be lonely!” People warned me, again and again. But I’m an addict. Not only do I not fear loneliness, I crave it. Isolation is one of my twelve addictions (and possibly the most dangerous one, after Aspertame.) In a way, I was a prime candidate for Los Angeles: immune to failure, addicted to loneliness, employed, and high off my ass 24/7. There was nothing about LA that scared me. Except for earthquakes. And those terrified me.

I grew up in Massachusetts, so it’s not like I haven’t experienced a little ass kicking at the hands of nature. I grew accustomed to blizzards and hale storms and hurricanes. When these things happen, we just lace up our L.L. Bean boots and salt the roads and go on with our day. But earthquakes are a different beast. I’d never experienced one as a kid, and never wanted to. There are a few things we can depend on in New England: polar fleece will keep us warm, any highway exit will have a Dunkin’ Donuts, and the ground beneath our feet won’t suddenly revolt and tremble without warning.

When I told my parents their only child was moving 3,000 miles away, my mom took the news surprisingly well. I’d expected her to try and stop me, but instead, she accepted the news without complaint. Then later that night, she sent me an email. “Proud of you, honey. I would be afraid to move to LA because of all the earthquakes.” A two-sentence annihilation. That night, I dove deep into a Google chasm where I learned everything I could about earthquakes. The San Andreas fault. The Northridge quake. And the probability of the “Big One” striking in my lifetime. It wasn’t looking great.

But it was too late to turn back. I’d already sublet my apartment, bought a non-refundable one-way plane ticket, and given away my guinea pig to a guy on Craigslist. I decided to stay the course. Because life is full of risks, anywhere you go. Just ask my guinea pig (I vetted the guy as thoroughly as I could, but it’s Craigslist.)

My first few months after moving, I hallucinated earthquakes the way I had hallucinated bed bugs when I lived in Brooklyn. “Did you feel that?” I would ask whoever was around, anytime I felt a slight tremor. It was always just a truck driving by or my 8-pound dog, Tilly, jumping up on my bed. Sometimes it was completely in my head. It didn’t help that I was usually very, very high.

Once I stopped pumping my body full of THC every day, my anxiety decreased and my nervous system settled into something bordering on normalcy. I stopped having routine panic attacks. I felt like myself again. Then, a week shy of ninety days sober, I experienced my first earthquake.

The first shock hit on Thursday, July 4, 2019, at 10:33 AM. My dog sensed it first, and woke up from her daily 22-hour nap to come alert me that something was wrong. We don’t talk enough about how dogs are furry, mystical prophets that can predict earthquakes. When my apartment started to rattle, I thought I was imagining it at first, as I had so often before. Then I noticed my Target art shaking on the walls, and the couch jerked what felt like an inch or two under me. This was real.

About seven seconds later, it was over. I was rattled, but relieved. While it was creepy and disorienting, it hadn’t been that bad. It was a 6.4 I learned from Twitter, which is pretty big, but its epicenter was in Ridgecrest, about 150 miles outside LA. It turned out to be a foreshock. The real thing would come the next night. There was no way to know this at the time. 

We can launch people into space, cure cancer, and create robots to write college essays. It baffles me that we still haven’t found a way to predict and therefore prepare for earthquakes. At least I have hope that somewhere out there a female seismologist is working around the clock on this, and I can’t wait to watch the biopic. 

The actual earthquake was a 7.1 magnitude that hit Ridgecrest the next night at 8:19 PM. At the time, I was sitting on a porch waiting for a guy I’d been seeing to come back from a local bar. I had texted him, “I’m here!” And he had responded, “sorry I forgot lol be there soon.” And then the earth started to shake beneath me like it was trying to tell me something about my dating choices. Like the foreshock, this earthquake’s damage was relatively minor. The only casualty that I know of was my situationship. My dog, me, and the city of Los Angeles were shaken up but, for the most part, unscathed. 

People love to talk shit about LA and its inhabitants. I do it too. It’s tempting to judge this city by the influencers and overpriced smoothies and billboards promoting plastic surgery and entitled white ladies complaining they can’t bring their dog into Erewhon (okay, this one was me.) A lot of stereotypes about this city might be true. LA (specifically Hollywood) is guilty of creating the Kardashians, the beauty standard, and Mel Gibson’s career (unforgivable.) But it also created Curb Your Enthusiasm and Wicked (Part 1 and 2) and brought us Pedro Pascal and Beethoven (the dog.)

It is brave to live here. Not just because of the risk of failure, the threat of loneliness, or the danger of passing away from boredom while sitting in traffic on the 405. It’s brave because the actual foundation of the city wants to chew us up and spit us into the ocean. We live under constant risk of earthquakes, fires, and light drizzles that transform the entire city into a mudslide and make everyone drive like lunatics. Most of the time LA is a beautiful place to live. But then, every so often, it becomes completely uninhabitable. And we never know when this will happen. Or how bad it will be.

If I had to find a silver lining, it’s that this unpredictable environment builds character. A necessary adversity to counteract the softening effects of a sun that shines every day and a temperature that oscillates between 66 and 78 degrees. I lived in NYC for a decade and I liked the person it made me. I needed to take three kinds of pharmaceutical medication to get through the day, but I was tough, scrappy, and hardworking. I had an edge. I could handle shit.

It only took a few months in Los Angeles for me to turn soft. Suddenly I couldn’t handle a temperature below sixty degrees, or a rainy day, or being told I can’t bring my emotional support chihuahua into Erewhon. What am I supposed to do, tie her to a parking meter while I’m buying a $12 juice? How will either of us survive that? Six months earlier, a man had whipped out his dick a few feet away from me on the NYC subway platform and I didn’t blink an eye. But just when I think this city has made me weak beyond repair, it starts shaking or bursts into flames. And I’m reminded again of my city’s and my own resilience.

After my first earthquake in 2019, I considered leaving Los Angeles. The quake had punctured the pink cloud of early sobriety and had me feeling like a raw nerve—anxious and emotional and hyperaware of my own mortality. For weeks, I walked around paralyzed in fear that the whole city could erupt and swallow me whole. I started listening to a podcast called “The Big One.” “You're at Union Station when the big one hits,” a woman’s voice narrates, “The next two minutes are terrifying. By the time you make your way outside, the Los Angeles you know is gone.” Did my mom write this?

I thought about leaving, but where would I go? I lived in NYC during Hurricane Sandy when the city was decimated by wind and water damage. Even predicted natural disasters can ruin lives and infrastructure. And climate change is making weather events worse, everywhere. Plus, there are so many other non-natural disasters to worry about, too. Like Aspertame in the liter of Diet Coke I consume each week, which is more likely to take me down than a faultline.

I considered relapsing on weed. To numb my earthquake-induced anxiety, along with every other feeling—bad and good. When I was in a stupor, high on medical-grade edibles, I didn’t fear earthquakes or illness or anything else—except my own thoughts, everyone I’ve ever met being mad at me, and government surveillance (at one point I thought my microwave was bugged, honestly I’m still not sure.)

I decided to stay in LA and stay sober. I went to meetings. I consumed gallons of frozen yogurt. I read. I made an Instagram profile for my dog. I saved money by not buying drugs and spent it instead on earthquake preparedness items from Target. I filled my apartment with flashlight batteries and jugs of bottled water and blankets and dog food and protein bars. And a pack of Camel Lights. Because when The Big one hit, or even the medium one, I was going to start smoking cigarettes again.

A few months later, COVID hit. I didn’t need the flashlight batteries, but the water and protein bars came in handy. And so did sobriety. My isolation was diminished by 12-step meetings on Zoom. And I wasn’t holed up in an apartment with appliances that I believed were spying on me. 

I was also grateful to live in Los Angeles. We had copious outdoor space for Covid-safe gatherings. We flooded the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd. We followed masking protocols and lined up for hours to get vaccines. We danced on our balconies and blasted music from our car windows when Biden won the election. If I had to be anywhere during the pandemic, I’m happy I was in LA.

I made a home here. And five years later, I had to evacuate when the fires ravaged LA, burning down Altadena and the Palisades and forcing thousands of people to evacuate. Just as Covid did, the fires made me more aware than ever of my privilege. Surviving a natural disaster shouldn’t be a privilege. But it is. Not everyone has somewhere to go, or the ability to leave. I’m lucky I did. A lot of people weren’t so lucky and lost everything. But when they did, Los Angeles showed up.

Whenever I feel tempted to talk shit about LA, because I can’t find parking or I’m stuck in traffic or because I drive past fifty billboards a day that make me hate my forehead, I think of the city after the fires. The way people supported each other. We donated so much stuff that donation centers begged us to stop. We gave all our money to GoFundMes to help friends, neighbors, and strangers who lost their homes, forgetting we can barely afford our own rent. We had meltdowns, and then felt guilty because we were fine while others had lost so much. Still we showed up.

Just as we showed up in recent months to protest ICE kidnapping and harassing our neighbors. My theory is that the unstable foundation of this city brings Angelinos closer. We’re bonded together, despite our differences, like tenants uniting to fight a landlord who keeps trying to violently evict us. We might be soft but we’re strong in that we endure. We don’t give up. We’re stage five clingers. But like, in a good way.

This city is not perfect but I love it and I’ve made a commitment to loving it in spite of its figurative and literal faults. I try to focus on the good stuff. Like street tacos and Santa Monica beach and the life I’ve built here and smiling at strangers for no reason. Toxic positivity, it comes for you eventually. This is it, I’ve made it.

It’s not that I’m not worried about The Big One. It’s just low on the list, beneath fascism  and the rise of AI and a government-backed genocide. To worry about a brittle faultline criss-crossing beneath my city feels selfish, or at least pointless. My hope is the Big One can just hold on until humanity has flamed out or we’ve followed Katy Perry and Gayle King into space. But if it does happen in my lifetime, at least I have a go bag in my car, a closet full of flashlight batteries, a community to lean on, and an excuse to finally smoke those Camel Lights.