Before Breaking Ground: Housing Journey Part 2
Something older and deeper feeds my commitment to living with a light footprint, and the cost is not necessarily about money. I'm not a fan of monetizing every aspect of one's life as a way to assign it value. Going much further back than the Part 1 narrative, I think there is a deeper value in sharing my evolution of consciousness about earth's finite resources and what security might become in the midst of warped social memes. During the immense personal trauma of the 1971 Sylmar / San Fernando accelerator quake, my child's mind was impressed with the unleashed power of nature when she screams. My adult mind still holds this revelation as sacred. Our most cherished homes will fail as a haven in such literally earth-shaking scenarios. Fortunately, when one looks at other natural disaster events worldwide, it is a notable commonality that most survivors manage to rally themselves. We do possess an amazing capacity to climb up from the rubble to be truly helpful to others. It is this aspect of humanity that I respect most and carry forward into my forever dreams.
I was barely eleven years old at the time of the above earthquake. The impressions made on my psyche were writ large --- larger than life as we generally know it --- because trauma is involved. But that event was the 3rd trauma, in less than five-months’ time that my family and I had been a part of.
1971 Sylmar Earthquake Footage
Image located from Wes Clark Blog a young resident witness of the quake who settled in Virginia.
Two months before the quake, my beloved older brother, Marlin, nearly died from complications of newly onset juvenile diabetes. This initiated a prolonged healing and learning curve in which he and I made important dietary changes, even though the rest of our family did not. Two months before that near-miss on my brother's life, we faced historic Clampitt Fire of Sept 25th and 26th (1970). Our house was, at that time, part of a brand-new neighborhood development (Saugus - Newhall), now merged as Santa Clarita, California. We had to be evacuated because that fire raged so close as to singe our roof --- aided and abetted by arson and the Santa Ana winds.
One of the cleansing aspects of that particular fire's path was that it destroyed the Spahn Ranch, an old movie set that had been the last location that housed cult leader Charles Manson, and his the family compound. For readers too young to know the significance of this to the history of California and of our society, you can visit the history page via the following link: Cult At Spahn Ranch
Earlier that fiery September day, when my brothers and I arrived from school on the bus, we could see the burning horizon and realized it was very close. The sky emitted a roiling grey-green cast as spark-filled plumes bellowed upwards. The unimagined heat and flames raced to consume more and more ground --- which meant it was racing toward us. Even to a child this was obvious and needed no explanation. I saw an unyielding appetite made voracious with its need for air and territory.
Before the fire reached the hills directly behind our home, turkey vultures were spiraling above in ever tightening circles, part of the blackening masses that were alive above our heads --- alive with ominous intent. Tarantulas were literally racing into the streets from the hills, too, like an overdone movie animation segment. Except it was real and there was no camara man to yell "cut!" One tarantula managed to hop up onto my leg without being dastardly enough to cause me any complications. It was fleeing for its life without seeking to defend itself from a duly spellbound girl of ten. We spent the next few nights on other peoples’ living room floors in a nearby neighborhood, still smelling the rancid smoke that infiltrated our hair, clothing and sleeping bags. None of this had been fully processed, psychologically, when the accelerator quake arrived five months later, turning our rather vulnerable moment of psychic relief inside out all over again.
My comprehension of the destructive nature of fire was crystalized when I witnessed the burning orange horizon, with its clambering walls of leaping flames, moving toward us so rapidly I felt confused. I could hear the outrageous roar of oxygen being sucked from the air. I couldn’t breathe without choking. None of us could. The heat of this blaze, when it reached the hills upon which our new development was built, was like being conveyed into a giant convection oven. An acrid and particulate taste of ash filled our mouths and throats, accompanied by a black smudgy film collecting around our eyes, our nostrils, our lips --- on adults and children alike. Witnessing my stepdad and other neighborhood men standing on the steaming roof of our house, frantically hosing down everything to keep the whole tract from being consumed, also left an imprint more vivid than any movie set can imitate. That heat, that scorched air, those shouts from people I knew a little and of their crying children, all of it was bonded to the chaos of cars and motorcycles speeding off to hurry people to safety. Such was the hour and wave after wave after wave of rescue to an unknown relief.
The aroma of burnt wild animals was no grand barbeque but an open incinerator of flesh and bone. Even at this writing, more than fifty years later, I can recall how hot ashes of all hues swirled in the riotous air currents --- like snowflakes of death. Luckily, we too were evacuated for several days while our house, though singed on the roof's edges, was miraculously spared. But my sleeping dream life became troubled for many years thereafter.
From the moment that 6 am quake shocked us all awake, until we could leave for New Jersey to start fresh three months later, our home, like most of our neighbors' homes, instantly became a source of danger. It was no longer a family sanctuary. It was 2200 square feet of instantly uninhabitable rooms and hallways, an unusable kitchen with busted windows, with cabinets heaving their contents. Bathtubs were severed from their moorings and toilets became cracked porcelain urns of smelly water. The hills around us were still black and sooty. The dust and ash the quake kicked into the air meant that thousands of people were choking for air as they were running from their homes in the barely dawning sunlight, just like us. We were unable to see or breathe, knocked by every thrust of the quake's energy into walls, jumping furniture, down stairwells, barely escaping chimneys that tilted precariously toward potential collapse.
My parents, my two brothers, and my small dog Charlie and I slipped and stumbled, barefoot, over freshly shattered glass and water and tropical fish, when the 20-gallon aquarium that had adorned our entry met us like a tidal wave in our effort to escape. Broken water pipes and leaking gas lines spewed their contents amid the thunderous crashes of falling debris. Unseen forces, which none of us could command or prevent, uncoiled beneath our feet. From split-second upon split-second fashion, thoughts jumbled together to puzzle out what sorts of immediate danger we were in: Was this an earthquake or the apocalypse? A nuclear bomb detonation? If I escape this what is left of the world? To a child of barely 11, it was unimaginable that the whole world wasn’t also in this crisis of chaos.
For months beforehand, the smell of ash and scorched, fetid nature was an assault on all our senses. I watched, on that quaking delirious day as my fragile mother's will broke. I watched as members of other people's families fell apart from one too many disasters. Some people grew sullen while others turned combative. Some became hysterical, as if the need to express the chaos would somehow cause it to mercifully abate. As if that would somehow put order to the madness we were standing in, falling in, and stepping though, second by second by second. And then, there was my mother, again. A thirty-year old alcoholic who had one more reason to stop believing in life being good or safe. Frame by murky frame of unrelenting force impressed upon us the untamable chaos of having nowhere to go to escape. No way to turn it off. And when it did stop, ever so briefly, the quiet became the prelude to another series of jolts and screams and confusions.
Evidently, because of the dams that were in our region, and the nuclear power plants emerging in the area, catastrophes of even greater proportions could have been set in motion by that earthquake. Little did we know how unprepared we were until that day. There was a consensus among scientists in news reports later that the dams that existed in the surrounding area would not be able to sustain another quake like that. The quake we had survived, that is. Barely. In other words, it could have been so much worse. But what I wanted to know --- what began to play in my mind as a child, was this: what can we do to improve our relationship to the natural world? To each other? And, as I grew into my adolescence, I wondered: Did we have to be set up to constantly compete for nature’s resources? What if resources could be used wisely and shared fairly? What if we didn’t need big houses and cars and asphalt and skyscrapers?
Within weeks of the quake my parents had to let our damaged house go back to the bank and declared bankruptcy. The insurance coverage for catastrophic representation had proven inadequate when so many homes and families faced real crisis at the same time. On the day of the quake, my nuclear family of five members moved immediately into an 17-foot travel trailer that my stepdad had purchased only a month or so before. It was parked in our driveway. What was meant to be our residence for travel would now become the shelter we would not otherwise have had. Little did we know it would be our primary residence for most of that year, even after we left to relocate to New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the Spring.
This made us seem lucky. Our neighbors had to sleep on their miniscule lawns, exposed to the elements. We had a tiny fridge with which to keep my brother's insulin safe. We had a cookstove that we could use. We could ride out the hundreds of aftershocks without exposure to the elements or having walls and furniture displaced repeatedly. But we were trapped, too. The Saugus - Newhall Canyon was impassible for weeks. Helicopters brought in potable water, donated food, medical supplies, portable potties, doctors and nurses, and law enforcement. With over 200 aftershocks in the first week --- with everything rattling and thundering at frequent but unpredictable intervals, there could be no school, no church, no normal activities that drew people together to think about and talk of other things. Everyone was thrown into survival mode. Having the privacy to pee was something to be grateful for.
In that first horrific week, some folks began looting the goods that had become exposed from the crumpled storefronts of the new and fashionable shopping malls, located less than a mile away. Some individuals were even crossing the fractured natural boundaries of people’s houses close by --- because they could. The gunfire of police, as they chased off those who were looting, became the nightly pop, pop, popping sound I was suddenly falling asleep to every night. The unique echo of handguns being fired at strangers in the distance, ricocheted up the canyon and back down it. And, in once case at least, the unknown strangers looting in the rubble turned out to be the well-educated father whose kid was in my 5th grade classroom at that time. Something desperate had been born. Not just in the miasma around me but within me. I would develop an over-the-top startle response that took years to heal.
That desperate aspect born in me was the need to know. The need-to-know true things. The need-to-know facts about emergency responses and catastrophe preparedness. If everything could be destroyed or stolen, what would it take to become equipped for a different life? A life that went beyond survival to one of thriving, with no encroachment on the lives of others. With no encroachment on the balance of nature. Was it even possible to understand life on this planet? I wanted answers but not through the lens of panic nor to manipulate anyone's desperate vulnerability but to prepare for recovery. To understand that the elements of any restoration must live in the structures of the present. To embrace the creative gift that living with uncertainty can be attended to in ways that will keep a person healthy and communities intact but responsive more than oppressive --- responsive to the needs of the present and future. I possess no blatantly clear moment of total realization, although my near death experience (NDE) of 2019 gifted me with something akin to a broader perspective of what profound realization might look like across an individual lifespan. For me, a series of small, breathtaking clarities over a full and challenging life have helped me to develop a sense of calm in the storms of a beloved terra firma. I cannot be the person who stops the hurricanes of change but I might be able to ride through the eye of the storms. Every earthquake eventually ceases to shake. Every fire eventually ceases to burn. Every gale will eventually blow itself to stillness. And so I learned to pray. And my most frequent prayer suggests that I can be present to all those I love and hope for. And I hope for others what I hope for myself: A place to call home that offers rest and resiliency rather than creature comforts and separation.
Early in this life I developed a deep sense of connection and respect for a greater consciousness and the interconnectedness of all life. As a result of several catastrophes, I discovered that my need-to-know true things was not to avoid shocking catastrophes of nature and men. No. As I matured in life, it was obvious I wanted to know how to come back from my own edge of ignorance, whatever I was confronted with. In particular, this was more often about how I and my human family impact nature by the way we live and wage war. I was just a preteen when I became aware of this. After all, this was all happening during the Vietnam war era, when televised reports were live and the news was not yet a contrived reality show but a documentation of lives and cultures we could not see for ourselves otherwise. I picked up on things from the difficult news in the forefront, and from the adults who talked among themselves yet within earshot of my ever listening vigilant wakefulness. And that, I suppose, would be the background. In this way, I discovered that parents mistakenly believe that they need to protect their children from truthful things.
Why do parents have a misperceived tendency to pretend all will be well when it takes a lot of hands, even young ones, to restore true wellness after just one, let alone multiple tragedies? Nevertheless, having no home, and having no way of knowing where and how to claim a home is a primary human tragedy. This tragedy is faced by millions of people right now. We cannot turn off this fact like we can switch off a light or let a computer go into sleep mode. Whether I am plugged in or off-grid, members of my human family are homeless. Whether you are plugged in or off-grid, members of our human family are homeless and hurting. Without a home and if refugees to boot, they are also stateless.
My questions belong to the present, but they began when I was an 11-year-old: Is there a way to live that allows us to share resources rather than hoard them or monetize them for profit? What are they ways in which we can live lightly and in harmony with the nature of things, eliminating the habit of violence over territory and inequality? As far as I am concerned, the answers to these questions reside within us as mentor-leaders, setting in motion a collective ethic of the right use of will.
If the earth is a mystery school, as some ancient teachings suggest, perhaps the burden of youth is to witness and challenge untrue things. And maybe the burden of the mature is to apply wisdom to inevitable change and the turmoil it can bring up in oneself and others. To make sure that the true and beautiful and meaningful things prevail. I have experienced a kind of grace that allowed me to transform what once left me weak and scared, uncertain and hyperalert. I believe now that the grace of what truly matters can lead us toward a living design in resilience and strength and love. It is at once personal, intimate, and inclusive.
If building my own tiny home is an act of intention and self-determination for me, would it be this for others, too?
Communion
A place is not a place
Without one of us
and all of us
living within it.
I shall stand for this:
a home within a home
where the heart
the body, the feet, the soul
the voice, the hands, the will,
all collaborate
to bring harmony
to purpose, to bring
thriving to life.
Amen
(c) 2023 M L Meadows
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