Categories > Books > Redwall > The Wicked Ground
So! All of The Wicked Ground is written and posted! This means, true to Mitya-story form, that there must come a thread explaining all the names and references, because by now you should all be able to tell that I tend to do most things on purpose with stories like this...and I think I tend to get more meticulous with that doing thing on purpose the more stories I write!
So, without further ado, the explanations!
Character and Place Names
As The Wicked Ground is a rewriting and elaboration upon part of my first ever Redwall fanfic, Rhynnsylvania, some characters carry over. I was not so meticulous about plot detail in the original story (major earthquake in one paragraph, what?) and I likewise did not tend to choose names that meant stuff at this point in time. Thus, Rhynn, Rakarde, Ruta, Walden, Kinth, Streamrunner, Leika, and Charity are all carryover characters with essentially meaningless names. Skoilkull, Winfield, Wesley, Merritt, and Aetantim also carry over, though the significance in their names will be better explained after I've written more of this trilogy.
But as for the names new and relevant to this particular story...
Andreas - The San Andreas Fault is very possibly the most famous named fault in the entire world. It's the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates and runs through roughly 750 miles of California terrain, from the Salton Sea in the south to Cape Mendocino in the north. It's known as a right-lateral strike-slip/transform fault, meaning that the two plates grind past each other mostly horizontally, and that all landforms/features that cross the fault appear to be deflected to the right, no matter which side of the fault the observer is on. The San Andreas has potential for very very large earthquakes -- cases in point being the magnitude 7.8 San Francisco quake on 18 April 1906 that completely demolished the city, or the suspected magnitude 8 Fort Tejon quake on 9 January 1857. Those said, the San Andreas isn't terribly active between those major breaks. If everything was slipping and sliding smoothly, without things catching and needing to break, Los Angeles would be moving toward San Francisco at a rate of about 2.5 inches per year, but because rocks catch and stick, that much strain builds instead, and it all gets released at once in massive earthquakes. The whole fault never ruptures at once, though. It tends to operate in three sections - north, central, and south - and the average recurrence interval for all three sections is roughly 150 years. 1906 and 1857 were the last ruptures on the north and central segments respectively. The southern segment, which includes the stretch of fault that is only twelve miles from where I live, has not ruptured since 1769. Fun times ahead...
Elsinore - The Elsinore Fault is another right-lateral strike-slip fault that runs parallel to the San Andreas, beginning in Los Angeles and ending just north of the Mexican border. The fault gets its name from the town of Lake Elsinore, which is right on top of it. The town and the lake did indeed get their name from Shakespeare. The Elsinore Fault is very old and not very active either, despite having caused a magnitude 6 event in 1910. Some scientists believe this is because the main plain of plate motion used to involve it and has since switched to the San Andreas. This one's about fifteen miles from my building.
Hayward Hollister - The Hayward Fault is yet another right-lateral stirke-slip fault that parallels the San Andreas, though this one is in the Bay Area, running from east of San Jose through Berkeley. It bisects the UC Berkeley campus to the point where the football stadium is literally being torn in half by the fault. While the Hayward has produced some pretty bad quakes in the past, it's currently showing a phenomenon known as aseismic creep, in which the land on either side of the fault does not stick but rather slides, producing significant steady motion without quakes and obviously warping the roads and houses that are on top of the fault.
The town of Hollister does not lie on the Hayward Fault, but rather the Calaveras, yet another right-lateral strike-slip fault that runs parallel to the San Andreas. Hollister is situated about 100 miles southeast of San Francisco, right where the Calaveras branches off of the San Andreas, and resultantly, the town has a disproportionate number of earthquakes, even for California. But Hollister is ultimately more famous for being a classic example of the effects of aseismic creep. There is a path of twisted roads and lopsided houses that follows the fault through the town, and apparently they get packs of geology students that follow that path to try and follow the Calaveras' trace through the town.
Jacinth - The San Jacinto fault is the last right-lateral strike-slip fault that I'm going to talk about, I promise. It is one of California's youngest faults, and certainly its most active, though the vast majority of the quakes it causes are far too small to be felt. The San Jacinto branches off of the San Andreas in the city of San Bernardino, then runs southeast to the town of Ocotillo, just north of the Mexican border. It also happens to pass four miles behind where I live, making it my closest major fault. A recent study suggests that in southern California, only 60 percent of the motion between the Pacific and North American plates rests on the San Andreas, with the other 40 on the San Jacinto. That means that when the San Jacinto ruptures in earnest, particularly if it goes on its whole length, it could rival the San Andreas for magnitude and destructive impact.
Garlock - The Garlock Fault is the second longest fault in California, and unlike all of the others mentioned so far, it's a left-lateral strike-slip fault (everything that crosses it appears to be diverted to the left) that runs perpendicular to the San Andreas, intersecting it at the town of Frazier Park and running east through much of the width of the state. It forms the northern boundary of the Mojave Desert, and when you look at a satellite image of California, it and the San Andreas form a very visible and very sharp angle that encloses the desert. The San Andreas is not a completely straight line, and that branch off point for the Garlock also happens to be at the start of the bend in the San Andreas. While the Transverse Ranges were kicked up by the pressure going into this bend, the Garlock developed to help ease some of the pressure by moving land the other way. According to some scientists, the right-lateral motion of the San Andreas and the left-lateral motion of the Garlock is actually rotating whole chunks of land in place. It was absolutely no coincidence that my Garlock character was the one to go against the parallel intents of Andreas, Hayward, and Elsinore! The Garlock is also not currently a very active fault, though it has caused some pretty significant quakes in the past.
Hosgri - The Hosgri Fault Zone runs for around 100 miles off the shore of central California, though it's difficult to trace because it consists of many smaller segments that apparently function as a group. Most of those segments are thrust faults, meaning that the land on one side of the fault is pushing upward relative to the other side, though some are back to the good old right-lateral strike-slip. It's not considered a major concern as faults go, and its most significant recorded quake may not have even occurred on the Hosgri at all. I mostly used it as a name because I thought, "Hey, this sounds like a Redwall name."
Fialko - This is the only character in the whole story who's named after a scientist, despite the fact that other characters are playing more scientific roles than he is! Yuri Fialko is a geophysicist at UC San Diego who, in June of 2006, published a short but very frightening paper discussing the strain on the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults and the average interval between major ruptures. He even includes satellite data to show where the earth is now versus calculations of the amount the San Andreas would move if it weren't locked would put it. The offset he's found is about equal to the amount of torn offset observed after San Francisco and Fort Tejon -- between seven and nine meters. The article is in geologese, but there are simplified summaries on the internet. In short, it says we're due for a Big One, that it's pretty likely within 30 years, and that San Bernardino and Riverside in particular are screwed. Like I said, scary! I figured, though, if I'm going to have a character in the story talk about The Big One, this would be the right name for him to have.
Falla - Spanish for "fault."
Lontano - Italian term for "from far away" that turns up in music directions every so often. I have actually had a whole story for this character bouncing around in my brain, though with its specifics still unformed. He is, in fact, from somewhere far away from Redwall, so there you go.
Enruso - From world-reknowned tenor Enrico Caruso, who happened to be in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake and fire. The real Caruso really did initially panic that the quake had broken his voice, and he really did wander around in his pajamas muttering, "Hell of a town, hell of a town," after the shaking had stopped. It was too good of an anecdote for me to not incorporate into my own story.
Crysantema - The opera that I described in chapter two of the story is, essentially, Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly. The original title of the play from which the opera was adapted was Madame Chrysantheme.
Lascala - The theatre at which most of Puccini's operas were premiered was the La Scala Theatre in Milan. I needed a quick reference name for the composer of the opera in the story, so I went with Puccini's theatre to represent him.
Liedswelt - Gustav Mahler was not in San Francisco in April of 1906; he was quite busy rehearsing his Sixth Symphony in Essen, Germany. But this is a Mitya story and, seriously, did you expect it to go by without Mahler references? Mehler Liedswelt was a name I came up for a Mahler character whose own novel never ended up getting written. It means, literally, "song's world." Since Mahler said that "a symphony must be like the world," and since one of his most personal songs involves text about how he is "alone in my heaven, my love, my song," I figured it was an appropriate name.
The Northridge Horde - In the original Rhynnsylvania, Rhynn's horde is simply The Northern Horde. This is horrendously generic name, and since I was working in all kinds of earthquake references anyway, I took the opportunity to make a little change. The magnitude 6.7 17 January 1994 quake that caused serious damage in downtown Los Angeles and surroundings is known as the Northridge Quake, as its epicenter was thought to be located within the neighborhood of Northridge. It was later pinpointed as being in Reseda, the next neighborhood over, but by that point, the quake was already well known as Northridge.
Darkhill - The magnitude 6.9 quake that interrupted the World Series and caused serious damage all over the Bay Area on 17 October 1989 actually had its epicenter some 40 miles south of the city under a mountain known as Loma Prieta. I personally think the sound of that Spanish name is appealing. I think the words flow nicely. Its name in English is far less poetic to my ear, though more suitable for Redwallian purposes. "Loma Prieta" translates to "Dark Hill." So there you go.
Parkfield - The real life town of Parkfield is a place you have to be trying to get to. Only three roads go there, one of which is unpaved and scary, and the other two of which turn out to be different ends of the same single street that runs through the town. There are maybe a dozen buildings in the whole place, and the sign alongside the street declares that the population consists of eighteen whole people. The Parkfield in the story is actually bigger than the real life one, and more accessible, considering the train. But the real life Parkfield has a claim to fame that draws plenty of geologists (and geeky tourists, such as myself) out on those three roads each year. The town is directly on top of the San Andreas Fault and, more significantly, it has a magnitude 6 quake roughly every 22 years. Once scientists figured this out, they set up all sorts of monitoring equipment, expecting payoff between 1988 and 1993. Which, of course, did not happen. The expected quake finally came in 2004, much to the glee of the geologists. Despite the fact that magnitude 6 is pretty freaking huge, nobody has ever died in a Parkfield quake, the town has never been leveled, and the people who live there are quite proud of their local seismicity. There was really no other name I could give a quake-prone town with knowledgeable inhabitants in this story! Also, there really are a lot of squirrels there.
The Narrows - Whittier Narrows is a large park in the city of Whittier, about 20 miles outside of downtown Los Angeles. The 1 October 1987 magnitude 5.9 Whittier Narrows quake, which caused considerable damage in some parts of the Los Angeles basin, had its epicenter in this park.
Big Bend - This is the official name that scientists have given the spot where the San Andreas Fault bends in its middle section. No technical terminology here, folks.
Other References, Chapter By Chapter
Chapter One - An often observed precursor event to significant earthquakes is that animals behave strangely, including things like birds and insects ceasing to make noise. I can't have much peculiar animal behavior in a world where the characters are all humanlike animals themselves, but I could at least make the insects shut up.
Chapter Two - The opera that takes place in this chapter is, as I mentioned before, Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly, only Redwallized. The real opera deals with Americans being colonial and imperialist in Japan rather than vermin doing that to woodlanders. This said, I described the plot as it actually is, with no alterations.
Jacinth's spazzing out was my way of extending the animals freaking out before earthquakes thing to the more sentient creatures of Mossflower. Just because the population on the whole wouldn't be hit like a real world animal population before an earthquake doesn't mean I had to pass up the chance for some good Redwallish cryptic premonition!
The lights that Aetantim notices briefly out the Infirmary window are a phenomenon known as earthquake lights. Nobody is quite sure why they happen, but before, during, and after some major quakes, some fault lines will give off light, from a dull luminescence to apparently spherical electrical pulses. For a long time, they were only rumored to exist, but then they were both observed and caught on film during a quake in Japan in the mid 20th century. They could possibly be a clue for predicting quakes, though by no means a failure-proof one.
Chapter Three - The type of fault in question in this story is right-lateral strike slip. This is not merely for convenience, nor is it just because most of California's faults are this type. I figured this out based on looking at the maps in the beginnings of the Redwall books, and I'll be writing a whole longer article thing about why I think the fault is this type and about the geological processes that could have made it that way. But this said, in a strike slip quake, there is not a huge vertical displacement of earth. There are waves in the ground, which do become visible in a situation upward of magnitude 5, but they are not the enormous scale vertical slips that produce tsunamis. Thus, the ground waves would proceed to make bodies of water incredibly choppy, but not to the point of flinging ships around, particularly not if the epicenter was on land, as in the case of this story. The epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco quake was in the water, and there are some accounts of some ships getting dramatically rocked, but there are accounts of others feeling alarmingly little compared to what was going on on land. Thus, it's wholly possible for a thing like the otters failing to notice the extent of the weird goings on while remaining at sea.
The moles succumb to a phenomenon called liquefaction. This occurs when major fault motion dredges up water from deep within the earth and creates a suspension of soil particles within that water. The ground therefore becomes soft and unstable, and things can very easily sink down into it. In the case of modern day quakes, it's mostly buildings that are demolished by liquefaction, but since the moles were already digging around in soft dirt, I saw no reason why the liquefaction wouldn't cause them a ton of trouble as well.
Enruso and Liedswelt's conversation is basically ripped from a true anecdote about Enrico Caruso and the conductor of the touring production of Bizet's Carmen that happened to have been playing in San Francisco the night before the quake. It was too amusing of a conversation not to use.
There exist plenty of accounts of earthquakes making rivers flow backwards. Perhaps the most dramatic was in the New Madrid, Missouri quakes of 1811-1812. These four events, the smallest estimated at measuring over 7.0 and the largest topping 8.0, managed to make the Mississippi River leap out of its banks, flow backwards, and permanently change its course in some places. If the mighty Mississippi could be so effected, the River Moss could certainly also fall victim.
Chapter Four - More earthquake lights! It has been noted that, before some earthquakes, the number of UFO sightings in the region of the quake goes up a little. It has therefore been theorized that people are seeing earthquake lights and mistaking them for UFOs. If the technology in the Mossflower of this story is enough to have trains, then it's also enough for telescopes and wondering about life elsewhere. Thus, a legitimate excuse for Walden to mention aliens!
Chapter Five - Garlock smells a faint edge of sulfur in the mist as he wanders on the morning of the quake. This type of smell has been documented as lingering around some fault zones immediately before, during, and after a rupture.
The darting furrows in the ground described in this chapter are known as mole tracks (nevermind that they're chasing a ferret in this story!). They're relatively common when quakes cross more brittle ground, as are open cracks in the earth. These cracks will pull open and pinch shut again with the passing compression waves of the quake. Fault lines themselves do not open up along their middle, but this myth most likely comes from such dramatic surface scars as these mole tracks and cracks. The myth of fault lines swallowing people up also doubtlessly comes from this. There is no documented proof of anyone ever being swallowed by a ground crack caused by an earthquake, though there are plenty of stories. There's also a very specific story from the 1906 San Francisco quake in which a cow fell into a crack which closed around it and left only the tail sticking out. There is, again, no documented proof, though the story is persistent. But there is enough photographic evidence of ground cracks and mole tracks that are easily large enough for someone to fall into that it is not impossible that someone could meet this fate. So I had it happen to poor Falla.
Chapter Six - There actually isn't any numerical significance to the specific amount of time the quake took or the time of day that it occurred. I went with morning for dramatic sense (and many major quakes do seem to have occurred in the morning), and with the length of time based on estimates of shaking time for comparable-sized quakes on the same type of fault. I was using San Francisco 1906 and Fort Tejon 1857 as models to some degree; they were estimated at 7.8 and 7.9 respectively, and the estimated shaking time for both is between one and two minutes.
Once again, Enruso's behavior here is based entirely on the real Caruso's behavior. The phrase, "Hell of a town," which Caruso was heard to have uttered, just didn't seem very Redwall to me, so I changed it a little.
As mentioned earlier, the motion of right-lateral strike slip faults makes all objects on the other side of the fault appear directed to the right from where an observer stands, no matter which side of the fault that observer is on. This is what has happened to the road that Hayward and Walden take to Redwall. When they come to the break and deflection, the line along which the deflection is the fault itself, though they do not know this. Maximum recorded displacements for both San Francisco and Fort Tejon were in the ballpark of 9 meters, which is more than enough to throw travelers off even more than the path has been thrown!
Chapter Seven - I know you know what the mark Andreas' pen made looks like. Crude seismographic instruments did exist in the later part of the 19th century, but Redwall surely wouldn't have felt a need to be equipped with such a thing before.
Chapter Eight - The brief earthquake reference in Mattimeo was how I got the idea to destroy Redwall in a quake to begin with, back in 1998 when I was working on the original Rhynnsylvania. If not for those couple of pages from BJ himself, you'd be safely without this big mess of mine!
Chapter Nine - Descriptions of surface ruptures along strike slip faults from before anything was known about those faults still include phrases along the lines of the ground being torn and pulled past itself -- very insightful observations!
There are several accounts of trees being split by unfortunate placement on top of faults, mostly from the 1906 San Francisco quake. One such tree in central California, whose halves were not completely detached from each other, did not die from the break, and is apparently still standing. Based on what I've read, the trunk has healed over with bark, but it's still clear that the tree was split and pulled apart by several inches.
Chapter Ten - No really nerdy references here. Move along, folks.
Chapter Eleven - While mountains like the Himalayas are caused by land colliding and crunching upward, and while ranges like the Cascades are caused by volcanic activity and pushing from underneath, the mountains caused by strike slip faults are pressure and friction ridges, and rippled is the best word I can think of these comparatively smooth peaks. On the ones with less vegetation, strata are sometimes very clearly visible. Sometimes, faulting will cut through forming mountains and displace them from themselves in a formation called a shutter ridge. These are all characteristic of California, and since Mossflower has the same kind of fault, I figured I could transplant some other physical features as well.
The long narrow lakes mentioned in this chapter are called sag ponds. These are formed when motion along faults pulls water upward from deep in the earth. In some cases, the ponds do appear still and unmoving, but along other faults, the water actually does flow as a stream, disguising something dangerous as something totally innocuous.
When one side of a fault becomes abruptly elevated relative to the other, the resulting formation is called a scarp. These are more common with dip slip faults, that is, ones where the primary motion is up and down, but most strike slip faults also have a small vertical component, and over time, the scarps can get pretty big.
Chapter Twelve - According to Alma Mahler, she and Gustav were "very shaken" (her word choice, inappropriate that it is) by the news of the 1906 San Francisco quake, which they found out about while in Vienna. According to Alma, though, she and Mahler were more upset about the death of Pierre Curie, which occurred on the same day as the quake. Now, Alma had a tendency to lie about her various husbands and lovers and to make things up and change small details depending on whether she wanted the guy to look better or worse for posterity. I have no doubt that Mahler was upset by the loss of a scientist like Curie, but based on extensive reading about his character and interests as described by people who knew him and were not compulsive liars like Alma, I think he was likely far more freaked out by San Francisco than Alma let on. Mahler essentially worshipped nature, who wrote several symphonies involving themes of good things coming to all of mankind rather than only named individuals, who freaked out for weeks upon reading an article about one man committing suicide. I have no doubt that the concept of a force of nature taking hundreds of lives and demolishing an entire city caught in his brain far more than Alma described. Liedswelt's bit in this chapter is my take on how Mahler might have felt, though Liedswelt has the added big stress of having been there for it.
Chapter Thirteen - Though I've moved it from southern California to Mossflower for the sake of this story, the cut open cliff face described in this chapter really does exist. In real life, it happens to be in a roadcut on California route 14 just south of Palmdale. The cut runs straight through the San Andreas Fault's scarp and exposes dramatically twisted and warped layers of multicolored rock. To me, it's absolute proof of the art in nature.
Chapter Fourteen - This was really not a smart thing for Aetantim to do in light of aftershocks, but the obligatory Redwallian artifacts had to be found!
Chapter Fifteen - If "It's nobeast's fault but yours, Andreas" was the only pun you caught in this chapter, you should consider yourself very very lucky. But if you're morbidly curious, the seismology articles on Wikipedia should be able to tell you what you need to know. But don't say I didn't warn you, and if you look them all up, you no longer have a right to smack me for any of them.
As for other references:
I had to have Elsinore get in her requisite line from Hamlet somewhere.
Garlock tells Hayward to go back to his badger fort. Tejon is the Spanish word for badger, thus Fort Tejon is Fort Badger.
I also had to have some sort of reference to the California Falling Into The Ocean urban legend. Which is nothing more than that. The part of California west of the Fault will move from where it is now, but it will slide past the further inland parts rather than drifting off to sea. In several million years, San Francisco and Los Angeles will only be about 50 miles apart, but neither one is going to end up under water.
Collapsed chimneys are basically the most common form of earthquake damage. Because chimneys are narrow and basically unsupported, they're the first thing to go. With a quake as large as the one in this story, if you've only lost the chimney and it fell away from the rest of the house, you're in very good shape.
Chapter Sixteen - The piece of music that Liedswelt is describing is, in fact, Mahler's Second Symphony. The text that the chorus sings is directly snipped from the last movement, though I've shortened it a great deal for my purposes here. There really is an earthquake in this symphony, though. The last movement describes the time between the Apocalypse and the resurrection of humanity. Death happens in the earlier movements, then there is a massive crescendoed drumroll that Mahler described as, "A trembling passes over the earth. Listen to the drum roll and your hair will stand on end!" The earthquake allows for the dead to come out of the earth, zombielike, and have a processional to the point of resurrection. Yet I was actually planning on including references to this piece based on the text alone, since there is talk of trembling and rising from the dust, but finding out that Mahler actually included his own earthquake references clinched my including it in this story.
Chapter Seventeen - The number of aftershocks following a major quake decreases proportionally to how much time has elapsed. The second day has half as many as the first, the tenth day has one tenth as many. With really large quakes, aftershocks can continue sparsely for decades. Some scientists think that quakes that happen around Charleston, South Carolina, in the present are still aftershocks to a quake estimated at being magnitude 6.6 to 7.3 that happened there in 1886. No such formula has been determined for magnitudes, though; large aftershocks are more likely closer to the main event, but that can come seemingly out of nowhere later on. The one that meant the end of stuff for Garlock in this story was soon enough after the mainshock that it shouldn't have even counted as unexpected.
Chapter Eighteen - As far as I know, no entire civilization has moved away from its homeland because of an earthquake, but hey, this is still fiction here!
The Title - This comes from a line in Natalie Merchant's song "San Andreas Fault." I like the song in its own right, though I admittedly initially pulled it off of iTunes because of the title alone. The line in question goes, "Oh promised land, oh wicked ground, build a dream, tear it down..."
Time and Place
I enjoy bringing in real world spatial and temporal connections to my stories. This should not come across as surprising considering I have a ton of characters who are personified days of the year, and I have made an effort to align anniversaries or trips to significant places with work on stories in the past. This story is no different. In fact, I think I've gotten worse.
The entire story was written within five miles of an active fault. Yes, California has more than its fair share, but there are plenty of places in the state that have a larger distance than five miles to the next fault. Part of chapter three was written while I was sitting basically on top of the San Andreas in San Bernardino. I would have written more of the chapter there if it hadn't gotten dark. I felt no earthquakes in the whole span while I was writing this story, though I felt my first the day after I finished it.
I started writing this on 1 November 2006, as an attempt at NaNoWriMo. I failed to get up to 50,000 even when all was said and done, but I didn't even finish the whole effort within November. The story was completed on 9 January 2007, the 150th anniversary of the Fort Tejon earthquake.
So, without further ado, the explanations!
Character and Place Names
As The Wicked Ground is a rewriting and elaboration upon part of my first ever Redwall fanfic, Rhynnsylvania, some characters carry over. I was not so meticulous about plot detail in the original story (major earthquake in one paragraph, what?) and I likewise did not tend to choose names that meant stuff at this point in time. Thus, Rhynn, Rakarde, Ruta, Walden, Kinth, Streamrunner, Leika, and Charity are all carryover characters with essentially meaningless names. Skoilkull, Winfield, Wesley, Merritt, and Aetantim also carry over, though the significance in their names will be better explained after I've written more of this trilogy.
But as for the names new and relevant to this particular story...
Andreas - The San Andreas Fault is very possibly the most famous named fault in the entire world. It's the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates and runs through roughly 750 miles of California terrain, from the Salton Sea in the south to Cape Mendocino in the north. It's known as a right-lateral strike-slip/transform fault, meaning that the two plates grind past each other mostly horizontally, and that all landforms/features that cross the fault appear to be deflected to the right, no matter which side of the fault the observer is on. The San Andreas has potential for very very large earthquakes -- cases in point being the magnitude 7.8 San Francisco quake on 18 April 1906 that completely demolished the city, or the suspected magnitude 8 Fort Tejon quake on 9 January 1857. Those said, the San Andreas isn't terribly active between those major breaks. If everything was slipping and sliding smoothly, without things catching and needing to break, Los Angeles would be moving toward San Francisco at a rate of about 2.5 inches per year, but because rocks catch and stick, that much strain builds instead, and it all gets released at once in massive earthquakes. The whole fault never ruptures at once, though. It tends to operate in three sections - north, central, and south - and the average recurrence interval for all three sections is roughly 150 years. 1906 and 1857 were the last ruptures on the north and central segments respectively. The southern segment, which includes the stretch of fault that is only twelve miles from where I live, has not ruptured since 1769. Fun times ahead...
Elsinore - The Elsinore Fault is another right-lateral strike-slip fault that runs parallel to the San Andreas, beginning in Los Angeles and ending just north of the Mexican border. The fault gets its name from the town of Lake Elsinore, which is right on top of it. The town and the lake did indeed get their name from Shakespeare. The Elsinore Fault is very old and not very active either, despite having caused a magnitude 6 event in 1910. Some scientists believe this is because the main plain of plate motion used to involve it and has since switched to the San Andreas. This one's about fifteen miles from my building.
Hayward Hollister - The Hayward Fault is yet another right-lateral stirke-slip fault that parallels the San Andreas, though this one is in the Bay Area, running from east of San Jose through Berkeley. It bisects the UC Berkeley campus to the point where the football stadium is literally being torn in half by the fault. While the Hayward has produced some pretty bad quakes in the past, it's currently showing a phenomenon known as aseismic creep, in which the land on either side of the fault does not stick but rather slides, producing significant steady motion without quakes and obviously warping the roads and houses that are on top of the fault.
The town of Hollister does not lie on the Hayward Fault, but rather the Calaveras, yet another right-lateral strike-slip fault that runs parallel to the San Andreas. Hollister is situated about 100 miles southeast of San Francisco, right where the Calaveras branches off of the San Andreas, and resultantly, the town has a disproportionate number of earthquakes, even for California. But Hollister is ultimately more famous for being a classic example of the effects of aseismic creep. There is a path of twisted roads and lopsided houses that follows the fault through the town, and apparently they get packs of geology students that follow that path to try and follow the Calaveras' trace through the town.
Jacinth - The San Jacinto fault is the last right-lateral strike-slip fault that I'm going to talk about, I promise. It is one of California's youngest faults, and certainly its most active, though the vast majority of the quakes it causes are far too small to be felt. The San Jacinto branches off of the San Andreas in the city of San Bernardino, then runs southeast to the town of Ocotillo, just north of the Mexican border. It also happens to pass four miles behind where I live, making it my closest major fault. A recent study suggests that in southern California, only 60 percent of the motion between the Pacific and North American plates rests on the San Andreas, with the other 40 on the San Jacinto. That means that when the San Jacinto ruptures in earnest, particularly if it goes on its whole length, it could rival the San Andreas for magnitude and destructive impact.
Garlock - The Garlock Fault is the second longest fault in California, and unlike all of the others mentioned so far, it's a left-lateral strike-slip fault (everything that crosses it appears to be diverted to the left) that runs perpendicular to the San Andreas, intersecting it at the town of Frazier Park and running east through much of the width of the state. It forms the northern boundary of the Mojave Desert, and when you look at a satellite image of California, it and the San Andreas form a very visible and very sharp angle that encloses the desert. The San Andreas is not a completely straight line, and that branch off point for the Garlock also happens to be at the start of the bend in the San Andreas. While the Transverse Ranges were kicked up by the pressure going into this bend, the Garlock developed to help ease some of the pressure by moving land the other way. According to some scientists, the right-lateral motion of the San Andreas and the left-lateral motion of the Garlock is actually rotating whole chunks of land in place. It was absolutely no coincidence that my Garlock character was the one to go against the parallel intents of Andreas, Hayward, and Elsinore! The Garlock is also not currently a very active fault, though it has caused some pretty significant quakes in the past.
Hosgri - The Hosgri Fault Zone runs for around 100 miles off the shore of central California, though it's difficult to trace because it consists of many smaller segments that apparently function as a group. Most of those segments are thrust faults, meaning that the land on one side of the fault is pushing upward relative to the other side, though some are back to the good old right-lateral strike-slip. It's not considered a major concern as faults go, and its most significant recorded quake may not have even occurred on the Hosgri at all. I mostly used it as a name because I thought, "Hey, this sounds like a Redwall name."
Fialko - This is the only character in the whole story who's named after a scientist, despite the fact that other characters are playing more scientific roles than he is! Yuri Fialko is a geophysicist at UC San Diego who, in June of 2006, published a short but very frightening paper discussing the strain on the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults and the average interval between major ruptures. He even includes satellite data to show where the earth is now versus calculations of the amount the San Andreas would move if it weren't locked would put it. The offset he's found is about equal to the amount of torn offset observed after San Francisco and Fort Tejon -- between seven and nine meters. The article is in geologese, but there are simplified summaries on the internet. In short, it says we're due for a Big One, that it's pretty likely within 30 years, and that San Bernardino and Riverside in particular are screwed. Like I said, scary! I figured, though, if I'm going to have a character in the story talk about The Big One, this would be the right name for him to have.
Falla - Spanish for "fault."
Lontano - Italian term for "from far away" that turns up in music directions every so often. I have actually had a whole story for this character bouncing around in my brain, though with its specifics still unformed. He is, in fact, from somewhere far away from Redwall, so there you go.
Enruso - From world-reknowned tenor Enrico Caruso, who happened to be in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake and fire. The real Caruso really did initially panic that the quake had broken his voice, and he really did wander around in his pajamas muttering, "Hell of a town, hell of a town," after the shaking had stopped. It was too good of an anecdote for me to not incorporate into my own story.
Crysantema - The opera that I described in chapter two of the story is, essentially, Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly. The original title of the play from which the opera was adapted was Madame Chrysantheme.
Lascala - The theatre at which most of Puccini's operas were premiered was the La Scala Theatre in Milan. I needed a quick reference name for the composer of the opera in the story, so I went with Puccini's theatre to represent him.
Liedswelt - Gustav Mahler was not in San Francisco in April of 1906; he was quite busy rehearsing his Sixth Symphony in Essen, Germany. But this is a Mitya story and, seriously, did you expect it to go by without Mahler references? Mehler Liedswelt was a name I came up for a Mahler character whose own novel never ended up getting written. It means, literally, "song's world." Since Mahler said that "a symphony must be like the world," and since one of his most personal songs involves text about how he is "alone in my heaven, my love, my song," I figured it was an appropriate name.
The Northridge Horde - In the original Rhynnsylvania, Rhynn's horde is simply The Northern Horde. This is horrendously generic name, and since I was working in all kinds of earthquake references anyway, I took the opportunity to make a little change. The magnitude 6.7 17 January 1994 quake that caused serious damage in downtown Los Angeles and surroundings is known as the Northridge Quake, as its epicenter was thought to be located within the neighborhood of Northridge. It was later pinpointed as being in Reseda, the next neighborhood over, but by that point, the quake was already well known as Northridge.
Darkhill - The magnitude 6.9 quake that interrupted the World Series and caused serious damage all over the Bay Area on 17 October 1989 actually had its epicenter some 40 miles south of the city under a mountain known as Loma Prieta. I personally think the sound of that Spanish name is appealing. I think the words flow nicely. Its name in English is far less poetic to my ear, though more suitable for Redwallian purposes. "Loma Prieta" translates to "Dark Hill." So there you go.
Parkfield - The real life town of Parkfield is a place you have to be trying to get to. Only three roads go there, one of which is unpaved and scary, and the other two of which turn out to be different ends of the same single street that runs through the town. There are maybe a dozen buildings in the whole place, and the sign alongside the street declares that the population consists of eighteen whole people. The Parkfield in the story is actually bigger than the real life one, and more accessible, considering the train. But the real life Parkfield has a claim to fame that draws plenty of geologists (and geeky tourists, such as myself) out on those three roads each year. The town is directly on top of the San Andreas Fault and, more significantly, it has a magnitude 6 quake roughly every 22 years. Once scientists figured this out, they set up all sorts of monitoring equipment, expecting payoff between 1988 and 1993. Which, of course, did not happen. The expected quake finally came in 2004, much to the glee of the geologists. Despite the fact that magnitude 6 is pretty freaking huge, nobody has ever died in a Parkfield quake, the town has never been leveled, and the people who live there are quite proud of their local seismicity. There was really no other name I could give a quake-prone town with knowledgeable inhabitants in this story! Also, there really are a lot of squirrels there.
The Narrows - Whittier Narrows is a large park in the city of Whittier, about 20 miles outside of downtown Los Angeles. The 1 October 1987 magnitude 5.9 Whittier Narrows quake, which caused considerable damage in some parts of the Los Angeles basin, had its epicenter in this park.
Big Bend - This is the official name that scientists have given the spot where the San Andreas Fault bends in its middle section. No technical terminology here, folks.
Other References, Chapter By Chapter
Chapter One - An often observed precursor event to significant earthquakes is that animals behave strangely, including things like birds and insects ceasing to make noise. I can't have much peculiar animal behavior in a world where the characters are all humanlike animals themselves, but I could at least make the insects shut up.
Chapter Two - The opera that takes place in this chapter is, as I mentioned before, Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly, only Redwallized. The real opera deals with Americans being colonial and imperialist in Japan rather than vermin doing that to woodlanders. This said, I described the plot as it actually is, with no alterations.
Jacinth's spazzing out was my way of extending the animals freaking out before earthquakes thing to the more sentient creatures of Mossflower. Just because the population on the whole wouldn't be hit like a real world animal population before an earthquake doesn't mean I had to pass up the chance for some good Redwallish cryptic premonition!
The lights that Aetantim notices briefly out the Infirmary window are a phenomenon known as earthquake lights. Nobody is quite sure why they happen, but before, during, and after some major quakes, some fault lines will give off light, from a dull luminescence to apparently spherical electrical pulses. For a long time, they were only rumored to exist, but then they were both observed and caught on film during a quake in Japan in the mid 20th century. They could possibly be a clue for predicting quakes, though by no means a failure-proof one.
Chapter Three - The type of fault in question in this story is right-lateral strike slip. This is not merely for convenience, nor is it just because most of California's faults are this type. I figured this out based on looking at the maps in the beginnings of the Redwall books, and I'll be writing a whole longer article thing about why I think the fault is this type and about the geological processes that could have made it that way. But this said, in a strike slip quake, there is not a huge vertical displacement of earth. There are waves in the ground, which do become visible in a situation upward of magnitude 5, but they are not the enormous scale vertical slips that produce tsunamis. Thus, the ground waves would proceed to make bodies of water incredibly choppy, but not to the point of flinging ships around, particularly not if the epicenter was on land, as in the case of this story. The epicenter of the 1906 San Francisco quake was in the water, and there are some accounts of some ships getting dramatically rocked, but there are accounts of others feeling alarmingly little compared to what was going on on land. Thus, it's wholly possible for a thing like the otters failing to notice the extent of the weird goings on while remaining at sea.
The moles succumb to a phenomenon called liquefaction. This occurs when major fault motion dredges up water from deep within the earth and creates a suspension of soil particles within that water. The ground therefore becomes soft and unstable, and things can very easily sink down into it. In the case of modern day quakes, it's mostly buildings that are demolished by liquefaction, but since the moles were already digging around in soft dirt, I saw no reason why the liquefaction wouldn't cause them a ton of trouble as well.
Enruso and Liedswelt's conversation is basically ripped from a true anecdote about Enrico Caruso and the conductor of the touring production of Bizet's Carmen that happened to have been playing in San Francisco the night before the quake. It was too amusing of a conversation not to use.
There exist plenty of accounts of earthquakes making rivers flow backwards. Perhaps the most dramatic was in the New Madrid, Missouri quakes of 1811-1812. These four events, the smallest estimated at measuring over 7.0 and the largest topping 8.0, managed to make the Mississippi River leap out of its banks, flow backwards, and permanently change its course in some places. If the mighty Mississippi could be so effected, the River Moss could certainly also fall victim.
Chapter Four - More earthquake lights! It has been noted that, before some earthquakes, the number of UFO sightings in the region of the quake goes up a little. It has therefore been theorized that people are seeing earthquake lights and mistaking them for UFOs. If the technology in the Mossflower of this story is enough to have trains, then it's also enough for telescopes and wondering about life elsewhere. Thus, a legitimate excuse for Walden to mention aliens!
Chapter Five - Garlock smells a faint edge of sulfur in the mist as he wanders on the morning of the quake. This type of smell has been documented as lingering around some fault zones immediately before, during, and after a rupture.
The darting furrows in the ground described in this chapter are known as mole tracks (nevermind that they're chasing a ferret in this story!). They're relatively common when quakes cross more brittle ground, as are open cracks in the earth. These cracks will pull open and pinch shut again with the passing compression waves of the quake. Fault lines themselves do not open up along their middle, but this myth most likely comes from such dramatic surface scars as these mole tracks and cracks. The myth of fault lines swallowing people up also doubtlessly comes from this. There is no documented proof of anyone ever being swallowed by a ground crack caused by an earthquake, though there are plenty of stories. There's also a very specific story from the 1906 San Francisco quake in which a cow fell into a crack which closed around it and left only the tail sticking out. There is, again, no documented proof, though the story is persistent. But there is enough photographic evidence of ground cracks and mole tracks that are easily large enough for someone to fall into that it is not impossible that someone could meet this fate. So I had it happen to poor Falla.
Chapter Six - There actually isn't any numerical significance to the specific amount of time the quake took or the time of day that it occurred. I went with morning for dramatic sense (and many major quakes do seem to have occurred in the morning), and with the length of time based on estimates of shaking time for comparable-sized quakes on the same type of fault. I was using San Francisco 1906 and Fort Tejon 1857 as models to some degree; they were estimated at 7.8 and 7.9 respectively, and the estimated shaking time for both is between one and two minutes.
Once again, Enruso's behavior here is based entirely on the real Caruso's behavior. The phrase, "Hell of a town," which Caruso was heard to have uttered, just didn't seem very Redwall to me, so I changed it a little.
As mentioned earlier, the motion of right-lateral strike slip faults makes all objects on the other side of the fault appear directed to the right from where an observer stands, no matter which side of the fault that observer is on. This is what has happened to the road that Hayward and Walden take to Redwall. When they come to the break and deflection, the line along which the deflection is the fault itself, though they do not know this. Maximum recorded displacements for both San Francisco and Fort Tejon were in the ballpark of 9 meters, which is more than enough to throw travelers off even more than the path has been thrown!
Chapter Seven - I know you know what the mark Andreas' pen made looks like. Crude seismographic instruments did exist in the later part of the 19th century, but Redwall surely wouldn't have felt a need to be equipped with such a thing before.
Chapter Eight - The brief earthquake reference in Mattimeo was how I got the idea to destroy Redwall in a quake to begin with, back in 1998 when I was working on the original Rhynnsylvania. If not for those couple of pages from BJ himself, you'd be safely without this big mess of mine!
Chapter Nine - Descriptions of surface ruptures along strike slip faults from before anything was known about those faults still include phrases along the lines of the ground being torn and pulled past itself -- very insightful observations!
There are several accounts of trees being split by unfortunate placement on top of faults, mostly from the 1906 San Francisco quake. One such tree in central California, whose halves were not completely detached from each other, did not die from the break, and is apparently still standing. Based on what I've read, the trunk has healed over with bark, but it's still clear that the tree was split and pulled apart by several inches.
Chapter Ten - No really nerdy references here. Move along, folks.
Chapter Eleven - While mountains like the Himalayas are caused by land colliding and crunching upward, and while ranges like the Cascades are caused by volcanic activity and pushing from underneath, the mountains caused by strike slip faults are pressure and friction ridges, and rippled is the best word I can think of these comparatively smooth peaks. On the ones with less vegetation, strata are sometimes very clearly visible. Sometimes, faulting will cut through forming mountains and displace them from themselves in a formation called a shutter ridge. These are all characteristic of California, and since Mossflower has the same kind of fault, I figured I could transplant some other physical features as well.
The long narrow lakes mentioned in this chapter are called sag ponds. These are formed when motion along faults pulls water upward from deep in the earth. In some cases, the ponds do appear still and unmoving, but along other faults, the water actually does flow as a stream, disguising something dangerous as something totally innocuous.
When one side of a fault becomes abruptly elevated relative to the other, the resulting formation is called a scarp. These are more common with dip slip faults, that is, ones where the primary motion is up and down, but most strike slip faults also have a small vertical component, and over time, the scarps can get pretty big.
Chapter Twelve - According to Alma Mahler, she and Gustav were "very shaken" (her word choice, inappropriate that it is) by the news of the 1906 San Francisco quake, which they found out about while in Vienna. According to Alma, though, she and Mahler were more upset about the death of Pierre Curie, which occurred on the same day as the quake. Now, Alma had a tendency to lie about her various husbands and lovers and to make things up and change small details depending on whether she wanted the guy to look better or worse for posterity. I have no doubt that Mahler was upset by the loss of a scientist like Curie, but based on extensive reading about his character and interests as described by people who knew him and were not compulsive liars like Alma, I think he was likely far more freaked out by San Francisco than Alma let on. Mahler essentially worshipped nature, who wrote several symphonies involving themes of good things coming to all of mankind rather than only named individuals, who freaked out for weeks upon reading an article about one man committing suicide. I have no doubt that the concept of a force of nature taking hundreds of lives and demolishing an entire city caught in his brain far more than Alma described. Liedswelt's bit in this chapter is my take on how Mahler might have felt, though Liedswelt has the added big stress of having been there for it.
Chapter Thirteen - Though I've moved it from southern California to Mossflower for the sake of this story, the cut open cliff face described in this chapter really does exist. In real life, it happens to be in a roadcut on California route 14 just south of Palmdale. The cut runs straight through the San Andreas Fault's scarp and exposes dramatically twisted and warped layers of multicolored rock. To me, it's absolute proof of the art in nature.
Chapter Fourteen - This was really not a smart thing for Aetantim to do in light of aftershocks, but the obligatory Redwallian artifacts had to be found!
Chapter Fifteen - If "It's nobeast's fault but yours, Andreas" was the only pun you caught in this chapter, you should consider yourself very very lucky. But if you're morbidly curious, the seismology articles on Wikipedia should be able to tell you what you need to know. But don't say I didn't warn you, and if you look them all up, you no longer have a right to smack me for any of them.
As for other references:
I had to have Elsinore get in her requisite line from Hamlet somewhere.
Garlock tells Hayward to go back to his badger fort. Tejon is the Spanish word for badger, thus Fort Tejon is Fort Badger.
I also had to have some sort of reference to the California Falling Into The Ocean urban legend. Which is nothing more than that. The part of California west of the Fault will move from where it is now, but it will slide past the further inland parts rather than drifting off to sea. In several million years, San Francisco and Los Angeles will only be about 50 miles apart, but neither one is going to end up under water.
Collapsed chimneys are basically the most common form of earthquake damage. Because chimneys are narrow and basically unsupported, they're the first thing to go. With a quake as large as the one in this story, if you've only lost the chimney and it fell away from the rest of the house, you're in very good shape.
Chapter Sixteen - The piece of music that Liedswelt is describing is, in fact, Mahler's Second Symphony. The text that the chorus sings is directly snipped from the last movement, though I've shortened it a great deal for my purposes here. There really is an earthquake in this symphony, though. The last movement describes the time between the Apocalypse and the resurrection of humanity. Death happens in the earlier movements, then there is a massive crescendoed drumroll that Mahler described as, "A trembling passes over the earth. Listen to the drum roll and your hair will stand on end!" The earthquake allows for the dead to come out of the earth, zombielike, and have a processional to the point of resurrection. Yet I was actually planning on including references to this piece based on the text alone, since there is talk of trembling and rising from the dust, but finding out that Mahler actually included his own earthquake references clinched my including it in this story.
Chapter Seventeen - The number of aftershocks following a major quake decreases proportionally to how much time has elapsed. The second day has half as many as the first, the tenth day has one tenth as many. With really large quakes, aftershocks can continue sparsely for decades. Some scientists think that quakes that happen around Charleston, South Carolina, in the present are still aftershocks to a quake estimated at being magnitude 6.6 to 7.3 that happened there in 1886. No such formula has been determined for magnitudes, though; large aftershocks are more likely closer to the main event, but that can come seemingly out of nowhere later on. The one that meant the end of stuff for Garlock in this story was soon enough after the mainshock that it shouldn't have even counted as unexpected.
Chapter Eighteen - As far as I know, no entire civilization has moved away from its homeland because of an earthquake, but hey, this is still fiction here!
The Title - This comes from a line in Natalie Merchant's song "San Andreas Fault." I like the song in its own right, though I admittedly initially pulled it off of iTunes because of the title alone. The line in question goes, "Oh promised land, oh wicked ground, build a dream, tear it down..."
Time and Place
I enjoy bringing in real world spatial and temporal connections to my stories. This should not come across as surprising considering I have a ton of characters who are personified days of the year, and I have made an effort to align anniversaries or trips to significant places with work on stories in the past. This story is no different. In fact, I think I've gotten worse.
The entire story was written within five miles of an active fault. Yes, California has more than its fair share, but there are plenty of places in the state that have a larger distance than five miles to the next fault. Part of chapter three was written while I was sitting basically on top of the San Andreas in San Bernardino. I would have written more of the chapter there if it hadn't gotten dark. I felt no earthquakes in the whole span while I was writing this story, though I felt my first the day after I finished it.
I started writing this on 1 November 2006, as an attempt at NaNoWriMo. I failed to get up to 50,000 even when all was said and done, but I didn't even finish the whole effort within November. The story was completed on 9 January 2007, the 150th anniversary of the Fort Tejon earthquake.
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