my mountain

I recently picked up Simon Winchester's "The Crack in the Edge of the World" about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Today I started reading it, and was suddenly transported home:

He was driving across the country, and,

"All that now lay between me and the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean was the fast-darkening silhouette of a very large mountain. It rose up ahead of the car, slightly to my right, its bulk filling the windshield, the brown of its dry August grasses purpling in the coming twilight, its shape broad hipped and brooding, like the arching back of an enormous whale...

"It was the summit from which all Californian distances and directions were once formally triangulated and measured--and are still computed, by some, to this day ...

"To its neighbors in towns like Concord and Antioch and Walnut Creek, who can so readily see its bulk from their picture windows, it is simply a piece of scenery, an eternal and unyielding part of the view.

"Mount Diablo is more connected and interlinked with the events of the San Francisco tragedy than almost all those who live beside it and below it have ever properly supposed."

Winchester is setting out to describe how Mount Diablo is inextriably connected (geologically, anyway) to the great San Francisco earthquake. His description of the mountain reminds me of a poem I wrote, which I'll post on Expatriate Letters soon. The strangest bit about finding this description, is that I picked the book up in a bookstall in the Istanbul airport while waiting for a connecting flight!