When The Earth Moves Under Your Feet...

In 1969 I was in Istanbul, living in my VW camper, on my way to India. Istanbul was so exotic and the Sultanahmet district was seedy with a distinct air of danger. Middle class Turks mostly avoided it, despite having the 4 top tourist destinations in the city— Hagia Sofia, the Blue Mosque, Topkapi Palace and the Grand Bazaar. But back in those days, Istanbul wasn't nearly as much of a tourist destination as it has become since then. There was only one first-rate hotel— the Hilton— and it was on the other side of town. But, in the late ’60's into the ‘70s, Istanbul was a major stop on the Hippie Trail between Europe and India and Sultanahmet was filled with disheveled hippies— like me. It was also the place the low life types of Turkish society came to rip off the hippies and sell them hash— and where the police were on the prowl to arrest the hippies and the crooks trying to take advantage of them. That was Sultanahmet in 1969, when I found myself in the Pudding Shop, where the film, Midnight Express, was happening in real time all around me— not being filmed… happening. Today there’s a picture of Bill Clinton with the Pudding Shop's owner in the window. Not many people know what happened over half a century ago to make the place famous. When I decamped from Sultanahmet for Gezi Park in the Taksim Square neighborhood on the other side of town, I discovered very different Turks… normal people. Sure, the lowlife Turks the hippies were encountering in Sultanahmet were assholes. But that's like judging all Americans by hanging out in Times Square (or the old Times Square before they made it into Disney Land). Or by judging all Americans by the predators like Donald Trump who have always flocked to Manhattan. That’s what we had in NYC— not earthquakes, predators. I grew up there; no earthquakes, predators.

Athough I’ve lived in California since the late 1970s and have become well-acquainted with the occasional rumble beneath my feet, my first experience of an earthquake came years earlier, in a completely different setting, on the Hippie Trail. It was either 1969 or 1972— I can’t quite remember which of my trips to Afghanistan featured it— but I was deep in the Afghan countryside, in the middle of nowhere. There were no buildings in sight, just a wide, open field under a vast, endless blue sky. That absence of human-made structures would later seem like a blessing. But in the moment, it only added to the rawness of what I felt.

When the ground began to move, my soul, even more than my body, froze. It wasn’t the danger that shocked me— there was no ceiling to fall, no walls to collapse— but something more primal. It was the sense that the one thing I had always counted on— the solid, unshakable earth— was suddenly unreliable. I wasn’t standing on bedrock anymore. I was standing on something alive and indifferent, something that could shrug me off like dust or swallow me whole if it wanted to. The motion wasn’t violent, but it was enough to unravel the illusion of permanence I had never before thought to question.

For a moment, I felt untethered from the world. I remember looking down at my feet, half-expecting to see the ground melt or give way. It didn’t, of course— it steadied again, and life resumed its ordinary course— but something inside me remained shaken. The experience cracked open a quiet truth I hadn’t yet faced: that the earth, like life itself, holds no guarantees. That shock, that sense of smallness in the face of the planet’s indifferent movements, stayed with me longer than the quake itself. It still lives somewhere in my bones, even after all these years and all the California tremors that followed.

That feeling— of internal rupture mirroring the external tremor— reminds me of Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, a collection of 6 short stories set after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. I read one, “Thailand,” in a British magazine, Granta, on a flight home from Britain once. “Strange and mysterious things, though, aren't they— earthquakes? We take it for granted that the earth beneath our feet is solid and stationary. We even talk about people being ‘down to earth’ or having their feet firmly planted on the ground. But suddenly one day we see that it isn't true. The earth, the boulders, that are supposed to be solid, all of a sudden turn as mushy as liquid.”

His characters don’t just experience an earthquake; they’re undone by it, spiritually and emotionally. One protagonist, living far from the epicenter, is shaken not by falling buildings but by the invisible shift in his internal landscape. A quiet, haunting disquiet creeps in, the kind you can't quite name. That’s exactly what I felt in that Afghan field— like the world had slipped into a parallel version of itself, one that operated by different, more fragile rules.

Murakami has a way of turning the tectonic into the symbolic, blurring the line between literal and metaphorical rupture. And in that moment, I didn’t just feel a quake— I felt the curtain parting between what I thought was true and what was actually real. I didn’t yet have the language for it, but I think that was my first real encounter with impermanence, the kind that doesn’t just come from reading Eastern philosophy or losing a loved one, but from the very land itself moving to remind you that nothing— not even the ground— is ever truly still.