California Fault: Looking for the Spirit of a State Along the San Andreas

Travel writer Clarke has an original and entertaining angle on California in this meandering odyssey: the death-defying souls who live atop the most earthquake-prone regions of the country. With geological fault map in hand, he visits endangered communities from Eureka in the north to the Salton Sea in the south, and talks with such improbable characters as the man whose recurrent headaches and stomach upsets forewarn and pinpoint an unusual number of severe and minor quakes; the folks at Bodega Bay who consider the San Andreas fault their ""patron saint"" because it prevented Pacific Gas & Electric's astonishing plan to build a nuclear power plant on the fault, and kept away offshore oil drillers and strip miners; or the woman in Los Gatos who refused disaster relief for her quake-damaged house because she didn't want government computers to know the color of her panties. Interspersed with such irreverent tales are geological data, history and portraits of endangered communities in denial, still cleaving to the optimism of the ""California dream."" (Apr.)