Occasionally in the canyon a huge old tree finally gives it up and comes down with a thunderous crash, which in the middle of the night can really startle the disoriented sleeper, scraping and distorting the sleeper's dreamscape, which makes for a vague recollection and recursive sense that one was expecting the disturbance all along.
Or someone sets off a homemade explosive or some such device, blowing off steam, not giving a thought to the people living nearby.
And every huge crash and temor in the night registers as the possible Event when the mountain finally blows its top, and one expects the oncoming shockwave or lahar with dread, which has yet to materialize.
In Montana the intermittent quakes are greeted with the sickening suspicion that the supervolcano under Yellowstone has finally blown, and the End is approaching as some looming and nebulous presence of a great cloud. Or in California, with its own intermittent quakes, each new 5 or 6-er is greeted as the next possible Big One, and a complementary run to the grocery or survival store for supplies. And then so on.
For many, the imagination goes straight for the Big End or whatever you want to call it, that disturbance which finally sets off a quality change into motion, ending the endless procession of the status quo. These disturbances set off the popular imagination, like snapping at a rubberband pulled tight and painfully tense.
The tension of the present is palpable at least, which continuously builds as waves of stored and released energy - in its many forms - circulate and accumulate, and the structure of what is becomes increasingly unstable and plastic.
And for others, who are unlucky enough geographically, temporally, and/or socially/politically/economically/etc. and are therefore made vulnerable, these releases, these disturbances, which imagined as the heavens finally cracking open, really are the End.
Say, the shaking earth with its waves that pass through human artifice weakened by socioeconomic and political forces, or the fire with its greater intensity and frequency promoted by the changing climate, which takes up the mismanaged and dried out lands and incinerates them, or the howling hurricane winds and surging waters which pass through mismanaged and poorly planned infrastructure, or even the cracking bullets barking forth from the barrels of wasted human capital, and all the rest of those highly kinetic forces really do spell the end for those caught in their pathways, and on and on it grinds.
