400 Pound Bomb vs. San Andreas Fault...Who Wins?

My son-in-law is in California playing Pebble Beach with his father right now and it occurred to me that he probably doesn't realize that I used to live right there.  It was a pretty cool time to live in California, and an even better time to be in language school--mostly because lots of other guys during that time were learning Vietnamese at the business end of an M-16.  As luck would have it, at the completion of basic training, I requested and received the coolest of all language assignments.  I was sent to the Presidio of Monterey, California to spend a year learning to speak Russian in a total immersion environment. 

The Presidio of Monterey is one of several military districts in California named presidios by the Spanish, and it has been in continuous operation as a military establishment of Spain or America since the 1700's.  The grounds are spectacularly beautiful and the small stucco bungalows spread out over "the hill" as we used to call it were an especially popular spot for retired Colonels, Navy Captains, and junior Admirals and Generals of all the services to settle down.  In the early 1970's, at least, the Presidio was one of the most laidback military facilities I ever visited.  

On the day that I and a few new-found friends from the Air Force arrived from San Antonio we heard the astonishing rumor that at 4:00 p.m. on that very day a 400 pound explosive device was to be set off directly over the fault line running through Monterey Bay--the San Andreas Fault.  The theory, the geologists pointed out, was that the bomb would set up seismic vibrations that could be measured to help map out the fault.  And we were "probably" safe from any cataclysmic event that might result from such cosmic stupidity.  And if the theory were not to hold?  Well, the Monterey Peninsula isn't that big anyway.

This is not what an unsophisticated poorly educated boy from rural New York would call good odds.

Of course, the geologists were right (this time!) and the slight "whump" we heard at 4:00 p.m. might very well have been an ovezealous dad putting a bit too much lighter fluid on the charcoal.  We never did see a ripple on the surface of Monterey Bay that afternoon, but all that staring got us to familiarize ourselves with our position relative to the Bay, California, and North America. Basically,  if the USA is a huge barge plowing westward into the Pacific, then Monterey is at it's prow...and Kate Winslett would be hanging off the prow in the arms of Leo, but with her feet firmly ensconced in the Presidio of Monterey.

What my friends and I saw that afternoon and evening was staggeringly beautiful.  Because of it's odd placement and the flow of the Japanese Current the weather in Monterey is unusually consistent and highly predictable.  The fog comes overnight and drapes the entire peninsula in a cool humid blanket that flowers simply adore.  By sunup, the temerature has risen to 62-66 f. and it continues to slowly rise as the morning progresses and the sun, which has burned away the fog by 10:00 - 11:00, continues to warm up the ground delighting the flowers that are eveywhere.  The temperature continues to rise into the high 70's and low 80's, but with very low humidity (I think the winds across the hill blow it all out to sea) it feels like a (huge) pleasantly air conditioned room.  By sunset, the ground has absorbed the heat of the day so that it can be slowly released overnight as the fog returns.  And darkness brings a clear dry air through which the lights of Ft. Ord, 20 miles to the east of us, are distinct but still shimmer and glimmer because of the radically diffent weather pattern there.  From my dorm window we look down on the single runway of Monterey Airport where we see the United Airline flights to SFO and LAX, and the military charters headed to points significantly farther west of us. (Yeah, the assignment is so cushy that we have air conditioned dorms, 2 to a room and the only requirement is that you speak Russian to every one you see--which after a while, isn't as difficult as it would seem...I'm not ashamed of my luck, I embrace it.)

The beauty of this assignment is that the entire school is operated on a University model.  There is a passing interest among the administrative staff to maintain a military demeanor, but the professional staff care only for the students and how much they learn.  There's no need to display or pay attention to rank here, either, and an Army Private is treated the same way as a Navy Lieutenant (at various times, I had members of every service in my classes):  All first names, no salutes, no "sir." I will say that there was a bit of arrogance among the students; we thought of ourselves as intellectual elites and sat around drinking beer and playing the same games that college juniors and seniors were playing all over the country (with the notable exception of drugs). 

Six one hour classes a day, five days a week.  Of course, we studied language, vocabulary, conjugations--all the stuff you would normally study--plus we had Russian History, Russian Culture, Soviet Culture and Politics.  We received briefing papers (declassified) from the CIA regarding current events in the USSR, and we received briefings on the Politburo Members and their backgrounds.  We were privileged to get weekly updates on Russian and Soviet life from the New York Times Moscow bureau and I think every one of the students read these voraciously. 

We developed close personal relationships with several of the instructors, and we naturally gravitated to those who responded to us.  An oddity about the Russian department at DLI was that every instructor was native-born to the Russian language.  And the lives they had lived were positively fascinating.  We had a retired (Soviet) Air Force General who had been purged during WWII; we had the American-raised son of a lawyer who escaped Russia in the 30's and made it here to the USA with his family; we had one woman who was ostracized by the others because her name was, unfortunately, Nadyezhda Krupskaya, the same as Lenin's wife; and we had my mentor, Ivan Ivanovich Kavalenko.

Ivan Ivanovich, as he insisted that we call him, had been a big-name electrical engineer and had been commissioned in the early 1930's to redesign and rebuild Moscow's power system.  Apparently Stalin, who had personally awarded him a medal on completion of the design, took a personal dislike to him and Ivan Ivanovich barely made it out of the country without feeling the Makarov at his neck.  As with all of our instructors, the hatred for Stalin was a palpable thing that was always present when they taught.  One instructor would pound the floor with his cane in a military beat and demand that we conjugate verbs to that beat and that beat alone.  Rumor had it that he had served in the White Army and fought against the revolutionaries, but I'm not sure he was old enough.

And then, we had poor old "Boobs Mahoney." Sadly, I find that I can't dig her actual name from the detritus of four decades, but let's say she lived up to her name.  She was younger than most of the others, maybe still in her 40's when she taught me, and her story was horrifying.  One day while we were walking around campus I asked Ivan Ivanovich about her and her story...so he told me.  She and her husband, a young partisan couple living, I think in Petropavlovsk, and fighting guerilla warfare against the Moscow regime during WWII had been discovered and captured somewhere in Siberia.  They were put on a train headed east into the Gulag when they stopped at a frozen boarded-up station somewhere along the way. As the prisoners (many of them chained together in a line) got off the train, her husband made a desparate attempt to escape by ramming his head through the window in the train station's door and actively slitting his throat.  He had told her that he didn't want to die in Stalin's camps. She was, for some reasons not told to me, released and she "made her way across Russia on her back" trading sex for distance.  The remainder of her story I don't know.  How she got to America, how she got to Monterey?  How she lived with what she had seen and done? all mysteries to me.

I will say that it's far easier to pay attention to someone when you know that their motivation for teaching you has that kind of root system.