A decade after 'The Really Big One,' this author imagines the devastation of the major quake

In a 2015 piece for The New Yorker — a piece that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize — Kathryn Shultz opened a whole lot of eyes to a potential disaster lurking beneath the pristine landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.

In "The Really Big One," Shultz explained how a massive earthquake along the Cascadia fault line may or may not strike the region in our lifetime.

Now, Oregon climate journalist Emma Pattee has taken that a step further and imagined the devastation that would follow a major PNW quake.

Pattee's novel "Tilt" follows a woman who is 37-weeks pregnant when the Big One hits. Worse yet, the woman, Annie, is 37-weeks pregnant and at IKEA. Y'all, IKEA is intimidating even when every SUNDVIK (crib) and SMÅSTAD (changing table) isn't falling on top of you and your unborn child.

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But so begins Annie's story: crumpled under a mound of boxes, her world shaken to its core, quite literally.

"The idea came to me because I had a lot of earthquake anxiety," Pattee said when I interviewed her on March 27 at Third Place Books in Ravenna. "I was actually at an IKEA, very pregnant, shopping for a crib, and the building started to shake. And I thought, 'Oh, this is the Big One. Wow.' But it was actually, like, a big truck driving by."

That anxiety stayed with her, though.

And it's not an unusual anxiety for people who live in the PNW, like Pattee. Yet, because the Big One hasn't hit — take a moment to knock on wood, please — there's no way to tell people exactly what to expect when it does.

"There are incredible books that have already been written about this earthquake," Pattee said. She referenced the book by Seattle's own Sandi Doughton, "Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest," in her acknowledgements. "And I really wanted to think through what will this earthquake be like and to give people who live in this region the chance to almost experience it as a kind of a premonition."

Through that premonition, she said people here might be more prepared when and if the quake strikes.

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"Tilt" is a gripping account of just the first day, not even a full 24 hours, after it does. Annie finds her way out of the IKEA and heads out into the post-quake world to find her husband, Dom. Her purse lost, phone and car keys with it, she is without the things that make modern life so easy to navigate and begins to walk in the direction she believes Dom is in.

During her journey, the reader sees the chaos through her eyes: people dead, others searching for missing loved ones, bridges down, and schools leveled. The unrelenting events of the day are interrupted only by Annie's reflections on her life and how she got there — pregnant, at IKEA so late in her pregnancy, and now, walking through a scene straight out of the movies.

"I really wrote the book about a shock point and about this idea that we are very caught up in modern life," Pattee said. "We all have jobs. We all have kids that have soccer. ... Some of us are sort of lucky enough to have these incredible shock points, and in those moments, you have a chance to to change your life. That's what Annie has. That's really what I wanted to to give to people reading the book, this idea that it's not too late to change your life."

You know, before the Big One does it for you.

Consider this passage (edited lightly to avoid a big spoiler), as Annie surges with the kind of second-guessing we do when nothing makes sense. She muses to her unborn child, who she calls Bean:

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As one audience member, Bonnie, put it: Earthquakes don't make appointments. We cannot know when the Big One will come or where we'll be when it does or, perhaps more importantly, where those we love will be when it does.

What "Tilt" does is consider that the moment will come at the least convenient moment, when we're not at our best, when we snip at an IKEA worker who (spoiler alert) will pull us out of the rubble just a few minutes later, and it imagines a way forward nonetheless.

And if it inspires you to finally get that earthquake preparedness kit in order, all the better.

"The reason we prepare is not because I'm worried about if I'm going to die or not," it's about the most vulnerable people that you know.

"We can't live in fear. You can live in preparedness," Pattee said. "Preparedness is really an act of of solidarity with our community."