Before Utah, I had never known the specter of local cataclysm, of something that endangered not only myself but everything around me. It was eerie to feel my personal landscape of terror merge with the state’s arid highlands. (Gerard Manley Hopkins: “O the mind, mind has mountains.”) I imagined the earthquake wherever I went. I would see a federal-style cottage and think of the family doomed to be buried alive under it. I would see the mansions and villas of Utah’s wealthy, installed on mountains or balanced atop sleeping landslides, and feel a blackened satisfaction.