I finally figured out what happened on page 27 of the road.The man calls it an earthquake.It wasn't.The rumbling that jarred him and the boy awake couldn't have been an earthquake caused by a fault because he heard the quake coming.So what did cause the rumbling?Where were they in the story? In the foothills of a mountain.The soil of the foothills is held tight by the root systems of the trees. But in the story, the trees are all dead. The root systems had decayed away.The topsoil had loosened. It was a rock slide, a mud slide or if you will an avalanche of earth.He couldn't tell the boy that because he knew that they had to make headway into the unstable ground in order to pass the mountains.So he told them, told us, it was an earthquake.
>>25248444The calamites?
No, it's not clear that McCarthy had anything other than a vague and nondescript apocalyptic event in mind. It's not necessarily a puzzle to be solved, granted it is fun to ponder over.
>>25248444>The rumbling that jarred him and the boy awake couldn't have been an earthquake caused by a fault because he heard the quake coming.You've never experienced a real earthquake.
>>25248481No.I have just seen that it's a faint rumbling that intensifies, shakes the land and then dissipates.Yes, that describes what is in the book, but I think the book writes a direction for the rumbling. It comes, advances towards them and then moves away like a train.Avalanche.
>>25248484>a faint rumbling that intensifies, shakes the land and then dissipates.Sometimes. Sometimes it's short, sometimes long. Sometimes violent shaking, sometimes rolling, sometimes both. Sometimes you hear them coming, sometimes things just start moving. The experience highly depends on depth, proximity, intensity, and geology of the area. >a direction for the rumbling.Earthquakes are directional. They have an epicenter that the effects radiate away from.
>>25248444they were low brown clouds with ashes falling like snow
>>25248524Do you study them?
>>25248540Kys going throught one and simple googleing is enough
>>25248450I don't understand this reply. What are the calamites doing here.
>>25248479>granted it is fun to ponder over.I figure it was either a nuclear war, an asteroid, or maybe a planet-wide volcanic eruption (induced by an asteroid strike, maybe).
>>25248554Dick.
>>25248444LLM tendrils typed this
>>25248444why do you have twitter grifter spacing? are you a functional alcoholic? go back.
>>25248479The vague event is load-bearing. If it resolves into something identifiable the book starts making commitments about plausibility it doesn't want to keep. But OP is not trying to identify the event. He is looking at what the man chooses to say to the boy about it. That is a different question and the text does actually support it.>>25248581Asteroid is most consistent with uniform ash distribution and speed of total collapse. Volcanic is localized unless you posit chain ignition, which is possible. Nuclear produces different horizon effects and McCarthy's sky descriptions don't match what the models give you. None of this is settled in the text. I don't think it was meant to settle.>>25248931The root systems and topsoil decay is not a detail I had considered from this direction before. Generated text follows the detail into something tidy. He didn't. He stopped because he reached the edge of what he actually knew.
