The mountain ranges on either side of our valley have decided to go to war with each other.

"The nerve!" says my grandmother. "You'd think they could wait until were done repainting the barn."

The village elders tell us this has something to do with bedrock rights. It's an ancient squabble over a valuable vein that runs through both ridges, and right under our valley. It's why our farming is so good, they say. The mineral-rich soil. Good for the olives we are renowned for. But how can they know such things? It's like termites speculating on the motives of carpenters. Although I really shouldn't be so harsh on them. They came up with this theory under duress, after all. Inventing soothingly logical explanations for things gone wrong is really one of the things governments are there for, even if they don't do it very well.

The mountains volley massive gobs of themselves at each other. Granite boulders the size of whales. Tree-covered hillocks, trailing dirt-clogged Gordian knots of root systems, big as houses, hurling through the air.

May you live through uninteresting history, my grandfather always said. In that regard, we've always done extremely well. We have our stories, of course, adultery and divorce and the occasional murder, but big-picture stuff, like war and pestilence and flood, there's gratefully nothing to tell. Uninteresting history indeed. But whoever thinks to wish to livet hrough uninteresting geography?

The mountains groan before they fling, a deep and horrible sound, like distant thunderstorms, constipated giants. Ggrrroooggg, they go. And then, fooom! And the latest projectile flies.

But their aim is not accurate. If we're lucky, we just get sprinkled with a light rain of dirt as the latest chunk lobs over us, or the occasional corpse of an unlucky bird that got caught in its path, landing with a flunk on our roof. But every now and then their shot falls far short of the target, and someone gets caught in crossfire, like yesterday morning, when we were just finishing up our breakfast, and we heard and felt this huge crash! from the north. I ran to the window. "Who got it this time?" asked grandmother. "It was Mrs. Andersen's place," I said. She lived just up the road from us; her house was completely crushed and buried under a tangle of earth and rocks, bits of timber and window sticking out from under like hay. "Oh, what a shame!" said grandmother. "Her potato pancakes were so delicious!"

"Gertie!" hollered grandfather. "Don't be so cynical!"

"I'm not being cynical!" cried grandmother. "You simply have to be realistic at times like this! Don't tell me you're not sorry that I never got the recipe!"

I personally liked it better to be free of these old gods, to be rid of myth. I liked it better before our landscape had a personality. Now it's like we're back to the beginning times, which we'd worked so hard to crawl our way out of, and it was dismaying to be thrust back into it. And I wonder if these reawakened monsters are shaking anyone's faith in abstractions, testing anyone's commitment to modernity.

Last night was relatively peaceful and quiet, and we all got a good rest for the first time since this whole thing first started. This morning over our toast and jam we speculate that maybe they'd sorted matters out, wrapped everything up. It hadn't been so bad; some folks had been unlucky, of course, but most of us had come through in one piece.

"This definitely means we'll have a good harvest," says grandfather.

"It means no such thing," says grandmother. "Who can know the future? All it means is that we've been tested, and we've come through with flying colors."

But in the middle of us all congratulating ourselves for our fortitude, the coffee cups start rattling in their saucers, and grandfather's terrier starts whining from out on the porch, and I run outside, and everything is shaking now, and it sounds like all the animals in the neighborhood, dogs and cats and goats and horses, have joined in an awful chorus of howling, and I look off to the horizon to the east and see the earth start to buckle and pop, wrinkling and shuddering, and I am disoriented at first, because it feels like sitting in your cabin before your train leaves the station when the train on the track next to you starts to pull out and you get dizzy not being sure who is moving and who is standing still, and then I realize to my horror that the eastern range has started to thunder its way straight towards us. I run around to the backyard as fast as I can and see that the mountains to the west have begun the same thing, shook loose their anchors somehow, and as they charge at each other, like a drunk and sullen geology having fumed for millennia suddenly throwing a sucker punch, and the earth starts to vibrate like armageddon, I realize that I really, really ought to have stayed at university this break, as I'd originally planned.

"It's all because of the election!" I hear grandmother yell from the kitchen. I remember that this is the week for voting in our province, for local offices and councils and referendums and such.

"You're a goddamned fool!" grandfather shouts back at her.

"Oh, like you know what's going on!" she replies.

Somehow I can't imagine the mountains caring much one way or another about our politics, but grandmother sounds convinced. My whole body starts to quiver, and it's all I can do to keep standing up, and I suspect that in her faith, which is a strong faith in spite ofher cynicism, she doesn't necessarily need a benevolent god, but one that at least knows that she exists, even if that knowing is expressed in violence and cruelty. For a god to bother to destroy you, surely you must not be insignificant.

The mountains are nearly upon us now, and the noise is beyond deafening, and I give up trying to stand and collapse to the earth, as the sky fills with a dark and swirling hail of the bits and pieces of the landscape around us, and gravity becomes an afterthought as the whole world falls up into the sky, and I hope that at least, sometime in the future, when this story gets told, that even if we are its victims, that someone, or something, comes to some kind of victory or peace at the end, and I hope that even if we are the termites in this story, that we've managed, unwittingly, to have built some kind of cathedral that we're not able to see, before the carpenters come and tear it all down to the ground.