A Crack in the Edge of the World (62 page)

This was all the more remarkable for taking place at a time when civilized existence was a far more grueling business, an age bereft of cell phones and Black Hawks and conditioned air, with no Federal Emergency Management Agency to give us a false sense of security and no Weather Channel to tell us what to expect.

Nobody in the “cool gray city of love,” as the poet George Sterling called it, had the faintest inkling that anything might go wrong on the early morning of April 18, 1906. Enrico Caruso and John Barrymore—who both happened to be in town—and 400,000 others slumbered on, with only a slight lightening of eggshell blue in the skies over Oakland and the clank of the first cable cars suggesting the beginning of another ordinary day.

Then, at 5:12
A.M.
, a giant granite hand
rose from the California earth and tore through the city. Palaces of brick held up no better than Gold Rush shanties of pine and redwood siding; hot chimneys, electric wires, and gas pipes toppled, setting a series of fires that, with the water mains broken and the hydrants dry, proceeded over the next three dreadful days and nights to destroy what remained of the imperial city. In the end, at least three thousand were dead and two hundred twenty-five thousand were left homeless.

Everyone who survived remembered: there was at first a shocked silence; then the screams of the injured; and then, in a score of ways and at a speed that matched the ferocity of the wind-whipped fires, people picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock, and took charge.

“People picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, took stock, and took charge.”

Golden Gate Park, 1906.

A stentorian army general named Frederick Funston realized he was on his own—his superior officer was at a daughter's wedding in Chicago—and sent orders to the Presidio military base. Within two hours, scores of soldiers were marching into the city, platoons wheeling around the fires, each man with bayonet fixed and twenty rounds of ball issued; they presented themselves to Mayor Eugene Schmitz by 7:45
A.M.
—just 153 minutes after the shaking began. The mayor, a former violinist who had previously been little more than a puppet of the city's political machine, ordered the troops
to shoot any looters, demanded military dynamite and sappers to clear firebreaks, and requisitioned boats to be sent to the Oakland telegraph office to put the word out over the wires: “San Francisco is in ruins,” the cables read. “Our city needs help.”

America read those wires and dropped everything. The first relief train, from Los Angeles, steamed into the Berkeley marshaling yards by eleven o'clock that night. The navy and the Revenue Cutter Service, like the army not waiting for orders from back East, ran fire boats and rescue ferries. The powder companies worked overtime to make explosives to blast wreckage.

Washington learned of the calamity in the raw and unscripted form of Morse code messages, with no need for the interpolations of anchormen or pollsters. Congress met in emergency session and quickly passed legislation to pay all imaginable bills. By 4:00
A.M.
on April 19, William Taft, President Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war, ordered rescue trains to begin pounding toward the Rockies; one of them, originating in Virginia, was the longest hospital train ever assembled.

Millions of rations were sped to the city from Oregon and the Dakotas; within a week virtually every military tent in the army quartermaster general's stock was pitched in San Francisco; within three weeks some ten percent of America's standing army was on hand to help police and firefighters (whose chief had been killed early in the disaster) bring the city back to its feet.

To the great institutions go the kudos of history, and rightly so. But I delight in the lesser gestures, like that of largely forgotten San Francisco postal official Arthur Fisk, who issued an order on his personal
recognizance that no letter posted without a stamp and clearly coming from the hand of a victim would go undelivered for want of fee. Thus did hundreds of the homeless of San Francisco let their loved ones know of their condition—a courtesy of a time in which efficiency, resourcefulness, and simple human kindness were prized in a manner we'd do well to emulate today.

Originally published in the
New York Times
on September 8, 2005. Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission
.

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