South Fork of the American River, along U.S. 50 on our drive back today from Lake Tahoe. We spent an abbreviated yet somehow leisurely weekend with a friend at her family’s cabin on the south shore (and when I say “on the shore,” I mean it–they are right on the lake). Anyway: Lots of snow in the mountains, still–the state estimates the snowpack is still about 150 percent of its April 1 average. That means lots more water will come coursing down the rivers in the weeks to come and that California will enjoy one year nearly free from drought anxiety; “nearly free” because there’s always next year, and who knows whether it will be dry or wet? “Nearly free” because the constant lesson of California history is there will be more people who want the water tomorrow than there are today.
Yes, all that from looking the South Fork flowing by. In other news: gorgeous river; gorgeous day.
Judgment Day (a.k.a, The Rapture) is May 21, in case you’re interested. At least that’s what these billboards around the Bay Area (this one’s at 17th and Folsom in San Francisco), in English and Spanish, proclaim. Also of note: End of the world is October 21. Which renders the whole NFL labor situation sort of moot.
On Friday night’s “10 O’Clock News” on KTVU, anchor Ken Wayne narrated video showing Christian penitents in Jerusalem bearing crosses through the streets amid throngs of faithful. What did the pictures show? Ken announced that people were re-enacting the “crucification of Jesus Christ.”
Just came in from The Dog’s nightly patrol. It’s been drizzling since late afternoon. I wondered what kind of picture you might get if you pointed a light–in this case, an LED headlight–up into the rain with the shutter open for 10 seconds. This is the answer. The orange hue suffusing everything is from the city lights; the blueish filaments are the drizzle coming down. I once saw a monster “flashlight” in a Restoration Hardware catalogue; it was actually a portable, battery-powered spotlight that you could probably use in an operating theater (although I think it could run on maximum power for only 20 minutes or so). I’ve fantasized about having one of those lights as an attention-getter. To light up some driver blowing through a stop sign at night, say. But I’d like to try the drizzle experiment with one, too.
Update: About half an hour after I posted this, we had a little earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey says it was a 3.8 magnitude shake, centered on the San Andreas Fault near the town of Pacifica, about 10 miles or so from where the 1906 quake hit.
A nice feature in the Chronicle marking the 105th anniversary of San Francisco’s signature catastrophe: ’06 Quake Through Eyes of Woman Ahead of Her Time. It’s a glimpse of the disaster from Leonie von Zesch, 23 when the temblor struck and one of the few women anywhere practicing dentistry at the time. (A contemporary newspaper clipping headlined “Woman Wields Forceps” describes her working “night and day” in a field hospital after the quake “battling that arch enemy of comfort–the toothache. [She] … is attractive as she is young.” Further, the article notes, “Race and caste make no difference to this dainty little lady. The dirty foreign boy receives the same gentle treatment as the daughter of a military officer.”)
Von Zesch’s account was part of an autobiography said to have run to thousands of pages, typed on onionskin paper and left among her personal effects when she died in 1944. The Chronicle’s account says von Zesch left her belongings to a niece who stashed them in an attic without looking at them. When she finally did, she discovered the writings, which will be published next month as “Leonie: A Woman Ahead of Her Time” ($19.95 plus shipping and, if you live in California, sales tax).
If the rest of the book is on a par with her description of the earthquake and its aftermath, it ought to be a good read. It’s not clear how long after the fact she wrote her account, but it begins with the scene in the Nob Hill home she shared with her mother rocking violently as china, Mason jars, and a variety of other household goods crash to the floor. “All the while, a seeming eternity of a few minutes, there was an unforgettable humming, grinding sound that not even the walls shut out, the grinding and breaking of myriad things all over the city.” She and her mother ate a cold breakfast–a man from the gas company had already come through the neighborhood to warn against lighting fires–and then “decided to walk downtown to see whether anything had happened to the tall buildings. No one, as yet, seemed to have the remotest idea of the magnitude of the disaster.”
By the time von Zesch and her mother neared Market Street, though, it was clear the city was beginning to burn.
“In spite of the horror, the air was electric with a sort of holiday spirit, either because the disaster was a novel experience which released people from the humdrum of everyday life, or because there were in a mood of thanksgiving and glad to be alive.
“There was something of hysteria in it, too. To Mother and me, everything was fearfully exciting. We did not anticipate personal loss. Our own home on Hyde, now rented, was out of the supposed fire zone; the Sutter place where we lived, of course, would not burn! Why we and thousands of others were so optimistic, I’d like to know. The water mains were broken. People all over town were daring to light gas stoves. The wind was blowing. How could the city fail to burn?”
The Chronicle ran part two of von Zesch’s earthquake reminiscence today. It includes an excellent slideshow of images from 1906.
And while we’re talking about contemporary images and walking through the ruins, a couple of good references came to hand while I was trying to figure out where Dr. von Zesch and her mother lived (she mentions Sutter and Leavenworth, and the ruined Granada Hotel nearby; I can’t get any closer than that, and a rebuilt Granada Hotel, guaranteed at its opening in 1908 to be fireproof, is at that corner today.
Below is a film discovered by way of the Internet Archive. It’s a 1905 streetcar trip down Market Street; the Ferry Building is the structure way down the street in the distance. What’s most arresting here is the life on the street–the mix of streetcars, automobiles, horse carts, pedestrians, and the random cyclist.
That’s an 11-minute tour through the heart of downtown. For contrast, here’s a snippet of some of the same area of Market Street (note the tower of the Call Building to the right) after the earthquake.
And one last graphic take on the 1906 earthquake. The U.S. Geological Survey has published a cool gallery of animations that try to convey the quake’s magnitude and the extent of the destructive shaking in the Bay Area. The image below is linked to an animation of the shaking in San Francisco:
A favorite walk for years, from our place in the North Berkeley flatlands, up Vine Street, Vine Walk, La Loma Steps, to Buena Vista Avenue. That last street winds up a hill full of stands of immense eucalyptus trees (also known as blue gums in their native Australia; they’re looming in the fog in the shot above) . When I say immense, I”m guessing some are pushing 150 feet in height 15 feet in girth at their base. They’re in many cases unwanted/ I recently came across a neighborhood flyer on a street in the hills that was appealing to neighbors to get together and pay for a “once in a generation” chance to cut down some view-blocking eucalyptus trees; the opportunity came up because the house in the yard of which the trees stood had recently changed hands, and the owner was willing to have the trees felled as long as he could split the expense. The eucalyptus also make locals nervous because when they burn, they burn fiercely. There’s no stopping a fire that’s burning through the crown of a stand of these trees. I remember hearing occasional sharp reports during the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 and thinking they were gas tanks exploding only to be told by an Australian spectator that it was blue gums. Absent fire–and today is anything but fire weather–they’re beautiful.
Well, I might not have caught my first salmon yesterday, but I did get some pictures of the trip out of Moss Landing. Here’s a slideshow I just posted to Flickr:
Above: The big oak in the schoolyard garden at Martin Luther King Jr. MIddle School, just around the corner and up the street from us. School was out today, and of course the occasion I connect the date with is April 4, 1968, the day King was murdered. I don’t remember anything about that day until hearing the announcement, at the tail end of the NBC national news, and I think Chet Huntley read the report, that King had been shot in Memphis. The rest of the evening and much of the next several days is vivid. My recollection is that the show essentially signed off with that report at 6:30 p.m. There was no cable TV to speak of, let alone CNN, so I think our immediate recourse would have been to the radio (not sure if WBBM had adopted an all-news format by then or not).
In any case, I remember that it was already dark, and it was raining. My mom had been out shopping for groceries, and she pulled up within a few minutes of when we heard the news. She had been involved in various civil rights activities and had actually driven by herself up to the South Side one night–in 1965, maybe?–to see King speak at a neighborhood church. I think we–my brothers and I–probably imparted the news in a panicked way and probably passed on the first report that King might have been shot in the head. I think that because of the shocked and despairing reaction I remember from my mother: “Oh, they always shoot them in the head!” I’m sure she was thinking back to President Kennedy. Maybe even to Lincoln. Bobby Kennedy wouldn’t be shot for another couple of months.
The connection, if any, to today. None. The schoolyard was beautiful, the day warm, and that night might never have happened except for what we remember and have brought with us into our future.
