A Crack in the Edge of the World Read online

  That night was quiet. All of the succeeding Tuesday passed without incident. The world and its wife slept peacefully in their beds through much of Tuesday night.

  But on the Wednesday morning everything would suddenly change. The surface of the earth was to be ripped apart yet again—and in an instant it became abundantly clear that there would be no time for relief, relaxation, or reflection. Another earthquake was to strike, and, in terms of lives lost and structures ruined, this would be the worst, by far.

  Half a world away from Italy, on the cool morning of 18 April of that same very bad year, seventy-seven days after the earthquake in the Pacific off Ecuador, which might have signaled to some that all was not well with this quarter of the world, the earth in San Francisco and in a score of places nearby suddenly went dramatically and terrifyingly berserk.

  And though it is specifically San Francisco’s tragedy that forms the core of this account, so far as 1906 was concerned there was yet more to come. Before the year was done a further 20,000 Chileans would die when an enormous quake, of magnitude 8.3 at least, struck the port city of Valparaiso in mid-August, essentially wiping it out. The restlessness of the earth seemed to know no bounds. Ruin was being visited on humankind on a titanic scale. The destructive appetite of an uneasy planet seems from this vantage point to have been almost inexhaustible.

  The figures collected since show with perfect clarity that 1906 was indeed the most dreadfully active of years. Only twice in the twentieth century were there more big earthquakes in any twelve-month period—but those of 1906 happened, by chance, to strike at great cities and so killed tens of thousands of people, rendering the year the most seismically dangerous of the century.

  Much the same now appears to have happened in 2004, by far the most dangerous year of the young century that has followed. It began with an immense earthquake in Iran; a series of shocks and volcanoes then shuddered all around the world for much of the twelve months following; and then the catastrophic Sumatran tsunami struck precisely one year after it all began. Geologists looking at the statistics have lately started to wonder if some cruel butterfly effect might be at work—a pattern that might permit a ferocious event on one side of the planet to trigger a similar disaster far away on the other. Those who believe in the ideas of Gaia think this might be so: As the plates shifting against one another are all interconnected, jostlings on one part of the planet’s surface might well create sympathetic movements elsewhere. Thus far there is no firm evidence—only the numbers, and the anecdotes, that show incontrovertibly that some years are seismically very much more dangerous than others.

  And 1906, it appears, was one of the very worst years of all time.

  TWO

  The Temporary City

  Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves

  Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!

  BAUDELAIRE, “Les Sept Vieillards,” 1857

  I FIRST SAW SAN FRANCISCO IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, at the end of a long westward drive that had taken me clear across the North American continent. The moment I glimpsed it, its cluster of skyscrapers glinting on the far horizon, was on a cool blue late summer’s dawn—and it was a sight every bit as breathtaking as I had imagined. And yet somehow, when I look back on that journey, it was the night before that remains more firmly etched in my memory. It haunts me still, I think, because the place where I decided to put up for the last night on the road—a place I had chosen by the purest chance, with just a pinprick on the map—turned out to be so very remarkable, so steeped in Northern California history, lore, and myth, that it managed to put my destination city into a context that might otherwise have taken years for me to understand.

  It was the end of a long and tiring day, and dusk was gathering over the peach orchards, the walnut groves, and the asparagus fields of the Central Valley of California. I had been driving westward from a city on the plains for the better part of a week, over prairies, ranges, salt flats, and deserts. All that now lay between me and the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean was the fast-darkening silhouette of a very large mountain. It rose up ahead of the car, slightly to my right, its bulk filling the windshield, the brown of its dry August grasses purpling in the coming twilight, its shape broad hipped and brooding, like the arching back of an enormous whale.

  The map said it was Mount Diablo, which I first thought came from the Spanish for “Devil’s Mountain,” and the reference books said it had once been the most important peak in the entire American West. “The great central landmark of the state,” someone wrote. It was the summit from which all Californian distances and directions were once formally triangulated and measured—and are still computed, by some, to this day. It was a mountain that everyone in the north of the state could see (at least they could before the invention of the haze-making automobile ruined so many Californian views), and from its summit, it was said, just about all of the north of the state could be seen in return, along with tantalizing glimpses of parts of Oregon and Nevada, too.

  I decided I would spend the night there, making my final miles to San Francisco in the morning. I was in no particular hurry, and besides, I had never seen my destination city from afar. From up there, or so it appeared from the map, in the morning I ought to have a spectacular view.

  I turned off the freeway and made my way through the corona of newly built bungalows sprouting around the mountain’s flanks—settlements like Clayton, Concord, and Walnut Creek, large and quite respectable Starbucks-and-Saks suburbs these days, but rather more sparse outposts back then. I threaded my way through a maze of back lanes, and soon the houses thinned and the road became red earth. I saw a gate and beyond it a small hut, from which stepped a ranger, all freshly pressed khaki, with a peaked hat and a gun. He issued me a ticket and a yellow chit that allowed me to pitch my tent. He asked if I might like to buy some firewood, which the state park authorized him to sell. He told me I was the last one in for the day. But then he stepped back into his hut and riffled through his log. In fact not just the last, he said; I was the only person staying on the mountain that night. It was a Wednesday, and in the middle of the week few people bothered to stay. So now he’d be closing the gate and going home. I’d be all alone on Devil’s Mountain, with no risk of anyone disturbing my sleep until the park opened again at dawn. Plenty of animals, though, he added. Most of them friendly enough. But it would be peaceful, that’d be for sure.

  The road wound steeply up the north side of the mountain, and, with the sun sinking fast behind the low ranges of the distant coast, the sycamores and the pines, the junipers and the great old oaks, were cast into sharp relief, their shadows ever lengthening on the meadows and, as I climbed higher, against the canyon walls. By the time I had found somewhere to set up camp, in a glade floored with a carpet of soft pine needles, well above the 3,000-foot line—the mountain’s summit is 3,850 feet above sea level—the night had entirely closed in, and I had to use the car’s headlights to show me where I could hammer in the tent and lay the fire for dinner and tea. While I was cooking, a small battalion of raccoons marched in out of the night, their eyes blazing; I lobbed a stone at one of them to stop him from stealing what little food I had left. It hit him square on the nose, and he left howling. Neither he nor his friends returned.

  I turned in early and found it difficult to sleep. I may have been fretting over the vengeful potential of members of the raccoon family. Might they come in angry droves and try to hound me from their turf? But whatever it was that kept me awake that night, I do not remember minding much. I had a canvas bag of books with me, and a gas lantern. It seems to me today, so many years later, that much of what would eventually come to fascinate me about California—its extraordinary history, its phenomenal wealth, its lyrically complex topography and geology, and its transcendent loveliness—was learned that night or seen the next morning, things that were concentrated, as tinctures of experience and reality, into those few square miles of rugged upland around this very remarkable mo
untain.

  THE NAMING OF MOUNT DIABLO, for example, has a much more curious complexity about it than might be supposed. Naturally it begins with the Spanish, who in the sixteenth century had extended their empire of New Spain northward from Mexico into what was eventually to be named California.*

  One of the Spanish expeditions to the northern interior in the late eighteenth century discovered the magnificence of the mountain: “The view from south to north is beautiful, for its end cannot be seen,” wrote one young army lieutenant. Shortly thereafter priests opened a mission nearby (that of San José, fifty miles to the southwest, the fourteenth of the eventual twenty-one by which the Spaniards intended to conquer, convert, and “missionize” the native peoples). Farmers arrived from Castile to settle on the mountain’s fertile flanks (the town of Concord was founded around this time), and the local governor let it be known that the fields on the lower slopes might be used for winter grazing; and then, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spain’s policy of subduing the native peoples of the region and bringing them to God got properly under way—with predictably sour initial results.

  During the spring of 1806 a platoon of Spanish soldiers were sent out from their small adobe fortress, the Presidio, near the Golden Gate, to the northern side of the mountain, their allotted task to hunt down some local Miwok Indians. These natives were members of a group the Spaniards liked to call the Carquinez—said to be a local expression meaning “trader”—and the soldiers were supposed to welcome them into the civilizing embrace of Madrid as well as Rome (the Spanish, of course, were not in the Americas simply to proselytize on behalf of the papacy). The Miwok were having none of this, however, and after running for some days eventually stood their ground in what was then a thicket of willow and bay laurel trees, at a spot that today is near an airport for the suburb of Pacheco. To frighten or intimidate the Spaniards, the Miwok sent out a medicine man so weirdly dressed and made up as to persuade the Europeans that the Indians were under the spell of the very devil himself. “An unknown personage, decorated with the most extraordinary plumage and making divers movements, suddenly appeared,” wrote one trooper, clearly terrified. He and his colleagues promptly took flight, the Indians escaped north across the Sacramento River (the narrows where they did so remain the Carquinez Strait to this day, with two important toll bridges the expensive scourge of commuters), and the returning soldiers reported to their commander back at the Presidio that they had lost the natives in what they in consequence christened “the thicket of the devil”—Monte del Diablo.

  Later cartographers assumed that the word monte—which in this context meant “thicket”—actually identified a mountain, although had the soldiers wanted to describe a mountain they would probably have used the less ambiguous montaña. But, in any case, the later mapmakers mistakenly co-opted the name to describe the peak itself—and the error has endured for the better part of two centuries, memorialized in a pile of rock two-thirds of a mile high and now perhaps the best-known wrongly described mountain in the Bay Area. In 1865 the new California legislature tried to change the name to the memorably unromantic Coal Hill; unsurprisingly, in a state for which romance would eventually become a byword, the attempt failed.

  Bret Harte, the Albany Yankee who went out west to write about the miners and the Chinese and other exotica of the Gold Rush days (and who would hire Mark Twain and later write in collaboration with him), added spice to the legend with a famous short story. He had come to know the mountain well. His first job after leaving Brooklyn in 1854 was as tutor to the sons of a local farmer, and his fascination with and support for the Indians and Mexicans—which would later render him highly unpopular with the less racially sensitive of the white Californian settlers—was essentially born out of his encounters with members of the Bay Miwok tribes on and around the mountain. The story, which he wrote in 1863, concerns an eighteenth-century Spanish padre who, while walking on the mountainside, is confronted by the devil. The satanic figure warns him of an intolerable and seemingly inevitable future, the loss of Spanish California to the Americans. But, the devil insists, this Yankee invasion can still be reversed—all he has to do is abandon God and adopt the agreeable diversions of Lucifer. The priest demurs; there is a fight. The priest awakens from a dream—and the high hill where all this low drama played out wins a name, the Devil’s Mountain, for all time.

  Spain, religion, soldiering, rambunctious literature, and the tribes of the Miwok—so much of early California distilled into one small Mount Diablo story. Small wonder that I kept my Coleman lamp guttering, and my pages turning, well into that breezy summer night.

  THE DULLARDS WHO WANTED to christen the mountain Coal Hill had a point, however. The rocks of Diablo were, by the middle of the nineteenth century, throwing up all manner of mineral wealth, and not a few people were beginning to make modest fortunes.

  Throughout Northern California there had been a lively interest in mining—one might almost say a quietly fanatical obsession—ever since that January morning in 1848 when a misanthropic carpenter from Lambertville, New Jersey, named James Wilson Marshall, discovered a scattering, a blossom, of gold flakes in the millrace of John Sutter’s lumber works near Sacramento, inadvertently triggering the Gold Rush, which in essence created* the state of California. In these fairly metropolitan parts—Mount Diablo is only thirty miles from San Francisco, and rather less wild than where other claims were being staked farther afield—prospectors in the hundreds were a-roving in search of minerals of one kind or another. And though maybe in the pleasant purlieus of the hills close to San Francisco Bay there was less of a need for the burro and bedroll, for the claim stake and the slouch hat—the accoutrements of the grizzled caricature of the prospecting type—there was nonetheless a great deal of very energetic exploration of Diablo’s riverbeds and the canyon walls, mainly conducted by new immigrants who had come by ship to see what the Gold Rush fuss was all about and stopped at Diablo on their way. Many lingered, and found lodes, outcrops, deposits, and ore bodies; and by the 1860s, as a result of their energies, a series of substantial discoveries had been made that would turn Mount Diablo and its slopes into a place as spectacular for its buried wealth as it was already magical for its aspect and topographic power.

  Coal—dull, brown, dirty, unromantic coal—was the first mineral to be discovered there, peeking seductively out of a thick group of fairly recent sediments known as the Domengine Formation, a band of which lies just to the north of the mountain, in the flattening fields that spread down to the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Gold and silver, mercury ore and copper, were nearby, too—but their quantities were small, and the difficulty of extracting them was prodigious and at first far too expensive. But coal, on the other hand, was abundant, and soon miners and mine owners realized how they could make their fortunes from it.

  For it happened that the discovery of coal on the slopes of Mount Diablo coincided almost precisely with the ending of placer gold mining in Sacramento, forty miles to the east. River sand was washed and the lighter minerals tipped back into the stream, leaving the sparkles of gold behind; even Bret Harte found a nugget worth twelve dollars on his first day of experimenting. But the relative ease with which gold had initially been extracted from the ground was as evanescent as it was seductive. By 1852, a mere four years after Marshall’s discovery (which was announced formally by the president, James Polk, thereby suddenly redirecting westward migration toward California and away from the more immediately enticing farmlands of Oregon), the glistening nuggets had all, it seemed, been found. Such gold and silver as might be lurking in the rocks had from then on to be won by more traditional mining methods, with the gold hosed out by the use of enormous jets of water or the hard igneous rocks crushed and hammered and pulverized and blown to smithereens in order to release their bounty.

  To do this, the mine owners required machines, big machines, nearly all of them made of iron. They needed rock crushers and pumps, stamp mills and conveyor tres
tles. They had to lay railway lines and acquire railway cars, as well as immense tracked engines that could claw the rock from the cliffs and tear down whole mountains. All of these great iron machines and manufactures had to be created. But the East was far away, and the costs and perils of bringing such enormous goods overland to California prohibitive, so a good deal had to be made locally. There had to be foundries and forges and rolling mills and factories in Northern California, with their primary function to keep the gold and silver mining industries alive—to help make the growing dream of California into a reality, and not let it die prematurely, a chimera.

  All of these new factories depended upon a source of heat—a source that helped to smelt and puddle and make the steam and turn the wheels and fans and conveyor belts. And that source, of course, was coal. Not the eastern and foreign coal that was then being brought in by ship for $30 and $40 a ton—but the newly won and homegrown Californian coal, carted in from the Mount Diablo mines that were, come the 1860s, being dug, drilled, and blasted into the foothills between the peak and the two rivers to the north. Using locally mined coal would make the factories of San Francisco and Sacramento hum, and hum for a sound return on the backers’ investments.

  It was a short-lived experiment. Only 4 million tons were ever extracted from the Diablo mines; competition from cheaper and more accessible coal farther east put paid to the California coalfields. Before long such pithead communities as had sprung up were abandoned, doors left open and swinging on their rusting hinges, stores emptied and their windows broken; wild grasses and chaparral engulfed the outhouses. Some say all that remains today are the trees that miners brought with them to cheer up their dismal work camps, among them black locust trees, almond bushes, and a fast-growing weed known as ailanthus, or tree of heaven, which was brought in by the Chinese shopkeepers and grew in such wild profusion that it is now regarded as a blight, fit only to be slashed and burned and carted away by the ton.