A Crack in the Edge of the World Page 6

  But not, it seemed to me, this preternaturally beautiful city of San Francisco. I squinted through a big brass telescope that had been obligingly placed on the parapet. My feeling that this was a confection of untoward and only half-urban-looking delicacy was confirmed by the magnifying lenses. How tightly San Francisco appeared to cling on to its hillsides: One could imagine knuckles whitened, sinews straining, teeth gritted.

  I walked back downhill, enchanted and fascinated by all I had seen. And then there came to me the one word that, more than any other, has stayed with me and has haunted me since that morning—a word whose relevance was only compounded by what I knew, by what all of us knew, of San Francisco’s history.

  As I folded my tent, cleaned up my campsite, and packed the car for the last thirty-odd miles back down the hillside and onto the freeway that would eventually take me over that enormous series of iron bridges and into the city itself, one word kept running around and around in my mind. This fragile, enchanting-looking place had also appeared, more than anything else, most terribly and fatally vulnerable.

  Perhaps all cities, like all the creations of humankind, lack the real permanence they often seem to seek. But this was something more. Because of where San Francisco was built, and because of the febrile and uncertain nature of the world that underpins its foundations, it has a unique vulnerability and suffers under a greater sense of edgy impermanence than any other great city anywhere. San Francisco that morning seemed, in the context of the landscape spread around it, a city more temporary than any other great urban creation that humans have ever made.

  THREE

  Chronicle: Such Almost Modern Times

  Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night

  God said Let Newton Be, and all was light.

  ALEXANDER POPE, 1730

  IT WAS A HYBRID YEAR, A YEAR BETWEEN ERAS, ONE THAT still balanced on the cusp. It was a year that was pinioned by two centuries, held in equipoise between the comfortable and apparently innocent ways that echoed down from the nineteenth century just gone, and the infinitely more complex and challenging ways starting to well up from the all-too-modern twentieth century just begun.

  Science—much of it born in direct response to the events of that April in San Francisco—was behind a great deal of the coming change. One harbinger of these transitions was a modest-looking paper that had been published in Leipzig six months before the earthquake. It was written in German and appeared in the monthly journal Annalen der Physik. It was titled “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon Its Energy Content?” The author of the paper—it was the fourth he had written for the Annalen during 1905, a year that would later come to be seen as the annus mirabilis of his entire career—was a young clerk named Albert Einstein, then working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. He conceived of the paper as a footnote, an afterthought to papers that more fully described what would later come to be regarded as his special theory of relativity. But the paper has an enduring fame among scientists, one that derives from a single sentence written just seven lines from the end. It presented Einstein’s very simple conclusion, at which he arrived after working his patient way through a series of less-than-simple calculations, by stating that “It directly follows that if a body gives off energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/c2.” This, after making allowances for the German nomenclature of the time, would become the best-known equation of all time: E = mc2

  And, though it would take a while before the paper was circulated and its significance fully realized, the year that followed its publication—1906, the year of the seismic mayhem that culminated in the destruction of San Francisco—unarguably marks the true beginning of an era that is still broadly recognizable today. It was the start of the atomic age, and the San Francisco Earthquake was the first internationally recognized disaster to be logged into its history.

  In a score of other ways, by way of a welter of major technological achievements and a blizzard of less obvious scientific advances, it was as if the world was sloughing off its old and wrinkled skin and a glistening new replacement was slithering smoothly into being. Psychoanalysis was recognized as a science at about the same time, with the publication of Sigmund Freud’s seminal Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) at the turn of the century; as W. H. Auden said of Freud, in creating the new science he ceased in an instant to be merely a man and became instead “a whole climate of opinion.”

  Mass production of automobiles began in 1900 (at the Olds Company in Detroit—Ford was not founded until 1904). And the motion-picture industry was on the verge of being born by 1901, thanks to inventions being made at an almost feverish rate by the Edison Company and to the opening of scores of what were known as Film Exchanges, which led in turn to the opening of public cinemas (and which also allowed the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake to become the first natural disaster to be captured in moving pictures; hundreds of minutes of disaster film can still be found in archives).

  Marconi sent his first Morse code signal by radio across the Atlantic that same year. The Atlantic Ocean had long before been crossed by telegraph wires; it was to be the turn of the Pacific in 1903, which acquired its first submarine cable in the same year that Orville and Wilbur Wright launched their tiny biplane beside the sea at Kitty Hawk. A message sent from the White House took only twelve minutes to come back to the transmitting telegraphers, having circumnavigated the planet via a now fully connected skein of cables, and at what was then a barely imaginable speed. The diesel engine was introduced to the United States in 1904. The rambunctious and boisterously enthusiastic radio engineer Lee De Forest created the triode, known as the Audion, around the same time and with it sent the first voice broadcasts across the oceans; later he transmitted music from the top of the Eiffel Tower during his honeymoon (the second of the four he would enjoy in his lifetime), the signal being picked up 500 miles away. And finally, though Elisha Otis had invented the principle of the elevator as early as 1852, the first such device having been installed in a New York department store in 1857, and though the Bessemer process allowed steel girders to be used (in place of iron columns) in construction, thus permitting taller and taller buildings to be made, it was not until these early-twentieth-century years that a combination of engineering, ambition, and architectural enthusiasm coalesced sufficiently to allow for the building in New York of the world’s first true skyscrapers. They were to be far taller than the big buildings of Chicago that are usually taken to be the ur-structures of the breed, and yet in both cities they were ornate and rhapsodical and flamboyant—and for the next two decades many were modeled on classical structures from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, or from Venice, Spain, and the work of the Moors.

  The ornate appearance of Manhattan’s first pair of tall buildings, the Metropolitan Life and the Woolworth, which were being built around the time of the events in San Francisco, suggests the lingering hesitancy of the time. Their look implies that, despite the rush of scientific discovery and progress, people were not ready—as they rarely are—to abandon completely the attitudes of those more comfortable years that were just beginning to slip into history. The British poet John Betjeman, who was born in London in 1906 (six months after the earthquake), wrote much later, in the thirties, a brief farewell to King George V, a slight poem that reflects the conflicted view of these earlier times as well. It offers a sentimental grace note to an era that the poet knew only as a child, but that he saw as having been fully and finally extinguished by the ways of the modern:

  Old men in country houses hear clocks ticking

  Over thick carpets with a deadened force;

  Old men who never cheated, never doubted,

  Communicated monthly, sit and stare …

  In the San Francisco that existed at the time of its greatest tragedy the modern was being half embraced, half disdained. Many of the more conservative Americans of the day clung to the attitudes and customs of the time that Betjeman, across the Atlantic in England, woul
d soon so sorely miss—and to these people it scarcely mattered that Einstein had just pried a nugget of understanding from the universe, or that aircraft had been invented, or that mass production was beginning, or that the ether was starting to chatter with radio transmissions, or that immense commercial buildings were being erected to be filled by men who barked into telephones and betrayed one another in newly cutthroat ways that would in due course be exposed by muckraking newspapers (this last term was introduced in 1906, a month after the earthquake).

  NO, THE MODERN was not going to be embraced without a struggle. There was too much disregard for certain aspects of the new. The 78,000 registered cars on U.S. roads in 1905 (up from just 300 in 1895) were still considered, for example, to be little more than barely useful toys; the 51-day journey taken in 1903 by the drivers of a 20-horse-power Winton automobile from San Francisco to New York, the first-ever cross-country road trip, was initially denounced as a fraud. Then again, social change was slow to be accepted, too: A woman was arrested for smoking a cigarette in an open car in New York. “You can’t do that on Fifth Avenue,” the arresting officer reportedly said. And an Illinois congressman loudly attacked the brand-new practice of adding strange confections to hitherto natural foods, to make them taste better, or to eke out the ingredients and make their supply more profitable.*

  Despite all of science’s froth and exuberance, and despite a growing perception of the brave new world it promised, 1906 was in many ways a year still hesitant, partly pinioned in the Edwardian era by its mannered ways. And though this hesitancy was perhaps more apparent back in England—which still had an empire to act as bulwark to its more reactionary values—it permeated America, California, and San Francisco, too, though inevitably in America it was colored by a bolder and brasher style.

  Teddy Roosevelt, a man who epitomized these conflicts in attitude and style—“Speak softly and carry a big stick” was the adage for which he remains best known—had been president since 1901, assuming the post after William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The tone he then set reflected the duality of the times. He had been a frail and sickly child, but as a young man he was determined to conquer his limitations by strenuous exercise, becoming a rancher and a volunteer cavalryman. When he eventually came to lead his country he did so in a rambunctious, almost defiantly physical way, bringing explorers and soldiers and boxers to the White House, making stirring speeches advocating valor and national sturdiness, and promoting American prominence throughout the world. His memorials are legion, the most notable (aside from his having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for brokering the peace treaty ending the war between Russia and Japan) being the Panama Canal, the building of which he secured by acquiring the Canal Zone from Colombia in 1903.

  His dream was for Americans to dominate in particular the Pacific Ocean, to stand firm against the encroaching ambitions of any “Orientals” who might entertain similar hopes, and to create in San Francisco a base for a naval force that would secure America’s supremacy forever. He may have been an Easterner of the old school—a graduate of Harvard and Columbia, married to a Bostonian—but he was a man who valued America’s blue-water West, in part because of the buccaneering spirit of those who settled there, but also because of the coast’s utility as a base for his own imperial ambitions. When he went to San Francisco in 1903 to dedicate the monument to Admiral George Dewey and the fleet that had so roundly defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay, he thrilled the immense crowd by declaring that the proper place for all Americans was “with the great expanding peoples, with the people that dare to be great.” San Francisco was, in Teddy Roosevelt’s eyes, very much the Imperial City, a gateway to great fortunes won on the far side of its vast ocean. The city could not have had a more enthusiastic champion in the nation’s capital when it suffered its greatest calamity.

  A YEAR, AND A COUNTRY, and a president, all of them in balance, all expectant and optimistic and apprehensive by turns as a whole world of changes—changes political, psychological, social, and, most of all, scientific—began to sweep in from the future. The year, in a state of such fine equilibrium, was unusually vulnerable to the unexpected, causing events like the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of San Francisco to cast a disproportionately long shadow on science, society, philosophy, religion, and art.

  Yet there is a difference in the way that Americans of those half-modern times reacted to the events—a difference in the way that the vulnerability of the people manifested itself, compared with that of earlier years.

  Back in 1755, for example, on November 1, All Saints’ Day, the city of Lisbon experienced a truly enormous earthquake—some say it reached 9 on the Richter-Scale-to-be—and as many as 60,000 people died. It triggered total mayhem. A few wise men in eighteenth-century Portugal, most notably the prime minister of the day, Sebastião de Melo, reacted to the event with a cool rationality: They ordered countrywide surveys to be made and replacement buildings erected only after engineers had marched soldiers around models of the proposed structures to ensure they would not collapse as a result of vibration, and so on. But, generally, rational reaction to that earthquake was minimal: Most of Lisbon displayed the kind of wild primitivism that characterizes a people who are shocked and unprepared and intellectually ill equipped to be able to offer answers as to why a catastrophe like this might have happened. God was responsible, it was widely assumed. Catholic priests roved around the ruins, selecting at random those they believed guilty of heresy and thus to blame for annoying the Divine, who in turn had ordered up the disaster. The priests had them hanged on the spot.

  In San Francisco, a century and a half later, it was all very different. When the San Andreas Fault ruptured just before dawn on that April Wednesday, the new-forming appreciation of science meant that a good number of the city’s inhabitants understood, at least basically, what had just taken place. Many of them speculated sensibly and rationally as to why. The official reaction to the disaster was generally swift and measured, ordered and rational—and the consequences of that reaction were far-reaching and remain with us to this day. True, some few lingering attachments to less sophisticated times did also leave their mark—which is why the hybrid nature of the year 1906 has rendered the earthquake so resonant and peculiarly interesting an event in American history, and in the history of the world.

  Lisbon’s disaster, widely regarded as an unstoppable act of a cruel and capricious God, is now largely forgotten. The San Francisco catastrophe, recognized, on the other hand, as having been the act of a perhaps not wholly unpredictable nature, never will be. San Francisco will not be forgotten because, thanks to the growing understanding of science, it became the first seismic event to awaken mankind to the realization that nature’s whims could perhaps be measured, perhaps one day anticipated, then met and even overcome. The tragedy led scientists to begin studying the earth with far greater vigor than ever before. It offered the first opportunity for humans to imagine what it might be like if they, and not God or nature, were ever to be in control. To that extent, the fact that the earthquake occurred in this specific changeling year of 1906 was more than a little fortuitous.

  FOUR

  From Plate to Shining Plate

  I am lost in wonder and amazement. It is not a

  country, but a world.

  OSCAR WILDE, quoted in the

  St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, 1882

  A SIMPLE PLAN

  SINCE THE MID-1960s, WHEN THE PLATE TECTONIC THEORIES were first adduced and observations proved them to be correct (to all but a few hard-core skeptics), it has been realized that the brittle exterior surface of the earth, broken into a number of enormous slab-like fragments generally known as plates, is in constant motion because of the upwelling and downthrusting of convection currents in the material immediately below that crust—rather like the motions of the creamy scum that forms on the surface of a soup that is boiling merrily away underneath it. The upwelling and
downward plunging of these currents takes place in the earth’s very plastic or highly molten mantle, which itself exists as a thick band—1,800 miles thick, in fact—just below the solid crust and above the molten-ingot sphere of heavy metals that spins at the heart of the earth and is called, somewhat un-poetically, the planet’s core.

  The convection currents exist because the inner earth is frighteningly hot—and it is hot for two primary reasons: first, because of the kinetic energy that was released when all the space debris combined, in bodies that are called planetesimals, to make the protoplanet that we now call earth; and second, because the inner earth contains huge quantities of radioactive materials, isotopes of potassium, thorium, and radium in the main, that emit heat because they have been decaying over the millennia. But there is a secondary reason for the earth’s being so very hot and having a crust in a constant state of motion (in a way that the crustal surfaces of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and earth’s moon do not seem to move at all), and this relates to the earth’s size.

  The earth is much bigger than the other close-in planetary bodies like Venus and Mercury and, because of its size, it stores a lot of heat in its interior. But this cannot be radiated away into space at the same rate as heat from the smaller bodies, because of the simple realities of solid geometry: The larger a sphere, the smaller its surface area when compared with its volume. Earth has a very large volume and contains a great deal of heat within that volume—and yet its surface area is too small to radiate away all that energy heat and decay heat with the kind of efficiency and dispatch that other, smaller bodies enjoy. So the core burns; the mantle bubbles and boils and moves up and down in convection curves and plumes, just as the aforesaid soup might do on a stovetop; and the scum of cream that floats on the top, the many-miles-thick earth’s crust, which bears all of the seabeds and all of the continents in the solid and broken-up plates of which it is now known to be composed, moves. It slips and slides about under the influence of those convection currents; the plates confront one another, interact with one another, jostle against one another; and a chain of consequences—some of them dramatic, some majestic, some terrifying, and all of them of singular importance for the humankind that clings to existence on top of some of the plates—is visible on all sides. The consequences of the plates’ interactions with one another are what we see and feel and know: the topography of the world that rises and falls all around us.