A Study in Survival /Part Two

I was living in San Francisco when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit.

It was 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989.  A friend and I had just turned off Van Ness Avenue looking to get something to eat.  Parked cars began bouncing up and down on the street and I did not immediately understand what was happening.  Traffic stopped and people leaned out of their car windows.
"Was that an earthquake?"

I witnessed a phenomenon I will never forget. The entire city shut down, emitting an arching low moan that plunged two octaves into silence. Electric busses, restaurants, stoplights, music - everything shut down as the city was muted.  We decided the best course of action was to get back to our Potrero Hill home.

As soon as we arrived, we pulled out a small battery-operated black & white TV.  There was nothing on the air.  After about 15 minutes, KRON/TV-4 came on with their helicopter showing the first views of the city and damage from the earthquake.  When the chopper reached the Bay Bridge, my stomach dropped.  A section had collapsed and as we watched, we saw cars drive over the edge and fall to the lower deck.  The helicopter proceeded to Hwy. 880 in Oakland.  The upper level had collapsed down onto the lower level at the height of rush-hour traffic crushing everything beneath.  I could no longer breath.  Apartments buildings had sunk in the Marina and people were trapped amid fires and explosions.  A brick building for transient workers collapsed killing nearly everyone in it. 

The occurrence of the Loma Prieta earthquake coincided with an important event.  The San Francisco Giants and the Oakland As were playing the first game of the World Series that night.  The importance of this cannot be underestimated.  There were 62,000 people at Candlestick park.  Thousands of others had gone home early that day to watch the game.  Bridges and freeways were virtually empty.  Sixty-two people died and nearly 3,800 people were injured, but this number could have been far greater if the Bay Bridge and the 880 freeway had been its usual bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic.

It took four days to reestablish stoplights and bring power back to San Francisco.  There were closed freeway ramps all around the city that took years to repair and shore up.  Due to structural damage, the controversial Embarcadero Freeway, built in the 1960s, was torn down.  Property values soared: This elevated freeway that had blocked the views and thrown so many businesses into shadow was now gone, restoring the vistas San Francisco is most loved for.

We are all interdependent, more so in our cities, but even so in the country. We no longer sit alone in the wilderness, like Laura Ingalls Wilder and her pa, twisting hay into burnable sticks to survive the long winter.   We depend upon each other.  We eat the food others have grown and shipped.  We wear the clothes others have made and our transportation is what others have built.

Interdependence, this is what society is built upon and infrastructure is the base we all stand on, connected together.  

A Study in Survival /Part One

It was 13 degrees below zero this winter right here in Clear Lake, Iowa.  As a born and raised Californian, I have never experienced weather like this.   I have to think in a whole new way here.  I need to know what to do.  I need to know what to have in case my car breaks down on a lonely country road in the dead of winter.

I loved the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Struggling in the wilderness against tremendous odds sounded like one fun adventure to me.  I am now pulling out these books and reading them with new eyes.  These are studies in survival.

 First published in 1940, THE LONG WINTER, finds her family - including two younger sisters as well as an older sister blind from scarlett fever - spending a winter that starts October 1st, running out of coal and slowly starving.

 They finally run out of coal and must bring hay into the "lean-to" of the house to twist into something burnable.  This is no small feat.  Laura and her father sit together in the cold of the lean-to picking up handfuls of hay at least 2 feet long.  Twisting and twisting it, doubling it over and making these hay sticks as hard as possible so that they will burn as long as possible.  They do this until their hands bleed and they can't stand the bitter cold any longer.  They bring these "sticks" into the house to burn and get warm enough to go back out and start again ...for months.

On her first attempt, Laura is able to make only six sticks before her hands are cut and bleeding.

The word has gotten to town that the supply train, now overdue by months, has no way to get there until spring.  People are running out of food and trying to leave.  And if you think (as I did) that this is the olden days, and everyone helped each other ...well, human nature is human nature, and prices on any remaining supplies are jacked up.  The general store is long empty anyway.

It is still only January.

 "February is a short month and March will be spring." Pa said encouragingly.

A man in town butchers his ox and sells it at 25¢/pound, a fortune in those days.  Pa brings home four pounds.  They do have wheat seed.  Ma is able to grind it, in a coffee grinder that holds a half cup.  It is a complicated matter to be grinding and grinding, making the bread with a sourdough starter, and stocking the stove with enough straw sticks,  so it burns long and hot enough to bake bread.

There is a rumor of a man, miles away who has a stockpile of wheat.  Things have gotten so dire that Almanzo Wilder (Laura's future husband) and his friend set out in the general direction to find this person and demand his help as people are now on the brink of starving to death. 

Obviously Laura Ingalls Wilder lived to tell this story.  Almost certainly people died from the cold and exposure, the isolation, and running out of supplies far more than I have ever given thought to. But it is sunny as I write.  The sun streams through my east facing front windows and without that, the winter experience in iowa would be much more difficult.  Especially in the mornings.  These mornings when I think about every little thing.

"Kill Site"

"Kill site."

At dinner with new friends last night I stopped the table.

 "Wait, WHAT? What did you JUST SAY?"

"Kill site."

I guess it's self-explanatory.
Everyone there knew the term. I can say with complete certainty that I have never heard those two words together in my life.

Kill site.

Definition: A place where people kill animals and grind them up.

So this is why I work a little job, with little children; To take up the space in my head that is consumed with anxiety, and a touch of sadness.

My grandfather worked at the Armour meat packing plant in Mason City, Iowa. He never worked when I knew him; he was already retired. I assumed he worked behind a desk. But he had an 8th grade education, and today I realized; He did not work behind a desk.

I never considered my mom's words when she told me, wryly and in an offhand way, that my grandfather never ate Armour hot dogs because "he knows what goes into them."

As many older people do, my grandfather often reminisced about life in his early 20s. I loved his story of how, in the 1920s, my grandfather courted my grandmother. He took the electric trolley from Mason City to Clear Lake, and then took the paddleboat ferry across to the south shore. They would walk to one of the dancehalls on the lake and make an evening of it. If my grandfather missed the ferry back to the other side, he either had to walk or sleep in the woods until morning.

He never talked about his time at Armour and I never asked. What I do know is that my mother said my grandfather was a changed person when he retired.

 She told me that when she was young, he often came home in a horrible temper. He was abusive to my grandmother in a way that was just shy of physical.

I saw none of this. I only knew my grandfather to be kind, funny, and friendly. He was patient with me. He took me fishing. He taught me how to play pool, and how to drive on the country roads.

Today, with some sadness and guilt, I wonder what it must have been like to have had that job.

I never asked. and anyway, he would have never told a child such as myself these things.