A Crack in the Edge of the World (7 page)

And there this material would have remained, except that about 4 million years ago, for reasons that will also be explained later, the whole mixture was dramatically folded upward. The old, hard rocks
were in the center of the fold; the new, young, soft sediments were on the outside. Under the influence of weather the young, soft rocks were swiftly worn away, thus exposing, as a range of steep and dramatic hills, the core of ancient ocean floor and dragged-down sediments from the dinosaur-era age of the Middle Jurassic. Mount Diablo was born. The soft rocks, which in one particular case were thick with abundant layers of soft coal, were to be found on the flanks of the hills; the unyieldingly hard and relatively ancient rocks, which were good for road stone but not at all rich in the kind of minerals that make men wealthy, were left in the middle.

The crucial element of this long and complicated story is the relatively uncomplicated but still somewhat mysterious event that took place almost exactly 20 million years ago: the moment when the onward press of the ocean crust suddenly, and for a reason that long remained a mystery, translated itself into a northward, sliding motion—as when an army suddenly wearies of charging head-on at the enemy and begins to execute a mysterious, somewhat cunning motion to one side that appears to be an attempt to outflank the foe. At this point—which took place in the middle of the period of world history known as the Miocene—everything that now in essence defines seismic California was brought into being.

This was the moment of making—when the earthshaking, city-killing, history-creating, epoch-changing linear system, 750 miles in length, and known since the beginning of the nineteenth century, broadly and generically, as the San Andreas Fault, was created. That the oncoming plate's change of direction also helped to create this hill, the massif that rises so formidably in the picture windows of the residents of the towns of Clayton, Pittsburg, and Pleasant Hill and their like, reinforces the view that I started to hold in the tent that breezy night: that Mount Diablo is more connected and interlinked with the events of the San Francisco tragedy than almost all those who live beside it and below it have ever properly supposed.

BY NOW I WAS READY
to sleep. I stepped briefly out of the tent and looked up at a sky ablaze with stars: Cassiopeia and Gemini unusually bright, Castor and Pollux winking down from the roof of the universe. There seemed to be a gathering of clouds rolling onshore from over the faraway Pacific. The loom of lights from the cities spread a blush of orange-pink on the underside, making them glow bright against the velvet of the coastal night.

DAWN CAME UP
all too early that next morning, and from where I was camped, close to the top on the western side of the mountain, the day and its morning sky were pale blue and clear as crystal. There had evidently been a shower in the small hours: The fire was out, the ashes were damp and cold, the pine needles glistened with more than the usual dew. I walked up along the empty road (the gates below would not open for another hour, and so I could revel in the knowledge that I still had the mountaintop entirely to myself) to the summit. At the top is a immense octagonal stone building—a onetime aircraft beacon,
*
a uniquely visible landmark and, as it happens, a memorial to one of the defining periods in recent American history, the Great Depression. The building, fashioned from a highly fossiliferous sandstone quarried locally, had been erected in the 1930s, using the brawn and muscle of scores of out-of-work men who had been organized into a local chapter of the federally funded Civilian Conservation Corps, and who had
lived for two years in a camp close to where I had slept the night before. I climbed the steps up to the parapet and gazed, silently and dumbstruck, at one of the most stupendous views in all America.

William Brewer, when he first surveyed the mountain in 1862, estimated that 80,000 square miles could be seen from the summit. “I made an estimate,” he wrote in his report for the Geological Survey, for which he was principal assistant, “that in tolerably plain view the extent of land and sea embraced between the extreme limits of vision range over 300 miles from north to south, and 260 to 280 miles from east to west. Probably but few views in North America are more extensive, and certainly nothing in Europe.”

There was no haze, no smoke from forest fires, no fog, no pollution—at least, not where I first looked, toward the southeast, almost directly into the rising sun. The dry flatlands of the Central Valley spread out brown and cornrowed, with their arrow-straight irrigation canals gleaming like tinsel. Beyond them in the distance, forming the horizon, rose the jagged and snow-topped wall of the Sierra Nevadas, a range that stretched 250 miles from the Cascades and Lassen Peak in the north to China Lake and the fringes of the Mojave Desert in the south.

This immense wall of rock was where California's two most precious assets were created: its water and its electricity (though more properly only one of these was a real asset, since the latter was created by the former, provided that the water was above sea level and thus possessed of potential energy). The moist westerly winds that blew in from the ocean were stopped in their tracks by this great granite massif, which, happily for the state (though less so for that part of California known as Death Valley as well as the entire western part of the state of Nevada, which lies in the mountains' rain shadow), proved too high for the winds to climb over, too elongated for them to weave their way around. The snows that then fell so constantly in due course melted and became rivers, with the waters then employed either to slake thirsts or to create power.

Most of the range I could see, and, had I had a detailed chart, I
imagine I could have recognized the noblest peaks: Mammoth, Dana, Gibbs, Parker, Darwin, Lamarck, and the great summits around Yosemite. The very highest, Mount Whitney—named for the first head of the Geological Survey—was too far away to sight, but, had I known exactly what I was looking at that morning, I daresay I could have made out far to the southeast Mount Brewer, the 13,500-foot Sierra peak that had been named for the remarkable and heroic William Brewer, an explorer of (according to his biographer, Francis Farquhar) “the strongest fiber, of unflagging energy, the soundest judgement, the utmost tact, and of unequivocal honesty and loyalty.”
*
He was also accorded the honor of having the California spruce,
Picea breweriana
, named after him; but he is otherwise too little remembered, like so many of those who opened up this staggeringly beautiful country, and who beckoned to outsiders to come west for reasons aesthetic and not purely mercantile. John Muir and Ansel Adams were first among those who heard this call, but many of the rest of early Californians, one is often tempted to suppose, belonged to the more strictly practical school of migrants.

I turned away from the sun, to my left, and gazed up to the north—a view dominated initially by the most spectacularly severe of California's peaks, the ice-covered, glacier-strewn, and symmetrically perfect cone of Mount Shasta. Shasta's standing, like that of Mount Kailash in Tibet, stems from its magnificent isolation: It is a double volcano, and it rises, without warning, from where the Central Valley peters out, close to the logging town of Redding, which was also just visible from that morning's vantage point.

Much closer, and just below Diablo's slopes, were the two great rivers that most properly delineate the geography of this part of California; the nearer of the two was the San Joaquin, which I could see
faintly, squirreling its way through the great sprawling inland port city of Stockton;
*
the more distant was the Sacramento River (the Río Sacramento, or the “River of the Sacrament”), which coursed down from the north, and from the mountainsides behind the state's present-day capital. The two joined in plain sight below me in a wide bay and glinting marshlands; and then, after squeezing their combined way through the Carquinez Strait—named after the Indians who had given the missionizing Spanish soldiers such a hard time with their diabolical medicine man—and beneath the iron highway bridges on which I could already see the crawl of morning motor traffic, their waters spread out into a wide and flat declivity: the immense, 1,600-square-mile tidal harbor that unfolds from the hills, valleys, wineries, sheep farms, and flower meadows of Napa and Sonoma in the north, down to the plants, factories, airfields, think tanks, and next-century-paradigm-shifting industries around Palo Alto, Stanford, and San Jose in the south.

There the rivers widened at last and evolved lazily and muddily into the feature that, once its value as a harbor was realized, was enthusiastically named to honor Saint Francis of Assisi, Bahía San Francisco, San Francisco Bay.

And center stage, seeming almost to be floating out on the wide waters, stood the city, the obvious and very evident capital of it all. There, at last, was my goal, the first sight of my destination, of the great city that had always been the Bay's principal port. It had at first been called after the pretty shrub that grew there in such abundance, yerba buena. But in 1847, in commemoration of the universally venerated twelfth-century priest from Assisi in whose kindly principles its founders so ardently believed, it had been given the name it bears today: San Francisco.

What I remember most about the city, which was spread out beyond the low hills and clustered like a jewel box of gleaming spires and glittering windows on its tiny thumbnail of a peninsula, was just how astonishingly
delicate
it all looked. It was quite unlike New York or Chicago or Boston. Those places were gray, massive, battleship-like cities, cities that were indelibly written into, and indestructibly welded onto, their landscapes, each fully a part of the topography that once shaped it. London, nestled among its own enclosing hills, had looked and felt much the same for centuries. As had Berlin, Paris, Moscow. And Rome, of course, “the eternal city.” Tokyo, so ancient and so modern and so
always there
, regardless of the fires and wars that had scourged it. Even Hong Kong, Sydney—even such defiantly modern cities as these had acquired a look of settled permanence.

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.

          
Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night

          
God said
Let Newton Be,
and all was light
.

A
LEXANDER
P
OPE
, 1730

I
T 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/c
²
.” This, after making allowances for the German nomenclature of the time, would become the best-known equation of all time:
E
=
mc
²