Death Mouth
I didn't think of the Oakland Hills as dangerous, but in the decade in which I resided there most of the time, I saw a nearby house that had slid down the hill after a heavy rain, felt a somewhat severe earthquake, and watched from across San Francisco Bay as my former neighborhood went up in flames.
Otherwise things were stable. Houses stayed where they were built. The ground was quiet. There were few fires except in backyard grills.
I loved the area. It was lush. The houses were not crowded together as in some recent “developments” with buildings of the same size. Apart from leaf-blowers, it was reasonably quiet. There were parks, one with a small lake. It was easy to get from there to Berkeley, to downtown Oakland, to San Francisco, and to the place where I worked then, east through the tunnel to Contra Costa.
The house that slid began for me as an empty space on a familiar walk. When I looked down the slope, I saw the intact house, resting against some big eucalyptus trees, the hillside looking as if it had been smeared by a giant hand. The cause was a downpour. I don't know what time of day the displacement happened or whether anyone had been hurt. The lowering of the curb for the drive led to nothing. Otherwise, everything else looked exactly as it always had.
As I later discovered, the earthquake in 1989 had caused the two-level freeway through downtown to “pancake,” and a section of the Bay Bridge to fall, but in the shopping area near where I lived the wooden buildings swayed but stayed upright. No trees fell. It was only some of the more modern structures of steel and concrete that snapped.
I saw the 1991 firestorm from the slopes of Mount Tamalpais across the bay. Of course from that distance we could not tell the exact location of the blaze. The smoke drifted west, which was an unusual direction for the wind. Days later we drove to my former neighborhood in the Oakland Hills and found that the house in which we had lived was burnt to the foundations, along with all surrounding houses except one.
I suppose our nonchalance about these events sprang from a comparison with “the big one,” a disaster on the scale of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Yet nobody with whom I talked could really imagine that scale, when a much of a city is wrecked by shaking and by fire.
One of the best jobs of imagining the big quake was done by local writer Rebecca Solnit, in A Paradise Built in Hell, her book on the actual responses to various disasters. The authorities always expected chaos fueled by panic, but in fact many people helped one another, almost as if they were happy for an excuse to go beyond narrow self-interest.
(For more material on the 1980s, see my book, Enlarging Our Comfort Zones)