Surviving the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake: A Memoir

The earth didn't just shake. It threw a tantrum.

The sound comes first

Everyone remembers the motion. What I remember is the noise, and it wasn't a rumble. A rumble is what movies give you because a rumble is reassuring — it has a low end, it has a shape, it sounds like weather. Loma Prieta sounded like a freight train being disassembled by a larger freight train. It sounded like the building was chewing.

Then the floor stopped being a floor. That's the part nobody prepares you for. Not that it moves — you can imagine moving — but that the one surface you have trusted, unquestioningly, every day since you were nine months old, revokes its agreement with you. Fifteen seconds. People say fifteen seconds like it's short. Count it out sometime while imagining the ceiling.

The silence after is worse

When it stopped, the city did something I have never heard it do before or since: it shut up. No traffic. No power hum. No refrigerators. Just car alarms starting up one at a time, like a chorus tuning, and somewhere down the block a woman's voice calling a name over and over.

I have found that you learn the shape of a place only after something has tried to take it apart.

Then people came outside, and here is the thing I will defend for the rest of my life: they were good. Not organized. Not heroic in the cinematic sense. Just relentlessly, boringly decent. Neighbors I'd never spoken to were handing out flashlights. A restaurant two doors down cooked everything in its walk-in and gave it away on the sidewalk because the power wasn't coming back and food doesn't keep. Somebody produced a transistor radio and forty of us stood around it in the dark like it was 1941.

The rebuild is the actual story

The quake takes fifteen seconds. The rebuild takes years, and nobody writes about it because it isn't dramatic — it's permits and shims and arguing with an insurance adjuster who has never in his life been under a doorframe at 5:04 p.m. But that's where the character shows up. Anyone can be brave for fifteen seconds. Staying is harder.

I stayed a while. Then, eventually, I didn't — which was its own kind of decision, and one I've written about elsewhere as a strategic reset rather than a retreat. But the city taught me something in that seismic tantrum that I've never been able to unlearn: everything you think is fixed is actually just currently holding.

You can build a whole life on that idea. I did. It's all in A Beautiful, Chaotic, Leaky Symphony, tantrum and rebuild both.