7.1, 10/17/1989, 5:04 p.m.

It is nearly 5:04 local time, here in Buffalo, and twenty years have passed. I was on the campus of UC Berkeley, and I’d just gotten out of my discussion section for Major British Writers. It was just about five, so I decided on an early dinner before heading back home across the Bay to San Francisco. The campus walks and plazas thronged with students and professors and others, walking, riding bicycles, heading home. At Bancroft Avenue, I was waiting for the light to change, when the girl next to me and I looked at each other. I knew she was thinking the same thing: was the traffic really making the ground shake like that? Nothing major, just an unusually strong vibration underfoot. People looked up. The traffic lights were bobbing, but maybe it was just the wind. An enormous plate glass window across the street suddenly shattered—exploded, really. But nothing else broke, and I remember thinking that it must have been older, weaker glass, not safety glass. The shaking stopped. Having never been outside in an earthquake before, I quickly tucked the experience into my catalog of seismic memories and headed down Telegraph.
I decided to browse Cody’s before dinner and to my surprise the store’s floor was covered with books that had fallen from the shelves. It must have felt stronger inside, I thought. One of the clerks covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said to another, “The Bay Bridge is down.” What? No...impossible. I remembered that the burrito place on Durant had a television, and there, seeing the collapsed Cypress Freeway for the first time, realized it had been a serious earthquake, the biggest in years. The destruction was localized, but still. A decade-plus later, on 9/11, there was a similar sense of very tightly confined destruction in New York City, a sense that just miles from major catastrophe, there was milk to be bought, cats to be fed, dogs to be walked.
The bridge was closed, and BART wasn’t running, so I went over to the apartment of some friends and asked if I could stay the night. Of course, they said, and we made a reunion/party of it. As reports trickled in—the location of the epicenter, the interruption and cancellation of the World Series—I tried to track down the various members of my large family, which was tricky because the circuits were jammed. Friends in Santa Cruz couldn’t be reached yet, but I called my roommate and reassured her that I’d be back the next day. Finally I reached my mother and learned she and Dad had been on the freeway (she thought a tire blew) and that my brother Philippe had actually been at Candlestick Park (still tailgating in the parking lot, he later told me). At one point my mother said, “Oh, there’s another aftershock.” “I don’t feel it.” “You probably will in a moment,” she said. Sure enough, like a swell at sea, the earth lifted and fell for a second; from my friends’ apartment we could hear the students in the high-rise dorms screaming like rollercoaster riders.

BART was back up and running the next day, so I thanked my friends and headed home. As the train swung along the curve closest to the Cypress Freeway, a hush fell over the passengers. People craned their necks, but you couldn’t see anything. During the ride through the Trans-Bay tube, there was even more silence and not a little tension. Back in the City, on the street, I noticed cracks in older buildings that hadn’t been there before, but as stated, the damage felt confined to other places. It turned out my apartment building was one of them: the four-story chimney on the east side had sheared away and fallen on the landlord’s chocolate-brown BMW. And my bedroom, which perched out over the backyard, looked like someone had turned it over, once, like a snowglobe. “Mary’s coming up from Santa Cruz,” my roommate said. Since we didn’t have any gas or water, we all went out for sushi. I remember that it felt like a party. The following night, another friend invited us over for a dinner of homemade paté, baguettes, stew, and red wine. It was my first experience of a sense of a community forged through necessity, through crisis. My first experience of the connectivity of human beings, of our need to reach out and ask if we’re okay. And we are.