No Se Nada

Four thirty-four a.m. - first train into the city. The BART platform isn't filled, but it isn't abandoned either. It's hard to know if the other riders are coming into San Francisco for the same reason as I, or because they work ridiculously early hours. I wouldn't know because I've never taken the first morning BART train. And I wouldn't be now - waking myself up at 4:00 am - if it wasn't for a very special occasion: One hundred years ago today the San Andreas Fault let loose a hell upon the residents of San Francisco, and I want to be in the city at Lotta's Fountain by 5:12 AM -- one hundred years ago to the second that the earth shook.

Pulling into Rockridge Station, the train presented itself full and I was lucky to get a seat. Do all these people have something to do in The City before five in the morning or are they headed in for my reasons? Across the transbay tube and out onto Market Street I realize the answer. Tens of thousands of people are filling Market and every side street, either pressing up toward Lotta's Fountain to see the Mayor and a phalanx of dignitaries speak accolades to long-dead generations and a very small knot of survivors, or patiently watching big screen monitors blocks away.

I pressed up to the fountain and got as close as a hundred yards, blocked by a flatbed trailer pulled in only to give the hundreds of media a closer look. Mayor Newsom introduces the female Fire Chief and the female Police Chief (something that this son of a fireman thinks very impressive) and two other women in positions of public safety. I can barely make out the amplified words over the droning of the TV news van generators, but drawing nigh on 5:12, the buzz in the crowd becomes unmistakable. A large clock stands behind the grandstand and as its second hand clears out 5:11, people in the crowd begin to count down. Then everybody falls quiet and sirens all over the city begin to wail.

Maybe they're wailing for the dead. Maybe the wailing is the same wailing that people all over the world do when a quake cuts down their kin. Thirty thousand in Bam, Iran or a few hundred thousand in Tangshan, China or three thousand in San Francisco is a lot of souls reclaimed by Mother Nature. Or maybe the wailing is part celebration of the resilience of the city and its residents -- people that rebuilt the razed city in three years. In any case, the silence of the crowd and piercing of the siren is a stark reminder of why we are standing on this street in the pre-dawn coolness. The air feels emotional and electrically charged.

After the noise dies down, Mayor Newsom passes the mic around to ten or so survivors of the quake. One was sixteen years old when the quake hit. Another -- hamming it up at 99 -- says she was a product of the quake: conceived and born in a tent in Golden Gate Park. The crowd roars with laughter when she says this. Some were five years old at the time, others little babes. Incredibly, all have made it to 2006. They've seen one hundred years of destruction and reconstruction, playing itself out through multiple generations of San Francisco. To me they seem like the Lotta's Fountain they lean up against while telling their stories. Watching the city come and go while remaining in place as focal point, story board and monument to this incredible city that took a heavy blow and came through on the other side.