A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online

they did not at other times. They were literally in proximity to each other, the walls literally fallen away from around them as they clustered in squares and parks, moved stoves out onto the street to cook, lined up for supplies. They had all survived the same ordeal. They were members of the same society, and it had been threatened by the calamity.
    Though disasters are not necessarily great levelers, some of the formerly wealthy in this one no longer owned more than the poor, and many of the poor were receiving relief for the first time. Nearly all shared an uncertain future—though because they were all in it together, few seemed to worry about that future. (Many left town to start again elsewhere in the state or the country, but the city’s population rebounded in a few years.) That lack of concern made it easier to be generous in the present, since much self-interest is more often about amassing future benefit than protecting present comfort. More than a hundred thousand people were camped out in San Francisco in the days and weeks after the earthquake. In the first few days, people took care of each other, and the methods and networks they developed continued to matter even after the Red Cross and other relief organizations moved in.
    And the rules were clear. William G. Harvey, who managed an automobile dealership, wrote, “All the big hotels, such as the St. Francis, the Palace, and others, were filled with eastern and other tourists who seem to have lost their heads entirely. Indeed, the only really scared people that I can remember having seen through the first three days of the fire were people of this class. In many cases these would come to the garage offering to pay any price for the use of an automobile that would take them out of the city. However, we absolutely refused to accept money from any such applicant, and as long as we saw that the petitioner was able to walk, we refused to furnish a machine. All our machines were kept busy carrying the sick and wounded.” There were extortionists who charged people huge sums to transport goods, but there was also this giveaway, this refusal of profit, that brought those with resources into community with those who needed them. The hotel dwellers seem to have been scared because, as outsiders, they did not feel part of this community or know how to navigate the city, but many of the affluent responded with fear in part because they feared their fellow citizens would deprive them of their advantages. (In many cases the disaster had already done so, albeit temporarily.)
    Most San Franciscans seem to have been at home in the city even when they had no homes. But a series of groups felt ill at ease: the occupying armed forces, who had been instructed to see chaos and impose order; the wealthy who feared an uprising; the city’s governors who knew only that they were not in power and believed their task was to take it back; the outsiders who did not navigate the city with ease.

States of Mind
    Generosity was one highlight of the postquake citizenry, equanimity was another. Everyone would say then that it was the spirit of San Francisco, as they would talk about British composure during the bombing of London or New Yorkers’ resilience after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Eric Temple Bell, who was a teacher in 1906 San Francisco but would later become known as a mathematician and science-fiction writer, recalled, “The best thing about the earthquake and fire was the way the people took them. There was no running around the streets, or shrieking, or anything of that sort. Any garbled accounts to the contrary are simply lies. They walked calmly from place to place and watched the fire with almost indifference, and then with jokes that were not forced either, but wholly spontaneous. In the whole of these two awful days and nights I did not see a single woman crying, and did not hear a whine or a whimper from anybody. The rich and poor alike just watched and