San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
We’re not here to stay, but Earth abides
It is hard to remember now what it was like before the virus, the fear, the panic, the rumors. It seems like long ago, when people went to work, and later met friends for dinner. Another world.
But one morning this last week I woke up with a start. The sun had risen as it usually does, and there were fluffy clouds. The headline in The Chronicle told it all: Stay home. That headline will be a collector’s item someday, I thought. If there is a someday.
A day or so later, I had enough of house arrest. I decided to go for a walk. That’s allowed, they said, as long as you keep away from other people. I could use the exercise and the fresh air. And besides, I wanted to see if the world was still there.
So I walked up to the top of Bernal Hill, which is the center of our neighborhood. It’s not much of a hill, but it’s important to us Bernalese, as we sometimes call ourselves. It is made of red rock — radiolarian chert, formed millions of years ago, when this part of the world was at the bottom of an ancient sea. The rocks are folded in layers, like stone blankets laid on end. The rocks are easy to see where humans have cut the hill to build roads. The hill is as green as Ireland in winter and spring, and a tawny brown the rest of the year.
Men are always doing something to the hill.
There was a quarry on the south side once, and years ago the phone company built some kind of electronic complex on the very top. It is surrounded by a chainlink fence with razor wire topping.
That doesn’t stop people from going almost to the top. There is a famous view: Mount Tamalpais across the Golden Gate. Mount Diablo to the east. The Santa Cruz Mountains to the southwest. On a clear day, you can see almost forever.
But the main attraction is the city itself at the foot of the hill — Potrero Hill, where I grew up; the Mission District, where I went to school; the glittering towers of the new city. You have to admit, despite all the mistakes, we have built a beautiful city, especially on a spring morning.
There was a brisk
March breeze, but not much sound rode the wind. Normally you can hear the steady hum of the freeways. Up on the hill you could look right down the streets and see the traffic, but the streets were almost empty. The city, all cities, make sounds, like an urban roar, that you can hear even in the country when the wind is right. But San Francisco was quiet; the people were inside, hiding from the virus.
I was reminded of a book I read years ago called “Earth Abides,” by George R. Stewart. The UC Berkeley professor wrote several acclaimed books, among them “Ordeal by Hunger” about the Donner Party, “Storm” about California storms, and “Fire” about California wildfires. Most of them are out of print, but “Earth Abides” is available on Kindle.
“Earth Abides” is about how a killing type of virus strain suddenly arises by mutation and spreads quickly because of air travel all over the world. It kills millions of people.
Only a handful survive, and one of them is a Berkeley graduate student with the unlikely name of Isherwood Williams, who tells the tale of the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one. Williams is not so much a hero as he is a survivor. With his partner, Emma, an African American woman he meets in the East Bay, he is the ancestor of a new tribe of people. He lives to a great old age and is the only one who remembers the old ways. He is the last American.
It’s science fiction, of course, 1949 style, but in Stewart’s hands it is engrossing. Not just science fiction, the Boston Globe said, “but among our very best novels.”
Much of it is set in the Bay Area, particularly Berkeley. The survivors live near the UC campus, and a big rock — possibly Indian Rock in the Berkeley hills, has a particular significance to the tribe.
There is no miracle cure for the virus, no dashing heroes. The electricity goes out. “The dark ages were closing in,” Stewart writes. All the trappings of modern life fade away. Natural forces take over, like storm and fire. There are plagues of insects and rats. The tribe has to move away from wildfires in search of fresh water. They live very much like the native people who lived here before European contact only 250 years ago.
The last chapter of the book ends on the Bay Bridge, still standing but streaked with rust generations after the virus.
“You raise your eyes from the book and see your own landscape, imagining how it would look without humans,” Graham Sleight wrote in a review of “Earth Abides” in Locus magazine.
Stewart’s title comes from the first book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament: “Men come and go, but Earth abides.”