This Day in History April 18, 1906: The San Francisco Earthquake
At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, San Francisco began to rumble and shake in a massive earthquake. The bustling urban center suffered major damage as the unreinforced brick commercial buildings crumbled and collapsed, and the wooden residential buildings buckled and splintered. Soon fires broke out and engulfed the city. They burned for three days and left around a quarter of the city in rubble and ash. About 3,000 people died.
The quake measured near 8.0 on the Richter Scale, and came with multiple aftershocks, including one that threw a four-year-old Ansel Adams face first into a brick wall. It broke his nose. The crooked bridge would remain a prominent feature for the rest of his life, echoing the jagged crags and meandering rivers he loved to photograph.
Above The Tetons and the Snake River by Ansel Adams. Right a portrait of Adams by Richard Byrd in 1972.
The temblor that broke his nose was a sudden rupture in time, the two tectonic plates heaving against each other at the San Andreas fault suddenly slipping, shattering the normal flow of history. Adams' photographs tend toward the timeless, seeming to exist outside of history. They show mountains, valleys and lakes in pristine order, uncluttered by people in their faddish fashions or outdated architectures. The black and white studies of light on rock and cloud could exist now or yesterday or a hundred years ago - and, if we are lucky, a hundred years from now. Of course, Adams realized the permanence of these landscapes was not guaranteed. He joined the Sierra Club as a teenager and worked tirelessly throughout his life to preserve and conserve our nation's wild spaces. He knew our relentless consumption of wilderness could bring far more chaos and devastation than any spasm of the earth's crust. So he showed us the worth and beauty of spaces without us.
Adams took this photograph in the fall of 1943. It shows the desert of central California nestled along the ridges of the Sierra Nevada under the hazy film of a dust storm. He was on assignment from the War Relocation Authority in the middle of World War II to document the Manzanar "relocation center" for Japanese Americans.
The assignment was personal for him. He was outraged when Harry Oye, a man his parents had employed for years and who was suffering from poor health, was arrested and forced into a hospital in Missouri as part of the US government's mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. He documented the lives of the incarcerated Americans at Manzanar and published a book showing the injustice of their treatment. You can view all the photos and a copy of the book, Born Free and Equal, at the Library of Congress.
Below is his photograph of the artist C.T Hibino painting the same landscape Adams photographed. Hibino, uprooted and imprisoned for no reason apart from his ancestry, brushes out a world free of the chaotic turmoil of the war and his own incarceration. In both Adams' and Hibino's work, the artists are creating order, arranging and directing our view of and toward a designed and constructed vision of the world. This is the work of the artist. Re-vision the world.
And this is also the work of the scientist.
The same day Adams got his nose smashed, the earthquake shook hundreds of jars full of fish specimens off their shelves, sending them crashing to the floor. They were the life work of the ichthyologist and educator David Starr Jordan, who is the subject of a new book by Lulu Miller. He had meticulously identified new fish from around the world and placed each specimen in a jar with a hand punched metal tag. After the quake, the fish and tags lay chaotically scattered in the shards of glass. Rather than give up in despair, he began sewing the tags to the fish he could still identify.
He began again with his project of ordering the world. Miller says she was inspired by his relentless optimism. He believed, despite everything, that he could impose his vision of order on a chaotic and unpredictable world. In a recent interview with NPR she says, "There are lessons here, I think, for this moment, which is to not sit around studying what's lost and stolen from you, but to actually just use this as a moment to innovate." In other words, in the midst of turmoil, re-vision the world.
But Miller is not solely optimistic. She sees the danger in refusing to recognize the way chaos and chance can undermine our best plans.
In her book she says, "Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build.
"It's not if, it's when," she continues, " Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all. My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do." And yet we push on, carving order out of all the messy chaos that entropy throws at us. Even that beautiful curve of river backed by the Grand Tetons in the photograph above is a creation, both of Adams' vision of the space through his lens, and the vision he helped inspire in our country to preserve the land in places like the Grand Teton National Park.
San Francisco rebuilt as well. Here is the city immediately after the disaster, the sun shining down on miles of ash and ruin:
And here again just three years later:
It is foolish - dangerous even - to naively think we can fully and confidently predict and control the course of our lives. Of course we can't. We will be struck by chaos, by the unpredictable, by the disastrous - and also the lucky and serendipitous. But it is equally foolish - dangerous even - to let the acknowledgment of our contingent state prevent us from boldly creating and re-visioning the future we want.
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