A Crack in the Edge of the World Read Online Free Page A

was awakened by the first shock. I began to count the seconds as I went towards the table where my watch was, being able through much practice closely to approximate the time in that manner. The shock came at 5.12 o’clock. The first sixty seconds were the most severe. From that time on it decreased gradually for about thirty seconds. There was then the slightest perceptible lull. Then the shock continued for sixty seconds longer, being slighter in degree in this minute than in any part of the preceding minute and a half. There were two slight shocks afterwards which I did not time.
    Professor Davidson must have been as terrified as anyone, but he was a man trained to observe, and he knew in an instant what was taking place. So he took painstaking care to note that his watch, as he later reported, stood at 5h 12m oos. Only he then added the caveat, for safety’s sake—and with the sense of caution that was hardwired into his astronomer’s mind—that this observation was subject to an error of plus or minus two seconds . This reflected, one imagines, any error that he might have made when calculating how long he had spent staggering, his nightshirt awry and his mind still marginally befuddled by sleep, from his bed to the bureau where his watch was ticking and readying itself to slide, along with the pitcher and the shaving mug, onto the redwood floor.
    The first full series of hard shocks, say his notes, lasted until 5h 13m 00s. The shocks were slightly less from that point until 5h 13m 30s, then there was a slight lull, and by 5h 14m 30s all was quiet again. The entire event—which was to destroy an American city and leave an indelible imprint on the mind of the entire nation—had lasted for just over two and a half minutes. That, at least, was the considered view of a man so esteemed that three mountains, a glacier, a seamount, an inlet, a bank, and a San Francisco avenue were later named after him. The official report on the earthquake said, in a tone that brooked no dispute, “We shall accept Professor Davidson’s time as the most accurate obtainable for San Francisco.”
    JUST ONE BLOCK SOUTH and eight-tenths of a mile to the west slept the weatherman whose name, still celebrated in meteorological circles (though he had only one mountain named after him), was Alexander George McAdie. A New Yorker, he became a soldier in the Signal Corps after college and made a name for himself by promoting the use of kites rather than balloons for the study of the upper atmosphere (in which signalers were officially interested, since radio waves were affected by what went on there). He became an academic and then joined the government. In 1895, together with his young wife, Mary, he moved out to San Francisco to head the Weather Bureau andto direct the state’s Climate and Crop Service, the latter post carrying with it the title of professor. One of his tasks at the bureau was to record, as accurately as possible, any and all seismic events that happened in and around San Francisco.
    Professor McAdie was an ambitious and a punctilious man, and at the very moment that he was awakened on that dark and chilly April morning, both his ambition and his scrupulous regard for factual observation—as critical in the world of weather as in the study of the stars—came promptly to the fore. As had been his custom ever since he went through the Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886 (“for twenty years I have timed every earthquake I have felt,” he was later to write), the instant he awoke and felt movement he clicked on his flashlight, noted the time on his fob watch, and recorded in his notebook everything that transpired.
    I have lookt up the record in my note-book made on April 18, 1906, while the earthquake was still perceptible. I find the entry “5h 12m” and after that “Severe lasted nearly 40 seconds.” As I now remember it the portion “severe, etc” was