In California, Marking Time With Natural Disasters

“Anyone in the Bay Area in 2020 remembers the ‘orange sky day’ — the day the smoke from large wildfires elsewhere in the state choked out the sun and turned the sky a dusky red-orange color from morning to night. It was still the early days of the pandemic when everything was so uncertain, but that was the day I really understood that nothing in nature is a given — not even the color of the sky.” — Carley Davenport, Oakland

“I was standing in the back door of our house looking at my husband working out in the garden. As the house started to shake it was all I could do to hang onto the doorway. My husband later said that the house was actually rippling. Later that evening we took a walk through the dark neighborhood. We could see the headlights of cars coming over the Castro Street hill. Noe Valley residents brought out their grills and the contents of their fridges and were barbecuing on the sidewalk.” — Kit Cameron, San Francisco, remembering Loma Prieta

“I was at home, a few miles north of the Northridge earthquake epicenter, when I was awakened by intense shaking at 4:31 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994. I got out of bed, felt my way in the dark to put on my clothing and shoes, and grabbed a flashlight to check on my neighbors. As dawn broke on that clear, windy morning, I swept up the broken glassware and dishes in the kitchen. As advised on the car radio, I drove with extreme caution — treating inoperable traffic signals as four-way stop signs — 10 miles to Kaiser’s Panorama City hospital, where I was a pediatrician and medical geneticist. They needed every hand.” — Harold N. Bass, M.D., Porter Ranch

“I was 10 years old and asleep in my Fairfax district second-story bed when suddenly I found myself on the floor with no memory of how I got there, even though the floor was still in upheaval.” — Ken Rudolph, Los Angeles, remembering the 1952 Tehachapi earthquake

“I was working with an 8-year-old tutoring student in the Mission District of San Francisco. The earth began to move and, like good Californians, we waited for it to stop. It didn’t. As the shaking increased, we moved to stand in a door frame. As we held on to the frame, my student looked up at me and said, ‘What makes earthquakes?’ I found myself trying to explain plate tectonics as the earth rolled.” — Jane Sprouse, Walnut Creek

“The 70 m.p.h. winds sounded like a freight train. Around 1 a.m., waking from a dead sleep to a huge boom and then the house shaking like an earthquake as a tree scraped across the front of the house — scraping, glass breaking, crunching and then it was done. In our family, we have partitioned our memories into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the tree.” — Jennifer Mantle, Boulder Creek, on Santa Cruz County’s 2019 winter storms

“Dogs barking, smoke alarms going off, sheriffs knocking on doors, voices screaming, ‘Run NOW!’ Driving through forests of flaming trees, smoke so thick your lungs were on fire and you couldn’t see the road in front of you.” — Robert Starkey, San Francisco, remembering the 2017 Tubbs fire