Hundreds of thousands of Americans tried to escape the country by boat and a harrassed Coastguard spent hours trying to turn back dinghies and catamarans and fishing smacks, all overloaded with desperate people with suitcases. Many of the boats were so overcrowded that they sank as soon as they reached the open sea. The Boston Globe printed on its back page, without caption and without comment, two photographs side by side – one of the Vietnamese boat people and one of the American boat people.

In the House, Representative George Meacher of Tennessee asked in an emotional speech how this ‘magnificent democracy of ours, founded on liberty, freedom, and honour, could be brought low in two weeks by a virus, an isotope, and a disease of the gut?’ Nobody could answer him.

Looting, homicide, arson, rape, and cases of ‘crazy and suicidal driving’ were reported ‘by the thousand.’ Most police forces could do nothing more than patrol the streets and try to keep their cities and suburbs as quiet as possible. A woman died in childbirth on the sidewalk outside the Waldorf-Astoria in New York because there were no doctors available, no ambulances, and most of Park Avenue was blocked with abandoned cars. In San Quentin prison, eighty-six inmates who attempted to escape because they were mad with hunger were shot dead. Two half-naked teenage girls from respectable Back Bay families were found wandering around downtown Boston in a state of shock after being kidnapped from outside their homes and raped more than twenty times each by marauding white hoodlums.

Thursday was the day that most newspapers stopped printing, that the last few gas stations closed down, that power blackouts began to darken thousands of square miles of the eastern seaboard. There was a terrible wildness in the air, a terrible panic, that nobody who lived through the first days of the famine could ever forget. One journalist remembered climbing Coit Tower in San Francisco and staring out for hours over a city that ‘flowered with foes, and echoed with shots, and howled with the sirens of the helpless police.’ Above everything, though, he said ‘I could hear the cries and shrieks of a people who felt as if they had been abandoned by democracy, abandoned by capitalism, abandoned by peace, and abandoned by plenty… a people who more than anything else felt they had been deserted by God.’

During Thursday, the phone rang again and again at the Snowmans’ house on Topanga Canyon. Nobody answered it until late on Thursday evening, when a motorcycle cop who had been checking houses for squatters and looters picked it up and said, ‘They’ve all gone. This is the police.’

‘Are they all right?’ asked the voice at the other end.

‘Who knows, friend? We’ve got chaos here, a bad brush foe burning. They could be anyplace at all.’

‘Nobody’s left a forwarding address?’