“I’ll come back for you at seven thirty tonight,” Elliot says, when he drops me off at the depot twenty minutes later.

“If I’m detained, I’ll find a way to send a telegram to your shop,” I reply. “Please make sure Kat understands that I am all right.”

“If it comes to that, I will.” He tips his hat in farewell and I turn for the platform and the train that will take me to what is left of San Francisco and the life that I tried to make for myself there.

25

With the Southern Pacific train station on Townsend Street operational again, it takes less than an hour to return to San Francisco, as opposed to the hours-long trek we had to make after the quake. I step out onto streets that have been stripped bare of their burned buildings. I remember that the inferno that scorched this area south of Mission Street had swept its way north to join a second fire in those first few hours after Belinda gave birth. The worst burns we saw at the pavilion came from the blaze that consumed these neighborhoods. There is little left of these city blocks now to suggest what stood here before; I see only scraped slabs, oddly shaped lumps of charred metal, flattened piles of ash, and men and women with shovels and wagons, working to cart it all away. On a few scraped lots, lumber has been delivered and the framing of new structures has begun.

Street signs that might have told me where I am are gone now, and I have to ask in which direction I might find the neighborhoods near Russian Hill. A man in utility worker coveralls takes pity on me when I tell him I’ve come to see what is left of my house near there. He offers to take me in his wagon as far as Union Square. It is less than half the distance; I will still have a combination of a dozen blocks north and about that many west to get to the house, but I take him up on his offer. Twenty blocks isn’t so bad to walk, not when you have a purpose. He sets off at a slow pace and I notice his horse is a tired-looking creature whose ribs are showing through its flanks. The man sees me looking with compassion at the animal.

“We’ve had to work the horses too hard,” he says. “They all look like this. Some worse. It can’t be helped. There is too much to haul away.”

We travel through the ruin of the neighborhoods south of Market and arrive ten burned-out blocks later at what is left of Union Square. What had been so familiar to me only a few months before is now a foreign landscape. The Dewey Monument—a tall obelisk topped with the lithe goddess of victory to honor Admiral Dewey’s bravery in the Spanish-American War—still stands in the center of the square, but I recognize little else. At the base of the victory statue is a hastily constructed hotel in the shadow of its wounded parent, the looming but heavily damaged Hotel St. Francis. But all around that bit of makeshift new construction is dead grass and soot that spreads out on all four sides toward shells of buildings or single walls or open spaces cleared clean of what once stood there.