I thank the man who gave me the ride and I start north up Powell, a street I know. I pass men of all ages laboring to clear away debris or lay new cable-car track. I know that at first, men were pressed into service because there was so much work to be done. In the early weeks after the fires, any able-bodied man still in the city was told he would assist in the cleanup efforts or leave. Only those with special tags reading do not press had been able to escape the call to help, and these were only doctors and others whose special abilities had been needed elsewhere. I’d wager most of these workers are now getting paid for their efforts; they are heartily laboring at the task and dressed appropriately for the work.

I turn on California Street to head west again, and I pass signs for food distribution tents and announcements for the locations of community kitchens that have been set up. I walk past one such place with long tables where soot-covered workers and mothers with little children and even men in suits are seated and eating a meal. I’d read earlier in the Chronicle—which is using the Oakland Enquirer’s printing presses—that the city has been divided into sections for relief supplies, and each one is run by a chairman aided by an army officer. Within the sections are numbered food stations distributing supplies that have been sent from everywhere in the country and that are guarded by armed military so that nothing can be stolen and then black-marketed. A few automobiles rumble past me, all of them being driven by uniformed soldiers—apparently privately owned vehicles are still much under the command of the military. Most of the traffic in the street is comprised of wagons being pulled by thin, overburdened horses.

Some folks walking the streets along with me seem to be there only to view the grim austerity of this once golden city. I can tell by their clothes and manner that they’ve come from Oakland or some other place to sightsee. There are even vendors on the street selling these people trinkets pulled from the ashes as souvenirs.

I don’t understand the desire to view this cataclysmic destruction or to carry home a memento of it. I suppose some people simply need to see what could have happened to them but didn’t, and to have a visual reminder of it.

Eight blocks later when I at last turn to start up Polk, the immediate view up the street is an incline of alternating flatness and scattered stalwart chimneys. It is like a desert landscape lacking any hue or definition except for scattered cacti made of brick that are reaching for the sky with wounded arms. Houses and buildings that were constructed of brick and stone are the exception. Some of these still stand, but they are hollowed out, as though the home or building had been begun but then never completed. Off in the distance on the top of Russian Hill I see a small clutch of houses that somehow escaped the flames. They stand as if to remind everyone who looks at them of all the beautiful homes that stood on these streets.