I pay the clerk for mother's birthday card, and I notice the digital clock on the wall behind her shows the time, five o'clock, the day of the week, T for Tuesday, and the date, 10/17. She gives me the change and the card in a flat brown paper bag only slightly larger than the card itself.

Once out the door, I stop on the sidewalk. There aren't too many people on the street; I'll bet they're all home in front of their televisions watching that silly baseball game. I turn and head toward the corner and almost turn right to go to my car, when suddenly I remember I've got to get a gift for the surprise birthday party Cass is having for Dan this Friday.

Instead of going right on Lincoln Street, I cross it and head for Lily Wong's. I should be able to find a good gag gift there. Halloween is only two weeks away, and I'll bet they've got just the thing. As I'm about to enter the store, the sidewalk under me starts shaking. It's an earthquake, so I'll just stand here and wait for it to stop before I go inside. Holy shit, it's just getting stronger! This's a big one! The big trees are falling into the street and on top of parked cars. The little ones are waving back and forth. Glass is shattering onto the sidewalks.

I run out to the middle of Pacific Avenue where Lincoln runs into it. I'm just trying to get out of the way of falling objects. Things are still shaking, and there's this low roar, punctuated by a groaning and booming sound. It feels like a war zone. I'm watching the destruction of downtown. The Hihn Building's brick wall is collapsing onto the sidewalk and on top of the cars in the parking lane on Lincoln Street. That's the building I just came out of. It's a good thing I didn't make that right turn. I'd be buried under that pile right now. Lily's plate glass windows are rippling and shattering. People are running in all directions. I can't seem to move except to keep my balance. This is like the set of a disaster movie, only here we don't have a director to call out, "Cut," and make it all stop.

The brick façades of buildings are falling onto the sidewalks. Windows are blowing out of store fronts all the way down to Ford's. But it's all disappearing into a cloud of red dust. I can't see past a foot in front of me. This is a major earthquake, and it's still going, but I can feel it subsiding, and as it does, I get my legs back, and in the midst of the chaos, I start walking, dazed, through a red cloud of dust down the middle of Lincoln Street to the parking lot behind the S. T. A. R. T. Clinic fitness center. There sits my blue Acura, all shiny and, so it seems, unphased by the quake. It's a good thing I didn't take that parking place I saw on the Mall. The car would've been crushed.

I get in, and I'm so dazed and shocked that all I can do is sit there and try to gather my wits. There's a light film of red dust covering the Acura. When I finally get my wits back about me, I drive out of the parking lot and head down Lincoln to Center and take a left. As I'm passing the parking lot on the left just past Calvary Episcopal Church, I see Dan Mc Cord walking through it heading toward the Mall. I wonder where the hell he thinks he's going. He doesn't want to see where I've just come from, but it looks like that's where he's headed.

I only go a couple of blocks down Center, and traffic comes to a standstill. I can see a column of black smoke rising in the sky above the Louden Nelson Center in the direction of my neighborhood. Now I'm scared. Fortunately, George is out of town for the week, so I know he's safely out of the house, but what will we do if it's jumped off the foundation, or worse, if it's the one that's on fire? I just can't even think about it.

The power is out, and the traffic lights aren't working. It takes me more than five minutes to go the one block to the corner of Laurel and Center. From there I can see that the fire's somewhere around Myrtle Street. I breathe a little easier knowing it's not our house. It takes me another five to ten minutes to make my turn on Blackburn.

I can see immediately that my house is in fairly decent condition. It's still on its foundation, and the porch roof hasn't collapsed like the one I saw back on Center Street, but one of the rain gutters has come loose at one end and has fallen to the ground. If that's the worst that happened to me, I can consider myself lucky. Driving home I must have passed at least five houses that jumped off their foundations.

I pull the car into the driveway and go into the house and have a look around. The cupboards are all open and empty, their contents scattered and broken on the floor. There's a big mess on the kitchen floor. The refrigerator opened and spilled its contents, and there's a mixture of orange juice, milk and a broken glass bottle of barbecue sauce. My Navajo pottery that was on one the shelves in the bookcase is just a pile of shards on the living room floor. Darn! A couple of those pots were old and rare.

I leave everything as it is and go outside to the gas meter, but when I get there, I don't have a wrench, so I go out to the garage and get a crescent wrench from the tool box. I turn the shut off valve from a vertical to a horizontal position. Then I go into the service porch where the hot water tank is located. I get down on my hands and knees and look at the pilot light. It's still on but getting dimmer. Within seconds it flickers its last and goes out. Next I shut off the water main and the main breaker in the electrical box on the side of the house.

It sure is quiet since the quake. The only sound I hear is the eerie whine of distant sirens; otherwise, silence pervades and darkness begins to descend on a crippled and devastated town.

I go back into the house. I want to get the messes cleaned up before it gets too dark. I also need to check out my flashlights to make sure the batteries are still good. I think I've got some candles in the drawer in the kitchen. I walk back to the service porch and get the mop and bucket. Before I start on the kitchen, I go back to the bathroom and start mopping up the water that spilled out of the toilet. I can use that water and the water that's still in the toilet and tank to mop up in the kitchen.

When I finish all the mopping, I move on to the living room. I try to save the pieces of broken pottery. I might be able to glue a couple of these pots back together. I put the pieces carefully down on my desk in the study, after making room among the jumble of books from the bookcase just above it. All the living room needs is to be picked up. Both lamps are on the floor, and all my knick knacks fell from the mantel. One of my unicorns shattered on the brick hearth. Everything else landed on the carpet. The study and bedrooms only take a couple minutes to pick up. By the time I finish, I'm working by candle light. I bet George is trying to get through on the phone.

Since all I can do now is twiddle my thumbs in the dark, I decide to go out into the neighborhood, see how the neighbors are doing. Up the street at Smith's house, a group of people is gathered on the front lawn around the bright glare of a Coleman lantern. The Chávez and Tyler houses are both sitting on the ground about six feet from their foundations. I don't see them in the group at Smith's. It's only the Smiths, the Roches, the Charbonneaus and all of their kids.

"How'd you make out, Richard?" Jim Roche asks as I approach the group.

"We were lucky. There doesn't seem to be any structural damage, but I had some broken dishes and my gutter fell down. There's a small crack in my chimney, but I think it's all right. How about you?"

"Pretty much the same. Nothing major. Not like poor old Dick Tyler there. They're go'n'a stay overnight with his brother-in-law on the west side. Said they were go'n'a come back tomorrow and clear out their stuff. You can see their house is a waste."

"How about the Chávezes?"

"They rented a motel room. They'll probably be back around tomorrow, too."

"We're all pretty lucky here," Jeff Smith says.

His five-year-old daughter is clinging to his leg. You can see the quake really shook her up, and everybody else in this group, as evidenced by a vacant, scared look in their eyes. Someone else approaches. When he gets close enough to the group, I can see it's Shawn from around the corner on Neary Street.

"Everybody here turn their gas off?" He asks.

Our responses are quiet, random mumbles, and then as if on cue, we all look to the east where the column of smoke, like a gray ghost in relief against the dark sky, is still rising. We all know, though none of us has to say it out loud that that fire was caused by a broken gas main, which was caused by the quake. Shawn moves off up the street to warn more neighbors to turn off their gas mains.

I stay with this group until eight-thirty, and then I go back home and get ready for bed. I'm really not doing much here, and I'm exhausted. The enormity of what happened to us today is beginning to sink in. All of a sudden I start to wonder if anybody died. Are looters over on the mall ripping off the stores? I hope they got it secured so none of that is going on. I guess I won't have to go to work tomorrow. Who knows how long the power'll be out?

Back at the house, I turn on my portable transistor radio to see if I can find out anything. Most of the stations are talking about the Bay Area. Nobody seems to know much about Santa Cruz. They're saying it was a six point five on the Richter scale, but I'd bet it was stronger than that. Just as I'm about to turn it off and turn in for the night, the announcer says they think five people died in collapsed buildings on Pacific Avenue. Now that's pretty scary. I wonder if any of them were near where I was.

"It is believed that three people in Ford's department store were crushed when the wall of the adjoining building collapsed into Ford's roof," the announcer says.

I was only a half block from there. I turn the radio off, blow out the candles, and step back out into the silence of the front porch and listen to the dark hush. Sirens continue to pierce the soundless night. I go back into the house and straight to my bed. I fall asleep as soon as I get under the covers.