The City that Waits - 25 May 2001

One day, a week or so ago, I was nestled in for my late afternoon nap when I noticed an odd creaking of the joints.

Not my joints - they became the music of daily life years ago - but the lintel of a door, the windowsill perhaps, or somebody creeping upstairs in the corridor outside.

I was awake enough to realise then that there was no upstairs outside - I was on the top floor of my hotel.

And as for suspecting somebody creaking about in the next flat - there was nobody in residence.

Because I was in San Francisco I thought, probably a minor earthquake.

I said: "Humph" and went to sleep.

When I woke up and joined my spouse in the sitting room the first thing she said was: "Did you notice some odd creaking about an hour ago, this lampshade shivered a little.

"Maybe," she said - and we both chanted in unison - "an earthquake".

You really don't have to be particular neurotic to hear small earthquakes in San Francisco. They're so common that the natives don't notice them as such, they think somebody's creeping around upstairs.

Well sure enough next day the paper had, tucked away in a corner, a note recording at 4.35pm the previous day, an earthquake - minute enough not to be noticed by a resident, large enough to register, just, on the Richter scale.

Whenever this happens, and I should say most residents would notice it two or three times a year, whenever this happens I always think of an English friend of mine - oh, maybe 20 years ago - who had something to do with a television programme made with lip-smacking zeal by some gifted pessimist called The City that Waits for Death. Wow.

None other than, of course, San Francisco.

When that film appeared - it was an impressive, if doom laden, documentary - I did a little tapping of the brain of a Catholic priest nearby, then the most famous of American seismographers - earthquake specialists.

The general message of the television film was that San Francisco was more in line than anywhere else for the Big One, that would equal, if not surpass, the magnitude of the famous San Francisco fire of 1906. When you're in San Francisco you no more use the word earthquake than you use the outlanders' dreaded word - Frisco.

Well the reverend and learned father was most enlightening. San Francisco, he did concede, lay over, or close by, one or two of the four hazardous faults that run through California. And no doubt a big one would come again to San Francisco very soon.

What did very soon mean? - The film had practically warned people to buckle their seatbelts against a jolt tomorrow or maybe two years from then.

"Well," mused the priest, "sometime in the next 20-40 years."

However he mentioned a really big one is due sooner in quite another place.

Hawaii I guessed.

No. Connecticut.

Connecticut? The small, New England Atlantic state whose shore faces across from Long Island?

"The same," he said. He told me that there is a deep but far-reaching fault that starts up in Massachusetts and goes down through Connecticut and New York City, through New Jersey and Philadelphia and peters out somewhere, I gathered, in eastern Pennsylvania.

Because of the probability of that big one there is a monitoring station in a small town in Connecticut which registers two or three earthquakes a day. Minute of course, so minute as not to disturb the natives or make the news. But if there is to be an SOS it would come, the father said, from there.

But the creaking of a lintel was not the big news when I was in San Francisco, it was the general anxiety over the coming energy breakdown in the summer. It was not so much a city waiting for death as a city waiting for the next rolling blackout.

These interruptions of power service are promised, or threatened, for the whole state - which is half the size of Europe.

The early ones were more experimental than necessary, they were done mainly to see just how much of a city's action - work and services - would be arrested.

They came usually in, or around, midday. And the first thing that everybody outdoors noticed was the immediate slow to a crawl of traffic and the hesitancy, verging on irritation and panic, at street intersections where the lights had gone off.

One blackout in the early evening rather tickled a housewife I know - the chance of a romantic, candlelit supper. The romance was soon blasted by the coming on of the dark and the horror that hits all victims of a hurricane when they realise that failure of power means no flushing toilets.

All these rehearsals were practised in anticipation of the long summer when two thirds of the state has burning heat - daily high temperatures of anything from 86 to 115 - and most of all in the desert where many of the old or the sick could not survive without it.

The call, throughout the summer in California, the call on air conditioning everywhere will be loud and continuous. Except, I have to say, in the compact city by the sea of San Francisco, which has, more than any other spot in the United States, a micro climate of its own.

The Ice Patch, so-called, not so far out in the Pacific, dead opposite the Golden Gate, receives the prevailing west wind and draws cool air into the bay. In July and August it brings, most afternoons, a vast plume of white fog.

I don't know anyone in San Francisco, in a house or a flat - and it doesn't matter how rich they are - who has air conditioning. If they lived only two miles to the east, just over the coast range, they could hardly live without it - a weird discrepancy which explains the puzzling note of the top corner of the San Francisco Chronicle every morning, it will say "Tomorrow's high temperatures: 65 - 88" - the 65 is the city, the 88 is the valley just over the hills.

July and August are the shivery months, a discovery that leaves tourists in T-shirts silent and baffled on a peak on Nob Hill.

Midsummer is the only time that San Franciscans can enjoy and applaud Mark Twain's outrageous remark: "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco."

Well I was there last week, as some of you may have noted, because it seemed the best place to report on the case - if it ever came to federal court - of El Paso Natural Gas versus the state of California. Otherwise the papers and the tele were full of Taiwan, relations with China and President Bush's tax bill.

Back here in New York the papers are full of the president's tax bill, the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East and the never-ending problem of America's involvement, or non-involvement, with Israel and Mr Arafat.

President Bush, soon after he entered the White House, made clear one radical change in American foreign policy - not so much a change in policy as in the appearance of it.

America, by which he meant he the president, would not jump into every foreign crisis and be seen on television every evening negotiating or summiteering or talking unless his presence could guarantee some positive help.

This statement means no more than it simply says, though it was immediately picked up in some allied capitals as a sign that the United States was reverting to the old Republican isolationism of the 1920s and 30s, which, to put it simply, is rubbish.

Every administration, since the end of the Second World War, has given a resounding echo to the declarations of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, that the United States will protect the free countries of Europe from any threat to their security.

As for the Middle East, no president of either party has dreamed of going back on President Truman's backing of the new state of Israel, as America's principle ally in the Middle East.

But coming back to New York and begin rattled, even on local news bulletins, with shootings, uprisings - an unending rhythm of assault and reprisal - it's easy to see why so many Europeans assume that the United States is prejudiced in Israel's favour and they put it down to the weight of "the Jewish vote". I for one, frankly, don't know what that is.

In a nation of 285 millions there are only six million Jews and one in three of them lives in New York City.

An abusive letter writer accuses me of talking so little about the Israelis and the Palestinians and wonders - not really - if I was afraid of taking the Palestinian side.

Well first I'm not a pundit, a spouter of opinions, I'm a reporter and will try, if there are four sides to an issue, to say what each believes.

Secondly, I don't know enough about the Middle East to justify an opinion, especially after thinking of the three generations of good men and women who throughout 80 years have failed to produce any stable peace in Palestine.

As for American opinion and possible prejudice let me quote the latest dispatch of the New York Times's expert correspondent on the Middle East.

"The Israeli settlements are foolish and their continued expansion is a shameful act of colonial coercion. The inability of American Jewish leaders or United States governments to speak out against settlement expansion is a blot on all of them.

"On the other hand the core problem right now is Yasser Arafat who can't say Yes and won't say Uncle and who is justly feared of still wanting to eliminate the state of Israel. The real problem is that the Palestinians are leaderless today and that is what the United States and the United Nations and the Arab world will have to face up to."

That's as far as I can go in reporting the best American opinion from the best reporter on the subject, Mr Thomas Friedman.

As for the obscure senator from a tiny New England state, who threatens all by himself to reverse the mighty engine of the Bush presidency, hold your breath for a week: Stay tuned.

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