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I’d been in town for about three weeks, I think. I had moved out of the Marine View boarding house and into an apartment in the Sunset District, rooming with a guy I barely knew even though we’d gone to college together. I was about two weeks into my first post-college job when the earthquake hit.

I used to ride the N-Judah train to work. It’s a surface train on the western side of the city, dipping underground at the Duboce Portal to drop me off 30 feet below Market Street, not far from the Ferry Building on the eastern edge of the City.

So, at 5:04 PM, coming home from the 8th or 9th horrible day in the office, I was underground. Only because I was still undergoing the initial indoctrination/brain-washing at my new but already dreaded job could I have dared leave the office early. (Most of my start group spent their days learning about caffeine addiction — the “Andersen Cocktail,” a packet of instant hot cocoa rehydrated with coffee, was the gateway drug at the time — while all my idle moments were occupied by wondering what I’d done wrong to end up in such a soul-sucking place. It was a lot like giving blood, except the needles went into my eye sockets.)

My train was headed west, pulling into the Civic Center station. Some folks got off. Some others got on. The doors closed. The train pulled away, shuddered, stopped. And then the lights went out.

I don’t remember anybody thinking this was terribly unusual. Muni trains were not known for their reliability. As I recall, Muni didn’t even publish a train schedule, just an interval, like “every 12 minutes,” which was harder to fail to keep than a real schedule, although they managed to fail to keep it pretty well. We all sat there in the dark train for a couple minutes, assuming it would shudder again, then continue on its way. But instead, somebody from Muni came walking down the tunnel from the station announcing “There’s been an earthquake!”

Everybody filed out of the train, walked the 30 feet down the tunnel back to the station, and climbed up the frozen escalators. It was like a school drill. Nobody had any sense of the magnitude of the earthquake, because we’d only felt a little shake. I had felt minor temblors a couple times a week since I’d arrived, so I figured this was just how they did things in California.

I remember emerging into the bright afternoon sun at Van Ness and Market Streets. This was my first hint at the chaos to come: all the streetlights were out. So were the building lights. Then I noticed that some of the office towers had broken windows. There was glass on the sidewalk.

The only thing I knew about the geography of San Francisco was that every time I tried to drive across it, I got lost in Twin Peaks, where most of the streets run in circles and from where, at the peak, you can see the place you wanted to go even if you can’t actually get there. As I looked around at the growing traffic jam I thought, I have absolutely no idea how to get home. Short of going back downstairs and following the train tracks.

I followed the crowd to the nearest bus stop, regretting for the moment that most of the busses in San Francisco were electric, and therefore out of service. An empty cab might happen by, I reasoned somewhat unreasonably. And I had no other ideas anyway.

Before too long a diesel bus approached. The crowd tensed as one — I’m getting on that bus! was the thought on everybody’s mind. The laws of physics be damned.

The bus didn’t stop. It was packed. It wouldn’t take one more body.

Apparently some of the riders needed to get off, for the bus stopped on the other side of the intersection. As soon as I saw brake lights, I ran. I’m not much of a runner, but I had adrenaline on my side. I and a few others reached the doors before they opened. We were soon pressed from behind to the point where the people getting off the bus were unable to move. Letting them off without losing one’s place in line became a physical negotiation. Finally a few of us managed to squeeze on board. I had no idea where the bus was going, but wherever it was, I was happy to be going there.

The last guy to board literally couldn’t fit. He was hanging outside the bus. He refused to let go, despite assurances from the driver that the bus couldn’t move until he did. He wasn’t belligerent, but panicked. Ultimately some other passengers had to lift him off and set him back on the sidewalk.

The bus felt like a Japanese subway. I could feel my briefcase in my hand, but I couldn’t turn my head to look at it. I couldn’t move my arm to reach a strap, but there was no need to hold on — in that crush of bodies, I was held perfectly fast by friction.

I got home an hour later, after a slow bus ride and a long walk. My apartment was intact, which, in retrospect, is too bad, because it was a dark and depressing place that might have benefitted, stylistically, from collapsing into a pile of rubble.

A small television had toppled off its perch on an upended milk crate. Some dishes broke, I think, but they weren’t mine. My roommate was sitting in his favorite chair in the dark, as if he was watching TV, which he wasn’t, of course. If he had, he’d have seen an endless stream of jump-cuts from the Cypress overpass to the Bay Bridge to the Marina, disaster A to B to C, and concluded, as had my parents, that the entire City had been destroyed and everybody in it had perished.

“Didn’t think I’d see you tonight,” he offered.

The phone was dead. Our bachelor stash of frozen pizza was a few hours from thawing into mush. We hadn’t had the foresight to buy a 6-pack of Emergency Beer. Or candles, or batteries, or really anything.

Looking north over the park, we could see the smoke from the Marina fire.

Today is the 16th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake.