DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

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.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. warned Friday that electricity rates could rise 2.5 percent in January to cover wholesale power costs pushed higher by tight natural gas supplies.

Sound familiar?

• October, 2004: electricity rates rise 4.1%
• August, 2004: electricity rates rise 5.7 - 19%

Recent hurricanes have damaged natural gas production. Presumably, demand rises with the onset of winter. Prices for natural gas are already climbing; this chart shows a 30% increase since just before Katrina. (mirror)

Because PG&E derives about 43% of its electricity from natural gas, electricity prices have to go up too.

We started with a floor-to-ceiling stack of empty wine bottles, three barrels and a dozen carboys full of wine from last year, and four huge bins of crushed grapes. The day’s agenda: bottle all the finished wine (86 cases!) and press all the new grapes (200 gallons!). Oh, and drink lots of wine — in the name of quality control, of course.

We had 20 people in three separate assembly lines. The first group managed the press: hauling buckets of crushed grapes to the press, filtering the juice, and pumping it into storage — some into oak barrels, some into glass carboys. This required some complex dance maneuvers. Once grapes had been poured into the press, the juice would run… so someone would have to hold the sieves and watch the catch basin, which would quickly fill… so someone else had to be ready to swap basins… but the full one would be needed shortly, so it would have to be emptied… so someone would have to hold a filtering screen above a plastic tub, which would quickly fill… so someone would have to pump off the juice into barrels, which would quickly fill — especially bad, because spilled juice in the cellar attracts vinegar bacteria, which could contaminate the entire winery, and nobody really wants 200 gallons of red wine vinegar, I don’t care how many salads they eat.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of hosing out of screens and tubs and wheelbarrowing off of empty grape skins.

I spent my time in the bottling group. The bottler is an ingenious device, a gravity-fed pan with three spigots. You have to suck each one to get them flowing, but so long as you don’t let them pull air, they’ll pour wine all day. Hang a bottle on each one, and the wine automatically starts to drain into it; when the bottle is full, the flow stops.

Full bottles were handed to the corker, who drove another manual device — basically a real long lever with a bolt at one end to push in the cork. Corking turned out to be nearly foolproof, although we did have one early bottle that somehow ended up with two corks in it. That may have been a ploy though (“I’ll take this defective one home with me!”).

We needed five people: one to feed bottles to the bottler, and cart away boxes; one to fill the bottles, an “expediter” to manage the passage of bottles to the corker and from there into boxes — this was me, which is why the position has a cool title — one to run the corking machine, and one to feed corks to it.

Standing in the middle of this provided a vivid education in process management. I wrote a nice review of a great book about process management last year; see The Goal. All those lessons came back immediately. There were as many opportunities for bottlenecks as there were people in this assembly line. If the bottler is fumbling to open a case of empties, or if he has nowhere to put the full bottle because the corker is behind, then the whole process stops. But optimizing a single stage would only reveal the next bottleneck in line. We made that line sing, I can tell you, but not without some concentrated effort. (The fact that we were all quaffing fresh vino wasn’t helping anything.)

Seriously, though, it was really satisfying to realize that fishing corks out of a bag doubled the time it took to put a cork in the bottle. This was the system’s biggest constraint, and it dictated the throughput of the entire operation. We appointed a “cork feeder;” within two minutes the backlog of full bottles dropped to zero… providing moments of valuable free time for the expediter to refill his tasting cup.

A third crew managed labeling: another 5-7 people doing a variety of things, but somewhat slowly because the first person in the line was doing too much: sliding the little foil lids on the bottles, lifting them from the ground, then holding them inverted in boiling water. Because my team was operating so efficiently we were able to take over the first two steps of this process, speeding up the labeling operation too. Woo!

Anyway, we bottled and boxed two cases of rose, about 70 of Cab/Syrah, and about a dozen of Pinot. I didn’t do one damn thing from my to-do list today, but it was the most productive day I’ve had in six months.

See photos of the entire process in my winemaking gallery.

Let me just say for the record that A Decade of Rock and Roll is a great classic rock album. I’m not ashamed to admit that I used to be a big fan of REO Speedwagon. On the other hand, I own two CDs from Marillion, which maybe ought to tell me something.

The Decade album, as we call it, contains a live version of the arena-rock classic, Ridin’ the Storm Out. Kevin Cronin’s introduction belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or maybe the Camp Hall of Fame (right next to his Gloria Vanderbilt jeans):

My friends, I’ve got time for one last story for you before we have to leave tonight. You see, if you’ve ever been in the Rocky Mountains after the wind comes up and the sun goes down, you can find yourselves in a whole lot of trouble, people. But what you’ve got to do is keep yourselves together, keep everybody warm, and always remember… to keep riding the storm out people! Come on with us one more time!

OK, you can put your Bics down now. Believe me, I understand.

Anyway, I was hiking in the Rockies a couple months ago when the sky went from gorgeous to ominous to dangerous in the space of 10 minutes. When the rain started to fall (sideways), everyone in my group was fumbling for emergency ponchos — those collapsible Hefty trashbag things that fit in a pocket. They’re hard to manage when the wind is tearing them from your hands. We were an hour’s hike from cover (trees don’t count) and had no alternative.

I was wearing a waterproof jacket already, so I had time to shoot a few pictures of my unfortunate hiking companions. The images don’t capture the stress of the moment. I mean, nobody really thought we were about to die, but lightning likes hikers. Especially wet ones. I thought my pictures might help the rescue team identify our smoking remains.

We zipped up and marched through the rain, promptly got separated, missed a turn, backtracked, sent out scouts, waited, courted death, and finally, once regrouped, started busting ass down the mountain. Which is a pity, because this hike — part of the Bierstadt Lake trail — comes down into a valley through a series of switchbacks. The views would be incredible, assuming the sky isn’t dark gray and you’re not running for your life.

Raphael thought this was a gas. Running is fun. Actually, to an 8-month old, just about everything is fun. Apparently being rained on is fun, because he kept poking his face out of my jacket, blinking away the raindrops and grinning up at the sky as if to say, “bring it on!” I guess that’s as good a reaction as any — certainly better than mine, which could be summed up as “please, not today!”

I guess that’s part of fatherhood. I thought I was pretty used to the idea of my own mortality after having ridden a motorcycle for 10 years. My 40-mile commute was an hourlong meditation on death, interspersed with cursing.

Needless to say, we survived the weather and lived to tell the tale, even dress it up a bit for dramatic effect. (You didn’t think I was really afraid of a little rain, did you? Wait, don’t answer that.)

And now for a moment of total nostalgia overload: apparently REO is co-headlining a show with Styx tomorrow night. Tomorrow night! Anybody want to fly me to Clearwater for the evening? Or at least, send me a concert baseball T with the 3/4 length sleeves and the vinyl band logo on the front. I can get my hair feathered in no time.

As seen from the deck.