her, they were likely to be safe. The population of San Francisco was over four hundred thousand. By the end of the afternoon, they had still heard of only a few deaths. Even if four thousand people died, that was 1 percent. Nothing like four thousand people were going to die, Andrew thought, but even if they did, his mother and Mrs. Hitchens, separately, had ninety-nine-to-one odds of surviving, of returning, of having an amazing and astonishing tale to tell. “My mother,” he said, “has never believed she would be struck by lightning. She doesn’t hold out for the fourth ace or the fifty-to-one shot.” He said this as if her predilections were a guarantee that she would eventually be counted among the safe majority.
They left the ferry building late in the afternoon, and he hurried Margaret out to the western edge of the island. From there, as dusk closed in, she could see the glow of the fire far to the southwest—was it twenty miles, or not even? They watched it, though it was only a glow and did not look like a fire. Even so, they also thought they could smell the smoke and sense a lurid haze between themselves and the setting sun. As the evening progressed, the glow became visible from the roof of the Lears’ house, and they stood up there with the boys, gazing at it.
Andrew swore that he would get to the city the next day. Others had gone—Mr. Devlin, whom Mrs. Lear knew through friends in Vallejo—had gone to find his wife and child. From a distance, it seemed as if you could do just that. “Or they might have gotten out by train.” Andrew kept saying this. “That would be more efficient. We don’t know how far west the fires have run. They could be in Oakland, but they could also be in San Jose, or even Santa Cruz.” Standing on the roof of the Lears’ house, Margaret thought she heard explosions, distant rumbles, but perhaps she did not. Perhaps, since she knew that there were explosions (and many of them man-made, as they dynamited much of the city to make a firebreak), she only thought she heard them.
But every story demonstrated that really you could not go to the city and find a person, or two people, or entire families. Many stories were not only astonishing, they were wrenching and terrifying. One man had been out in the early morning, right down by the ferry building. He said that by ten o’clock Mission Street was an “inferno”—wagons left in the middle of the street burst into flames, and the flames roared and rolled overhead, as in a furnace. Hotels and boarding houses collapsed, with people inside screaming, and then burst into flames even as the rescuers were dragging people out. The hospitals themselves and the refuges had to be evacuated as the flames approached. What everyone reported as the most terrifying thing was that the rushing wind seemed to be made of flame, that the winds and the flames together seemed to be stoking themselves into a kind of whirlwind of fire.
Of course there were those, in the following days, who drew that customary analogy between the notoriously sinful ways of the people of San Francisco, most especially those denizens of the Barbary Coast, and those of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, which people always draw. And the unnumbered deaths in Chinatown were, to these people, another piece of evidence for the wrath of God. But if someone dared to express such sentiments in front of Andrew, he would roar at them, and so even those so inclined kept these feelings to themselves around him.
On April 20, with the fires still burning, Andrew did manage to get to Sausalito, but he could get no farther: every boat and ship in the bay was engaged in evacuating people from the south end of Van Ness Avenue, not in carrying anyone into the city. When he came home late on the twenty-first, he was convinced that his mother and Mrs. Hitchens were in Golden Gate Park, or at the Presidio. “Thousands there. Thousands. Who is more enterprising than my mother, after all?” He sent reassuring telegrams to his brothers, not exactly saying that he had found the two women, but implying that he shortly would—though, of course, he knew nothing, had heard nothing. The Palace Hotel? Entirely gone. But perhaps they had not stayed there. Or not gone to the opera.