My husband’s interest in Bay Area architecture drew us to the undulating rows of little stucco houses in Daly City’s suburban hills. They emerged from South San Francisco’s foggy belt, some of the earliest examples of sprawling postwar American suburbia back when laws prohibited non-whites from purchasing or living in those little boxes. Today, Daly City has the highest concentration of Filipinos in the United States, with white residents making up less than twenty-five percent. Jack and I walked along Skyline Boulevard, a scenic road that runs along bluffs overlooking the sea. The houses extend far into the cliffs, the last row standing precariously on the edge. Beyond the sandstone cliff was a gorge. During the 1906 earthquake, the sandy cliffs above Mussel Rock collapsed. It took a year before waves completely cleared the debris. The active landslide, which started one hundred thousand years ago, has since spread out more than four miles into the ocean. It’s reactivated whenever there’s a strong earthquake. 

The erosion of cliffs in Daly City created a gorge the size of the Vatican. We decided to rest near the precipice—behind the off-limits danger zone. The sky was clear and the ground where we lay was covered with seaside daisies and native blackberries. Above us, a purple hang-glider hovered for a minute, then turned around and glided into the sunset. We saw other hang-gliders smoothing along the coast, landing gently on the black sand beach below. 

We had been walking for nearly half an hour, unable to find the trailhead from the cliff that led to the beach. Beyond the gorge, on the beach fifteen meters offshore was Mussel Rock. From the precipice, we could see overgrown structures, foundation remains of houses that had tumbled down. It was a wooded area, a known coyote habitat. Jack and I left the cliffs and walked back to Westline Drive. We followed the road for about a thousand meters until we reached a parking lot. Behind it was a dumpster and further ahead, a chain-link fence—the gate to the trailhead leading to that weekend’s destination—Mussel Rock. 

A ninety-year-old widower who lived in the area gave me directions to the trailhead the first time. He was a retired forester. He reminded me of Carl in Pixar’s Up—short, thick glasses, a sprightlier version. He asked if I was a geologist. I said no. I told him I read about the rock in John McPhee’s book Assembling California. I became obsessed with it. He said he collected rocks and invited me to see his collection in his backyard. It was my first time to step inside a non-Filipino household’s home in Daly City. It was exactly how I imagined it—with dainty details, mid-century modern designs: from his late wife’s tea ware display in the china cabinet, the embroidered doilies and kitchen curtains, to the framed miniature spoon collection on the pink and mint wall. 

His rock garden included a few slabs of stones planted in rows like headstones. The majority of his collection was kept in sun bleached wooden boxes sitting on weathered shelves. Some of the rocks were rare and some were common but collected from different places. The old man washed the dirt off the small rocks. I lined them up admiring their range of colors and crystal patterns, the different ways a surface—rugged, smooth, or veined—caught the light. His collection of small agates was impressive. The tiniest was a carnelian, the size of a fingernail—a smooth, translucent, deep red pebble. Some believe that these gemstones are good for your memory and mental health. I wanted to pop it into my mouth like a gumdrop. 

“Wear something warm if you’re going down to Mussel Rock,” the old man had said. A few years later, I returned to the rock with my husband. 

Jack and I stood at the water’s edge facing the three-million-year-old bedrock. It rose from the ocean, caught between the walls of a fault line. We were standing right on top of an area where the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate continue to grind against each other, the point where the San Andreas Fault intersects with the sea, the epicenter of the 1906 earthquake. I wanted to understand California, this place where my family and ancestors migrated to. I liked that I could see something primeval from under the earth, and that it was there because it seemed to have gotten away. That rock surfaced between plates and broke through rough waters, a layer of geological time caught in a place where it shouldn't be—an emblem I claimed as an immigrant writer. 

The earth has its own way of shaping our stories beneath our feet. We can picture geological time like a stack of bibingka. Imagine a stack of rice pancakes turned upright so that the striped layers are visible on top. The San Francisco Peninsula is sort of like that, a tongue of land with bands of time arranged diagonally across the surface. Except there’s something odd about the sequence. For millions of years, the ground folded like an accordion, up and down. It buckled, causing rock types from different geological periods to surface right next to each other. 

—

I was on the road in the Philippines on July 16, 1990, when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook the main island of Luzon and killed 1,621 people. Most of the casualties were in the central plains, my home province, and in Baguio City, my destination, a mountain resort town in the north. The forty-five second earthquake struck at 4:26 in the afternoon. Earlier that day I went to a small lakeside town south of Manila to break up with my boyfriend. 

I was in my early twenties; Ray was eighteen, a tall freshman nursing student. He wasn't home so I went to the town plaza where his mother ran a small eatery—a few tables and food trays on a stand. Ray’s mother always looked tired, her hair up in a loose bun. She said her son had just left for school. We were cordial to each other, reserved. She insisted that I eat before I left, which was unexpected. I sat down, a little nervous. She brought food to my table in bright little plastic bowls and filled my plate with a heaping mound of rice. She asked if there was anything else I wanted to eat. I felt awkward. She refilled my glass of water and then sat across the table. I wanted to finish my breakfast quickly but there was so much food. I wondered if she knew her son was gay. And what did she think of me? Ray had told her that we met at a regional Catholic retreat for young people. It was true. I was the peer facilitator. 

She sat in front of me while I ate, her head pensively turned to one side. I did the same thing, so we looked like we were both waiting for someone, except we were staring at the wall. I felt stupid. I wondered what she thought of her son taking the bus every weekend to see me, a ride that took the entire day. And of me doing the same thing to see her son. The answer came from a spiral notebook that she pushed gently across the table. She opened it to a page for me to read. "Please take care of my son," she said in a low voice, careful that others wouldn’t hear.

I recognized Ray’s cursive handwriting right away. Some of the sentences ran vertically, others diagonally, so unlike the neat letters Ray wrote me when we first started dating, the ones he signed with the mini heart of Jesus with a flame inside and a tiny cross in place of the aorta. The page I was reading wasn’t like that at all. The words were a thick unruly jungle of emotions. And it was my name on the page, written over and over, the pen pressed hard with lines lifted from pop songs. I love you I love you I can’t live without you. 

I was stunned. I told Ray’s mother I had to go. She looked like she was about to cry. I looked away. I said I needed to catch a bus. 

“I don’t want anything bad to happen to my son,” she said.

I became frantic. I got up, left in a hurry, and boarded a bus headed for Manila. I went straight to Ray’s nursing college and left a message through his classmate. At three in the afternoon, Ray and I met at the central terminal of the rail station. He was still in his white uniform and carrying a backpack. He probably thought I had come to pick him up so he could join me again on my trip. 

"You have to go home," I told him. "Your mother read your diary." 

He was furious. He didn't want to go home. He wanted to come with me. I said no, it’s over. Go home. I walked away and he followed me. I ran to the terminal and passed through the turnstile without looking back. I climbed the stairs to the elevated tracks and managed to board a train that was about to leave. It was packed inside. I craned my neck as the doors closed, worried that Ray was somewhere in the crowd. Maybe he was in another coach. He knew I was headed to the Grace Park bus station. Maybe I should get off at a different station and take the bus instead at the Cubao terminal. I felt sick. The plan was to take a northbound bus to my hometown, rest a bit, shower, pack, and then take another bus, a night trip that zigzagged to the mountains up north. I was going to the City of Pines to visit friends, get away from the lowland heat. 

I checked my watch as the light rail neared my stop. It was 4:20 p.m. I only had ten minutes to run to the bus stop and catch the last bus trip to my hometown. We reached my stop, an elevated, multi-level station supported by concrete beams and columns. The door opened and I stepped off the train onto the platform. The station was packed with rush-hour commuters. I squeezed and inched my way between people trying to get out and the others who couldn’t wait to board. That was when it happened—while I was looking around and watching out for Ray. 

I didn’t notice it at first. I remember seeing white flakes falling in front of my eyes. I squinted and brushed dust off my hair. I looked up and saw a cloud of dust falling from the ceiling. There was a sound like a jackhammer. Somebody pushed me from behind. I heard screams. Panic broke out. A stampede spilled out of the train. It surged and nearly lifted me off my feet until I hit the railing. It happened so fast I thought I was going to get thrown over into the streets below. Or be crushed—and I still had no idea what was going on. I was pinned against the railing, looking down at the street. The electric cables, the posts, and the buildings swayed. Fearing the sky train station would collapse, I pushed against the railing and turned towards the stairs, squeezing, and forcing my way through a mass of elbows, backs, and limbs. 

By the time I got to the street the shaking had stopped. I ran all the way to the bus station, past the trembling masses. Some sat clustered together on the sidewalk. I reached the bus station and made it just in time to get a window seat. I thought of Ray. I felt horrible. I didn’t realize I was crying until the old man next to me said it’s over, we should just pray for our loved ones. 

I slept the entire trip. I usually find it hard to sleep on long bus rides. When I woke up, the bus had stopped and the old man next to me was gone. So were many of the passengers. It was dark outside, and I could tell we were not at a rest stop. All I could see was a long stretch of red taillights on the highway, the traffic in both lanes not moving. A few people milled around cars, trucks, and buses. Many walked. When the rest of the passengers started to get off, I asked where we were and what was going on. Somebody said we were already in Nueva Ecija, the epicenter of the earthquake. 

Wait, wasn’t that in Manila? 

No, somebody said, it was worse in Cabanatuan. Buildings collapsed. Hours after the earthquake, the media descended on my home province. People got stuck on the road. I thought of my younger sister and brother, our grandmother at home, my parents abroad. 

The power was out. I grabbed my bag and joined others trying to get home on foot in the dark. The ground had split open in my ancestral hometown of Cuyapo, a rupture that stretched seventy miles from the central plains to the eastern coast. I reached home around midnight. My younger brother, my grandmother, my uncle, and the family driver were sleeping in the front yard and the driveway. Nobody wanted to go inside. The piano was still blocking the hallway. I thought of my parents. They were in the U.S. seeking medical care for my father who had been diagnosed with ALS. They had heard the news and had been trying to contact us, but all the phone lines were down. I was afraid I'd get a call from them. How could I tell them that my younger sister wasn't home? Nobody knew where she was. It took a week before my younger brother managed to track down our sister in another town. She was with her boyfriend, and they were pregnant. There were no casualties in Manila, but I never did find out what happened to Ray.

—

Seventy-four people died when a severe ice storm slammed swaths of North America in January 2007. Hundreds of thousands lost electric power. A large portion of California’s orange crops were damaged. I lived in the North Bay at the time, a daily commute across the Golden Gate Bridge. On Friday the 12th, I went to work and was told that we could get off early because of the weather. I was on the way home when I saw something that made me decide to get off the bus. I saw it from a distance, a flash of light, a glint below the Golden Gate Bridge on its south end. I stared at the light, hoping to get a better view as the bus drove on. It disappeared briefly when the bus turned around a bend. When the view reappeared, the light was gone. I couldn’t get my mind off it. I knew that Fort Point was beneath the bridge. I wrapped my scarf around my face. It would be a quick run, I assured myself. I had to catch the last bus trip home. I ran past a group of shivering Kapampangan tourists who braved the dropping temperature and followed the winding path downhill all the way to the waterfront below the bridge. 

I was drawn to the light, the prospect of giving in to something wholly enigmatic. It had been a miserable day. I just started work at the University of San Francisco Bookstore, my first job in the United States. My assignment that week was to be the greeter, and it was torture to stand by the door in that brutal weather. I felt like I wasn’t smiling enough. I wanted customers to feel comfortable asking me questions so I would have an excuse to help them inside where it was warmer. They put me there because I struggled behind the cash register. My learning curve in recognizing coin shapes and weights was hampered by debilitating anxiety. I worried I would confuse the dime with the penny. I shrank every time the supervisor stood behind me. They should just make me permanent in the stock room. I wouldn’t mind standing among the aisles of literary titles for hours. I had job interviews scheduled so I tried to focus on those. I couldn’t wait for spring. When I got off the bus and the icy wind blasted my face, it was too late to turn around. The bus had already left.

In 1853, army engineers spent a year blasting the site so they could build the fort close to the water’s edge. It sat on sand, clay, and a large block of serpentine rock. You could see it outside the fort, on a hill next to the parking lot. An exposed section of the hill looked like it had been scraped with a giant rake, light green on the surface, dark green underneath. It’s a piece of ocean crust. The ocean floor got pushed up to the surface during the subduction of continental plates. I had touched it the first time I visited the fort. It was waxy. I was always on the lookout for spaces in the city where the earth spilled its guts. 

The last visitors had left. With less than an hour of natural light, I entered the fort with my DSLR camera tucked inside my jacket, ran across the empty courtyard, and climbed the cast-iron stairs all the way to the open rooftop. The sunset was stunning. I walked towards it, almost in reverence. I could hear the bitter wind whipping up the waves below, the sea crashing against the fort’s seven-foot-thick walls. I could never visit Fort Point and not think of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Madeleine stood at the water’s edge. She dropped petals into the frigid bay, and suddenly jumped in. 

I looked up. The sky was not where it should be. Instead, there was a giant arch above me. It was built in the 1930s to save the fort. Without the arch they would have to demolish the fort to give way to the construction of the bridge. The arch saved the fort by straddling over it, paving the way to an engineering marvel. But I couldn’t see the arch either. In its place was a gigantic yellow straw mat, the size of a football field blocking the view. It was attached on all sides to the colossal steel arch above it, about 100 feet long and 30 feet wide. It caught the end of the golden hour, giving the arched tatami a sad and resplendent glow. The protective mesh ensured safety during an on-going large-scale retrofit project. It caught the sun’s light. Behind the lining were men at work. They were adding more steel and modern bolts so that the arch could move independently when the Big One comes. Foundations were deepened and anchored to bedrock. Holes were drilled and 30,000 steel rods inserted. Many of the fatalities in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake died on a collapsed section of the Bay Bridge only seven miles away. While the Golden Gate Bridge did not suffer any serious damage at the time, the destruction and fatalities of the Bay Bridge’s double-decker freeway became a catalyst for the extensive seismic retrofit that the bridge underwent in 2007. 

—

I can’t remember what I was dreaming about at three in the morning when my husband woke me up. I remember the bed moving in the dark on August 24, 2014. There was no fear. It was like slipping into another dream—my name being called, the rocking movement… My eyes and my brain tried to keep up, filling in dim shapes in the room. It was an intensity eight earthquake, considered severe, the largest since the Loma Prieta earthquake. The epicenter was at American Canyon in Napa. 

For tens of thousands of years, the indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest have survived the greatest of earthquakes, including the magnitude 9 earthquake that occurred 300 years ago. The Juan de Fuca plate got stuck as it was being subducted under the larger North American plate. It kept pushing. On the night of January 26, 1700, it released a catastrophic seismic force that ruptured the region from Northern California to southern Vancouver Island. “It’s what the land does at times,” said Robert Dennis, Chief of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation. Some people climbed into their canoes and tied themselves to treetops. Science writer Ann Finkbeiner wrote about understanding the Pacific’s earthquake through the wisdom embedded in indigenous accounts: “Build on high ground and tie your boats with long ropes. And don’t bother trying to separate the present from the past.”

—

The days after the 1990 earthquake in the Philippines lay on the floor in fragments: the numbers, the televised images of bodies being pulled from the rubble, the stories of where people were at the exact moment the earth shook. News of the devastation in the mountain resort town of Baguio City reached me. I decided to continue traveling north. 

Some of the roads were closed. I hiked when I needed to. I wasn't alone. Many braved the landslides. There were areas where an entire mountain face collapsed and buried roads. When I reached Baguio, I went to the collapsed Hyatt Hotel to help dig through the rubble. I found a children’s book in Spanish called Painted Tales. The boy who owned it and his parents were still missing. The father was a Colombian chef, and the book was written by Colombia’s national poet, Rafael Pombo. Thirty years after the earthquake, I tried to track down what happened to the boy and his family. I asked around, checked with other survivors, and searched the Internet. I learned that his parents died in the earthquake and that the little boy survived. He grew up in Switzerland. 

I also found Ray on Facebook. He left nursing and became a gym instructor. He still lives with his mother in their lakeside town south of Manila.

I am easily overcome by the largeness of life, the stillness of wide, open spaces—anything bigger than nations and older than continents to ground my displacement. At each new level of distance and scale, I had to contend with my shifting self in a world in flux. I had to be smaller and breakable to partake of the shared experience, which meant the world became a bigger, more complex story to tell. The end of human time would be read in the archives of the earth, our final story recorded in the condition of rocks without us, wrote author Antonio Iannarone in his book Depositions. We would never find the time to undo our stories; it’s all “anxious words on anxious stones.” 

I recalled the evening I spent at Fort Point beneath the bridge. The fort lay on a foundation of granite imported from China where it was cheaper despite the cost to transport it and of better quality. The most perfect example of coastal fort masonry on the west coast was built to protect the city from foreign invasion or possible attacks during the Civil War. None of that happened. Two hundred men, many of them failed unemployed miners, labored for eight years to build the fort. The fort never saw action. 

It was too cold to lie down so I ended up sitting, leaning back, propped with my arms on the floor. I tilted my head back until my neck hurt. It reminded of the first time I saw the Star Destroyer inside a movie theater in Greenhills, Manila in 1977. I was ten when Star Wars’ imperial battleship loomed on top of the screen. I couldn’t wait to see it come into full view. 

I stayed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in the ube colors of twilight. I pictured myself a stratum in geological time, the preserved bones of an immigrant resting on a medley of green ocean rock and granite from China. If continental plates along the San Andreas fault continued to move at the same rate, my remains could be found in Hollywood in 20 million years. I was looking up, too near to view the arch in its entirety. I heard passing cars above me. I could almost hear the bone-rattling force of a tune, the kind that swept you away once in a Blue Moon—You saw me standing alone/ Without a dream in my heart/ Without a love of my own.

Wilfredo Pascual’s personal essays in English and Filipino have won the Philippines’ Palanca Literary Prize multiple times. His essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and listed as Notable in the 2016 Best American Essays. More recently, his writings were selected as Finalist in the Fall 2022 Narrative Prize and the 2022 Inaugural Wolfson Press Prose Prize. The latter described Pascual’s vivid and inclusive writing as offering “the heft of lived experience”, essays that “speak to the immigrant’s suspension between competing homelands and the gay man’s sense of traumatic liminality…” Born in the Philippines in 1967, Pascual moved to Thailand in his mid-twenties where he lived for twelve years, and later to the United States where he continued working abroad for international nonprofits in Asia and Africa. While in Thailand, he traveled to the U.S. and attended writing workshops at New York University and the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley. He was also a Breadloaf Fellow for Nonfiction. A program he led with local authors and artists in Asia and Africa won the 2013 UNESCO Confucius Literacy Prize for publishing hundreds of new original children's books in local languages. In addition to Salt Hill, Pascual’s essays have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Fourth Genre, December Magazine, Queer Southeast Asia, Philippine Studies, Likhaan, Baguio Chronicle, Bicol Chronicle, Bulawan, and the Cotabato Literary Journal. He lives with his husband Jack in San Francisco. http://www.personalwilli.com/

Greeshma Chenni Veettil (b. 1988, Kerala, India) (from the series SLOPE OFF INTO, digital inkjet print) is a visual artist based in Syracuse, NY. Her work combines photography, alternative processes, text and installation in an attempt to re-contextualize the everyday details of our lived environment. She is interested in creating immersive visual experiences by transforming flat photographic prints into three-dimensional photo-sculptures. In their new spatial configurations, her images seek to draw out new responses towards recognizable mundane objects. Greeshma is currently a graduate candidate in the Art Photography department, at Syracuse University.

This essay was originally published in Salt Hill 48.