One
Roll

On Oct. 17, 1989, a massive 6.9 magnitude earthquake, epicentered in the Santa Cruz mountains in Northern California, brought my home town and the San Francisco Bay Area to its knees. I was a commuter at the time, living in Santa Cruz and working in Silicon Valley. An earthquake that lasted 15 seconds changed that.

I never made it home that night, nor the next day. I crashed at a friend's house for a bit. Finally, I limped home on Oct. 20, grabbed my Nikon FM out of a drawer, shoved a single roll of 24-exposure film in it, short-loaded it to squeeze in an extra frame, and walked from my home to downtown Santa Cruz to see what was going on.

It was still too early to know the full extent of the damage, but the streets were full of people just like me. President George H. W. Bush arrived via helicopter to see the damage firsthand. Nobody had a cell phone because they barely existed beyond industrial and marine use. I saw very few people with cameras. We were all still shell shocked and just living it.

It changed Santa Cruz forever. Some of us never moved back home — choosing instead to chart a new course instead of trying to navigate crumbled highway roads to jobs at buildings that could barely stand.

I'm one of them. And this is that one roll of Kodak Gold 200 ASA film I shot that day, 30 years ago.