After the earthquake, after the fire that followed, life became a matter of survival. So many had died, so much had been destroyed, that survival of the fittest became more than just a cliche. It became our life.

Peter and I were a couple of the lucky ones. The destruction and death was so random, and while we lost family and friends we were still standing when the chaos settled down. There was little left of our city; all around us were just piles of bricks and twisted metal where once tall buildings had stood. The streets had buckled leaving great gaping fissures that opened up deep into the earth.

Every day we spent our hours figuring out how to survive. We joined the groups of scavengers and banded with several others to scavenge for food once all the fresh things had finally rotted and the stench of it hovered everywhere. Today we were making our way into the former grocery district to collect what we could find.

Peter spotted it first. “Grace! Look!” He was pointing at a sign hanging crookedly off a building. It was a Whole Foods, or what was left of it. Most astonishing, though, was that the glass doors and windows seemed almost intact, which gave us hope that it had not yet been ransacked by scavengers.

“Oh my gosh. Do you think we could be this lucky?”

Our small group approached the doors, and with some brawn from the men, we managed to force open the doors. Inside, except for the smell of rotting food, the shelves were still stocked in places. We picked our way carefully through the aisles and whooped like we had discovered gold.

We huddled together after a few minutes and made a plan. Grabbing every grocery tote we could find, we divided up into smaller groups and started loading up with non-perishables. Peter and I said we would would check out the canned goods and we gingerly walked up and down the aisles making sure to only take healthy stuff that did not need to be cooked. Into our bags went canned meats, vegetables and fruits. It didn’t take long to fill up those bags since we were trying to get enough to,feed six people for as long as we could.

We were talking and actually laughing when suddenly Peter said “Uh-oh.”

“What do you mean by an uh-oh. Please. No bad thing right now. Let’s just revel in our good luck, okay?”

“Can opener?”

“Uh-oh.” He was right. I yelled at the others who were busy loading up their own bags. “Hey guys! Do we have a can opener back at the shelter?”

No one replied. We were all professionals who had lived lives that included electric can openers. So here we were with a great stash of canned foods that could be our life saver, and it appeared no one, not one of us, had a simple thing as an old fashioned can opener.

Eventually, over the next couple of days, Barry had managed to find the remains of a Dollar Store and found a manual can opener. It literally saved our lives for a couple of months before FEMA managed to get us out of the ruins and moved us all out of San Francisco. The city was gone, destroyed as it had been in 1906, but this time the decision was made not to rebuild.

Peter and I still have that can opener. I used it yesterday to open a can of black beans and as usual I remembered how sometimes it is the most mundane things that can mean the difference between life and death.