There were four million people living in San Francisco—that's four teeth."
The boys' eyes darted from teeth to hands, from pebbles and grains of sand to Edwin's fingers. They darted back through the group in ascending order, trying to comprehend such unimaginable numbers.
Finally, Edwin ventured, "That's a lot of people, Grandpa."
"Like this sand on the beach here. Each grain of sand could be a man, a woman, or a child. Yes, my boy, all these people lived here in San Francisco. And at one time, all these people came to this beach; there were more people than grains of sand. There were a lot more of them. And San Francisco was a wonderful city." Across the bay, where we camped last year, more people lived in that city far beyond Point Richmond, on the flat land and the hills, all the way to San Leandro. That great city of seven million people stretched out. Seven teeth… like that, seven million."
Once again, the boys' eyes darted up and down from Edwin's fingers to the teeth on the piece of wood.
"The world was full of people. The population in 2010 was eight billion people in the entire world; eight crab shells, yes, eight billion. It wasn't like it is today. People knew much more than we do about how to get food. And the more food, the more people. In 1800, Europe alone had 170,000 people. And then, with one grain of sand, ho-ho, a hundred years later, there were 500 million people in Europe—five grains of sand, my boy, plus this tooth too. That shows how easy it was to get food at that time, and how much more people there were. In the year 2000, there were 1.5 billion people in Europe. And it was the same in the rest of the world. Eight crab shells—yes, there were 8 billion people living in the world when the scarlet plague began.
I was a young man of 27 when the plague came, and I was living on the other side of San Francisco Bay, in Berkeley. Do you remember, Edwin, those big stone houses we saw when we came down the hills from Contra Costa? That's where I lived, in those stone houses. I was a professor of English literature.