When the shaking stopped I turned around and saw Chuck, who sits behind me, crawling out from under his desk.

First words out of my mouth: “Looks like we’re going into Page One.” Not that anybody had to be told. The quake rattled the newsroom long enough and hard enough to send our news-detection meters into the red. At first we had no idea how bad things were: we could’ve been just down the road from a minor earthquake, or a hundred miles from one that flattened a small city.

Fortunately, it was the former: a magnitude 5.6 quake on the Calaveras Fault, within a mile of where we used to live in the hills east of town.

Nobody in the newsroom was hurt, but somebody could’ve been: A TV mounted on a high shelf tumbled to the floor with a crash. A water pipe sprang a leak near the business desk and maintenance people had to be called in. Somebody said the pressroom was the safest place to be because the entire press is on rollers. Don’t know if that was any comfort to the guys installing plates three stories up in the beast when it came to life for about 30 seconds.

The rumbling topped just after 8 p.m. and our first-edition deadline was around 11. Reports from the field started pouring into the newsroom e-mail system and everybody with a notepad and writing utensil started sending bits and pieces of the story. This was my favorite, from Food Editor Julie Kaufmann, who was at a middle school band concert:

At Spangenberg Auditorium in Palo Alto, the Jordan Middle School Symphonic Band kept right on playing “Estampie” by W. Francis McBeth when the earthquake struck in the middle of a concert.

“They didn’t tell us to stop,” said clarinetist Zoe Greene, 13, with a shrug.

“I knew the lights wouldn’t fall because of the safety cords, but I was worried about the curtain” said Chloe Koseff, another 13-year-old clarinet player whose knowledge of stage lighting safety procedures comes from her role as stage manager for the school’s theater productions.

Band conductor Vivian Boudreaux-Mikasa kept the group right on tempo during the shaking. “At first I thought it was the wind blowing outside,” she said. “If it had gone on any longer, I would have told them to duck and cover.”

Had the quake struck half an hour later, the music would have been more appropriate: John Higgins’ “Habitat (Visions of a Fragile Planet)”.

Nice touch there. (More of the Merc’s coverage here.)

Putting the story into words was challenge enough; finding pictures was another matter altogether. The quake happened after dark, so there wouldn’t be much damage within camera range. But in one of those crazy coincidences that happen only to photojournalists (I worked with a guy in Tampa who had a car crash into a travel trailer right in his viewfinder as he was shooting a picture for a story about a dangerous intersection), Richard Koci Hernandez, one of our top shooters, was interviewing a bunch of people in Willow Glen when the rumbling started. Instinctively, he started taking pictures, one of which showed a woman huddling under a sturdy table. When it was over, everybody dashed out of the house and he came to the paper with the lead photo for Page One.

My shift was up at 10 p.m. and by then the newsroom had everything pretty much under control and my prime duty — staying out out everybody’s way and attending to some non-quake-related pages — was pretty much done. I left them to their labors. If it’d been the Big One, however, I’d probably still be there.

It’s a thankful fact of life that news like this unfolds so rarely … big news is almost never good news, and we’d find nits to pick no matter how good the news is (I can see the headline: “Defense workers rue Second Coming”).

What keeps us doing it night after night, wading through story after story of lost dogs, inept public officials, this week’s scientific breakthroughs disproving last week’s breakthroughs? I can’t speak for everybody else; all I know is that the visceral rush of chasing the story after Real News happens would be declared illegal if the Drug Czar got wind of it.

On Thursday evening, it seemed impossible.

Twelve hours later, it seemed inevitable.

As Friday morning’s sun cleared the hillside and warmed our campsite, I looked to the 14,252-foot summit of White Mountain, set two days of doubts aside and asked myself a simple question: “how long could it possibly take to hike a mile and a half?”

Discovering the answer was one of the most remarkable experiences in my life.

I’ve always been the doubting type, and not because my formal name is Thomas. I fancy myself a skeptic, a rationalist, a realist. Two decades of writing headlines for a living have convinced me that the only thing exceeding the human capacity for self-delusion is our tendency to allow those delusions to cause massive calamities. I’m happier not expecting much from our species.

I know about the power of positive thinking and all that, but I also know that if something appears in my mind to be just plain impossible, it probably is.

And yet, there’s the example of 4WheelBob, the wheelchair hiker who not only did something that to my mind was transparently impossible, but got me believing it was possible, too. A month later I’m still marveling at the turnaround.

On that Friday morning of our White Mountain adventure, Bob’s bull-headed determination had drained all credibility from my skeptical outlook. The reality on the ground, as they say, obliged me to stop dwelling on how it couldn’t be done and start thinking about how it could. And that’s how Bob and I were finally of the same mind: We’ve got all day to reach the top, we concluded, and besides, how long could those last few turns of gravel road take?

Of course it would be the most most grueling day of the whole outing, a 10 hour, 45 minute marathon that obliged Bob three times to crawl up the mountain on this hands and butt when the trail got so steep and rocky that his wheelchair couldn’t get traction.

I hiked to the summit a few hours before Bob got there. I kicked back, soaked up the view and even congratulated myself: it was, after all, my first Fourteener. Most of the trail to the top is visible from the summit, and every time I looked down to see if Bob was still coming, he was still coming. Inches at a time, the rocks constantly tangling those little wheels in the front of his chair, him popping little wheelies to rise over them and push up the trail a few more inches. Painfully, excruciatingly slow going.

I think I was almost as happy as Bob was when he got to the top.

Thing is, my estimates of the impossibility of Bob’s quest had been correct all along. The original plan was to hike in a mile or so on the first day, camp out and hike to the summit and return on the second day. On Thursday, the second day, I hiked most of the way to the summit and concluded there was no earthly way Bob was getting up and down that hill in a day. And he didn’t.

But he didn’t have to. If he camped out one more night and made it to the top in one marathon slog on Friday, he reasoned, somebody could hike back to the trailhead, fetch his SUV and drive it up to a point near the summit that he could hike back to. Fortunately, one of the guys in his support crew was willing and able (he even sacrificed the opportunity to see Bob reach the top), and that’s how the impossible goal became possible.

Bob could go only so far on brute strength alone. Mental flexibility (and friends who wanted him to succeed) got him the rest of the way.

And from here on in I suspect I’ll be much more skeptical of people’s estimates of the impossible.

I’m off on an adventure (preview here).

Melissa’s holding down the fort in San Jose — if you need to get word to me for some reason (like to give me that million dollars I’ve been patiently awaiting), you can drop her a line here.

I moved to California in 1999 with a small stake from the 401(k) at my previous job. I made just about every investing mistake on the map trying to protect that stake from the whims of Wall Street. When I finally realized I was in over my head, I parked it all in a half-dozen Vanguard mutual funds a couple years ago and let the market do its work.

The first thing I did was the worst: I put all the money into one Vanguard growth fund at one price. Which meant that not only was I hostage to whatever pain the market might inflict on that single fund, I was also hostage to a single price. As long the fund was over the $34 purchase price I was fine, but here’s the rub: In the eight years since the original transaction this fund still trades under $34.

I sold off a bunch of the fund in around 2001 or so to preserve capital. About a year later I decide that ol’ “diversify your risks” thing might be a good idea, so I divvied it up among four stock funds (a small-cap, a mid-cap, a mixed fund and the original growth fund) and two bond funds. I bought all these funds at incredible bargains because of the bear market, whose gyrations over the next couple years got me thinking I ought to try my hand at trading individual stocks, during which time I promptly squandered these bargains.

Trading stocks instructed me in a few things: 1) broker commissions are killers; and 2) it’s not for the impatient or cowardly. All I ever did was lose money.

One thing I learned from reading the blogs of active traders is that you have to have a) a system (and the discipline to stick to it): and b) an edge: something combination of insight and skill that keeps you on the profitable side of trades. If you have neither system and nor edge, you might as well toss your dollars to the breeze.

I got fed up with trading just before the bull run of 2004 that lasted up until a couple months ago. Instead of just pouring all my money back into my mutual funds at a single price, I set up an automatic investment that put bought the same dollar amount of stock each month from each fund. They call this dollar-cost averaging, and the advantage of it is obvious at times like now, when the market’s going crazy again: I buy more shares when prices are low, and fewer shares when prices are high, and I’m losing money only on the most recent purchases; all the others, bought when prices were lower, are safe (for now anyway).

In retrospect, of course, I would have made tons more money if I’d just poured all my cash back into those stock funds three years ago, but the trouble with the financial markets is it’s like trying to drive your car via the rear-view mirror. You can’t see what’s coming; all you have are the hints provided by where you’ve been.

Something else I learned: The surest way to improve your fund balance is to keep adding money to it. This is why I’ll always park at least a chunk of money in my two bond funds: they pay cash money, which gets invested in more shares of the funds. The more shares I own, the more the funds pay.

Bottom line is I can ride out the current mess without inducing an aneurysm, because I know the market won’t hit all my funds with the same force, and most of the risk is lies in the small number of shares I bought at the most recent prices; the rest are essentially safe (in the short run anyway; a protracted bear market could bite me in the fanny again, I suppose.)

When I got into the market like everybody else during the 401(k) boom of the ’90s, I had no concept of dealing with the risks. When the crash happened I had no concept of protecting my assets.

Live and learn, as they say. This spring my original 401(k) balance finally got back to where it was in 1999, and the market promptly nose-dived again. But at least my money’s spread around so I don’t have to repeat my previous errors. The fun part will be learning from the next ones (which the market will gladly provide).

This morning I realized that three of my former Mercury News colleagues are running copy desks at other papers, and they’re all advertising for openings on their desks:

• Craig runs the desk at the paper in Billings, Montana.
• Courtney runs the desk at the Palm Beach Post.
• Maggie runs the desk at the Las Vegas Sun.

I”m filing this under “good to know, just in case.”

He was playing a six-string acoustic bass guitar, and was rather good. I remember wondering why we hadn’t been told of this skill, considering all the attention that attended Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing.

He was unfailingly polite and charming, the kidder and prankster we’ve been told of. A little boy, a toddler of 2 or so, was nearby, and the president tossed a soccer ball his way. The ball hit the boy on the head, knocking him on his diapered butt. He started wailing.

Later I was bragging to somebody about going to the White House, but I didn’t mention the baby.

It’s going on several weeks since the last update — a few of you have no doubt been following along on my hiking blog, now carefully targeting the needs of Bay Area hikers. Any day now, a few Bay Area hikers will show up and start putting it to good use.

One thing I experimented with was adding Google ads to all my pages. The income was so trivial — two bucks a day if I was lucky — that I had to confront the fact that the time spent fiddling with my ad settings worked out in such a way that I was essentially paying Google to put the ads on my pages. Not a complete waste of time, but very near it.

It’s not that all my hiking and picture taking and blogging wasn’t turning into a paying proposition: When I showed all this content to the head of the features department at the paper, she promptly put me to work writing a hiking column for the entertainment section. A month’s worth of hiking columns equals a year’s worth of Google ad revenue; only one of them involves walking in the woods, so which would you choose?

The difficulties entailed in making money off online ads are stunning, and depressing: an advertiser, on average, is willing to pay is $4 for 1,000 ad impressions (an approximation of how many times an ad will be seen by an actual user). Say you’re a college-educated professional earning a good living in a place with a sane cost of living, and you make $4,000 a month. You’d need a million ad impressions a month to make the same money from ads on your blog. That’s 30,000 readers a day if you’re selling only one ad per page; sell five ads per page and you can get by with 6,000 — still a far, far cry from the 200 folks a day stopping by my hiking blog.

People do make money blogging, if they work very hard, zero in on popular topics like celebrities, porn, politics or technology and never take any days off. The market tells you the dollar value of your efforts in unsparing terms: zero if you can’t draw a crowd.

I was much happier blogging for free because I could write what I wanted, whenever I wanted, and take weeks or months off with no consequences beyond continued obscurity; I figure hey, if I was going to get rich and famous by blogging it certainly would’ve happened by now.

So, let the rest of the blogosphere fret over shaking loose a living from this. I’m in it for my own amusement and nothing more.

I’ve survived the most recent rounds of cuts. Those who were getting The Call will have gotten it by now.

The Merc will be lighter and slighter from here on in, I’m afraid, but as everybody who has experienced the Good Old Days knows, they never last.

I’m going to make Two-Heel Drive what it should’ve been all along: a blog devoted to hiking in the Bay Area. Check it out to see how things are coming along.

Actually nothing bad happened to me at all, but a wash of gloom at work has made this one of least blissful weeks in about as long as I can remember. I’m sure glad it’s Friday. What it was like:

Monday: After reading a story about the U.S. military apologizing because a bunch of young boys had been accidentally killed in an airstrike (kept in harm’s way by Afghan insurgents, some say), I read a story about a child-porn ring being run out of the UK in which unspeakable acts were performed live over the web on very young victims. Then I found out what happened to this soldier we wrote a huge series of articles about chronicling his recovery from a bomb blast that left a massive dent in the side of his skull. Something went wrong with his most recent surgery, leaving him brain dead and his family planning how to harvest his organs. Never knew the him beyond what we put in the paper, but I found myself thinking I really wanted that guy to live.

Tuesday: Word comes down that layoffs are on the way. As it turns out this would be the least-negative thing that would happen this week.

Wednesday: A co-worker well-liked by the whole newsroom dies suddenly at age 44. There’s no explanation for the cause of death, but we’ve been in the news biz long enough to know a cause of death is almost always given, with one exception.

Thursday: The newsroom is more like a funeral home; a vigil is held near the fountains outside in which co-workers praise the many qualities of our fallen colleague. The more nice things are said about him, the harder it is to reconcile the likelihood that he took his own life. Even harder to reconcile is the reality that whatever may have driven him to his grim departure, there was nothing we could’ve done because he gave no outward sign of trouble.

Friday: I’m strangely optimistic, a week like this has nowhere to go but up, right?