QUAKE DIARY : Bittersweet Boyhood Memories Sharpen the Sense of Loss in Santa Cruz

It was the place where I got my first baseball mitt. Johnny’s Bike and Sports Shop. I remember that fresh smell of leather and pounding my fist into the pocket of the glove that would carry me through so many seasons. Most boys have experienced such a moment.

I had returned to Santa Cruz, two decades later. But this was no happy homecoming. The Quake of ’89 had rattled and rolled through the mountains north of town, mercilessly bearing down on Santa Cruz and whipping it about like some tourist on an amusement park ride at the city’s seaside Boardwalk.

A notebook thrust in my back pocket, I wandered the grid of streets, agog at the tattered buildings. It was like grieving at the bedside of a sick old friend.

Johnny’s had not fared particularly well. The silent storefront had been boarded up, sheets of plywood covering windows once crowded with bikes and baseball bats. A deep, ugly scar zigzagged down from the roof line.

I couldn’t see in, but I could imagine the tumult inside--toppled shoe boxes and clothing racks littering the floor, the stuffed elk and moose heads shaken from their perches on the wall. Johnny’s stands at the entry to the Pacific Garden Mall, the four-block strip of red-tiled walkways and mom-and-pop boutiques that over the years had become the social and cultural hub of Santa Cruz.

Normally, the mall is abuzz with activity--a Bohemian bazaar of folk singers and jugglers, stoned street people and round-eyed tourists. Any day of the week, college students in Birkenstock sandals and wool sweaters would rub elbows with local residents in tweed coats or ‘60s refugees in ponchos, long hair tied by bandannas.

The mall was still now, shut off to the outside world. Chain-link fences circled the perimeter to keep the curious away from the crumbling brick walls of turn-of-the-century buildings walloped by the quake. Those tumbling bricks had already claimed several lives, including that of a 22-year-old woman caught in the collapse of the coffee shop where she worked.

But the curious still came, lured by the tragic newspaper and TV tales of death and destruction on a few familiar blocks. The mall, Johnny’s and the other stores, had become a kind of inglorious attraction in a town that has been a tourist favorite since the 1900s.

I fell in step with the rest, circling around the fortress of chain-link to tour the mall from side streets.

Memories crept forth with each crumpled building I passed. As a kid, I’d have a hamburger and shake with my parents at the Bubble Bakery or purchase a pack of gum from United Cigar. During teen-age days, I headed to the mall for my Christmas shopping or to buy the latest Doobie Brothers album at Odyssey Records. Or to just look, to watch the people. To grow up.

Relatives had told me the Cooper House--a former city courthouse made over to house a dozen shops and an alfresco restaurant--had survived the quake unscathed. It was one of many rumors that proved incorrect. Peering down one street, I caught sight of the proud old building and froze. An exterior wall had fallen away from the second floor up. One of the trademark dormers jutting out from the pitched roof had collapsed inward.

Later, I talked to the city’s mayor, Mardi Wormhoudt. She confidently predicted that the city and the mall would bounce back. Plans already were in the works to erect tents near the devastation so the merchants could continue to conduct business as the all-important Christmas shopping season nears.

Still, the mayor worried that some of the businesses, already struggling as it is, might not make it. And the buildings they leased might not survive, either. Though many of the historical structures can be saved, it will come at a price. Some of the landlords, Wormhoudt guessed, might choose to bring in the bulldozers and start from scratch.

Back in my rented car, I drove slowly past the signature Victorians that straddle the streets around the old downtown core. Most seemed to be in fine shape, but I wondered about the unseen damage--cracked foundations, shattered lath-and-plaster walls.

Down by the half-moon main beach where the Boardwalk reclines like a sleepy sunbather, I spotted the Giant Dipper, the serpentine roller coaster that has ruled the city’s shoreline for more than half a century. The massive framework of sturdy timbers remained intact. The Dipper, that heart-pumping ride I had feared so much as a child, would be around to thrill future generations.

Heading up Graham Hill Road, I passed the homes of boyhood friends. All seemed fine, much like the sturdy wood-frame house where I grew up. My parents lost a few glasses that fell from a cupboard, but that was it. Some of the fallen glasses didn’t even break.

Not everyone was so lucky. Pulling into our street, I glanced at Mrs. Olsen’s house. As a kid, one of my first jobs was gardening for this kind old woman. Now her home looked a shambles, a spray of bricks from the toppled chimney littering the shake-shingle roof. Mrs. Olsen hadn’t taken this earthquake business so well, my father informed me, but the neighbors would help.

No, not everyone was so lucky. Ten miles away, up the winding road to the Loch Lomand Reservoir, many of the rural homes amid the redwood trees had been wrenched off their foundations and spun down the hillside. In my youth, I had passed these houses time and again on the way to the reservoir with Dad for some trout fishing.

The next morning I went down to Bonny Doon Beach, a crescent of sand flowing out from towering shale cliffs seven miles north of Santa Cruz. It was raining and work crews were picking through a 20-foot-tall pile of rubble left by a landslide they believed had buried Gary West, a 41-year-old waiter.

West’s sister and her husband were there in raincoats. She hoped West had somehow managed to slip back into a sea cave before the rock slide could have caught him. I waited 90 minutes to find out.

The sheets of rain thickened, and I gave up. I learned a few hours later that the crews had discovered West’s battered body near the foot of the cliff.

That night I returned to Southern California. As I left, the work crews were busy cleaning up the mall and other sites of devastation. Civic resurrection was already well under way. But I felt hollow, for so many reasons. Even when new buildings rise, Santa Cruz would never be quite the same.