HOME PORT : At the Edge of the Pacific Rim, the Harbors of Los Angeles and Long Beach Are the Very Models of Modern Major Ports

The landscape is of such heroic ugliness that its ugliness must be embraced. Frontage roads gouge its face like knife wounds, and chain-link fences zigzag beside them like stitches.

Smokestacks cough plumes of thick, white vapor into skies that glow in the night with the ghostly incandescence of hundreds of lights hung from towering cranes. But this is the ugliness of vitality, not of death.

Ships enter the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach from everywhere--Greece, South Korea, the British Isles, Singapore, Central America--some bearing cargoes much like those carried by Venetian trading vessels 1,000 years earlier: oranges, salt, spices, lumber, spirits. But today there are also microchips, newsprint, tires, blasting powder, chemicals that could generate toxic clouds.

Truck containers, hundreds of them stacked like building blocks, wait to be filled or delivered. Heaps of coal glisten in the sunlight. And in a never-ending shell game, played with a variety of containers--in shapes of pyramids, cones, or domes--workers scatter loads and form them into a Martian skyline resembling something from an old Flash Gordon movie.

As tugboats drag in freighters, like the carcasses of felled animals, three football fields long and 12 stories tall, the ports’ teams of longshoremen swarm in to pick them clean. Cranes, high as buildings, reach down again and again to pluck out loads, whisking them through the air and onto flatbed trucks. Stevedores with forklifts guide the pallet cages to their landing. The filled trains snake away.

Seagulls provide a sense of scale. As they circle the hulking towers, a daub of cloud-gray against the massive crush of blue steel, their perishable softness seems somehow absurd.

There’s an ugly poetry about it all, but behind that is big business. With the trade boom in Asia, the once somnolent L.A. port has become the nation’s busiest, handling 1.44 million cargo containers in 1989, contrasted with 1.2 million in New York. Long Beach ranked third with 1.17 million. And despite the worries of local residents, officials are planning to spend nearly $5 billion to expand the two harbors, adding landfill to Terminal Island and dredging for deeper channels.

Most ships will stop here for only a few hours--sailing is no longer so romantic a way to see the world. A ship’s crew has little to look forward to in the way of shore leave. Some will go to the small building that houses the International Seafarers Center, crowding around its three telephone booths and, in a gaggle of languages, receive the news that drifts to them irregularly: family deaths, wives giving birth to children who won’t be seen until their second birthday, the marriages of brothers and sisters. Letters tacked to a bulletin board await pickup.

Though women have begun to make inroads into the tough-talking fraternity of longshoremen, it’s still largely a storm front of masculinity, one that tends to both elevate and disparage women.

Sailors who may see the center’s manager, Lottie Seabren, only once a year call her “Grandma.” And her presence at the dinner table aboard ships is prized.

Lust has not disappeared from the waterfront. At the center, Seabren tells of how a handsome Greek sailor was in tears while talking to his wife. Then, when he hung up the phone, he asked Seabren to find him a prostitute.

Pamela Western, owner of the Pegasus Restaurant in Long Beach where many longshoremen while away their off-duty hours, is known as “Mom.” At the Pegasus, the waitresses wear slinky lingerie while pouring coffee at 7 a.m. “Mom” disapproved of the tradition, begun by the previous owners, but neither patrons nor employees wanted to change it. The waitresses insist that they’re treated with respect, and the regulars won’t tolerate so much as a lewd remark from a newcomer.

As the low flat tone of a foghorn fills the air, the men drain their coffee cups and return to the docks. From the camaraderie of the longshoremen to the solitude of sailors whose days are measured in cigarettes and meals, the ancient rituals of commerce go on. Along the waterfront, gulls hover over the masses of steel. And beyond the breakwaters and the Queen’s Gate, obscured in sea mist, an endless line of ships awaits entry to the port.