Southland Psyches Buffeted by Storms : Weather: Transplanted Easterners find it a touch of home, but rain makes many Angelenos uneasy, experts say.

Rain makes Tom Lange bake. A good downpour sends Lange, an associate curator at the Huntington Library, to his Pasadena kitchen, where he kneads bread, listens to Paul Butterfield records, drinks hot tea and is, he says, perfectly content.

Lange has no illusions that he is in the mainstream.

“I grew up in New Jersey,” he said in an attempt to explain why he has been known to take a day off just to revel in the glumness of a gray, wet day. He says he thinks the urge to hibernate “is completely alien to Californians.”

Cathi Helfer isn’t so sure. She knows a handful of Angelenos whose desire to keep cozy is so strong that it even extends to their pets--when rain threatens, Helfer’s West Los Angeles kennel gets more bookings as some pet owners board their animals just for the day.

“People just want their dogs to get some attention in the gloom. We call it day camp,” said Helfer, co-owner of the Camp Best Friends kennel. Southern Californians aren’t immune to the snuggling instinct, she said. They’re just too frightened of bad weather to enjoy it.

“It’s kind of scary because of all the damage that comes to people,” the Santa Monica resident said Wednesday as the skies threatened to open up once again. “For once, I’m glad I live in the flatlands.”

After six years of devastating--but reassuringly predictable--drought, Los Angeles lately has felt as if anything is possible. One day it rains. The next it feigns sunshine, only to whip up a tornado. Brace yourself for rain and the sun peeks out. Dare to remain unprepared, as recent mudslides and flooding have taught us, and you risk disaster.

Joan Didion may have been the first writer to come out and say what novelists Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain had been hinting at for decades: “Los Angeles weather,” she wrote in the late 1960s, “is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.” When it rains in Los Angeles, she observed, hills wash away, cliffs crumble and subdivisions slide toward the sea.

Psychologically speaking, however, that’s only the beginning of what rain can do. As traffic-clogged freeways become soggy parking lots, some experts say, Angelenos are forced to pause, shift into first gear and spend a rare moment contemplating their lives. Stuck in their cars in a blinding deluge, many local residents don’t like what they see.

“That’s a main side effect of the rain--people are less satisfied with L.A.,” said Barbara Cadow, an adjunct psychology professor at USC. “They start thinking, ‘Why do I live here?’ When your one-hour commute turns into three hours, you start realizing what a jungle L.A. is, how many people there are. There’s no escape, no freedom, no way to get home.”

For the record, Cadow, who grew up in Florida, wouldn’t live anywhere but Los Angeles. But she doesn’t let her love of the mountains and the ocean cloud her judgment about the impact of rain on the psyche.

While most Southern Californians know how much the parched state needs the moisture, she says, many still find rain difficult. Some, lulled by the sunny sameness of drought, have simply forgotten how to cope with atmospheric fluctuations. Others who have moved West to escape bad weather feel cheated, as if Mother Nature has broken the promise of the California Dream.

Witness one Tarzana businessman who, when asked to describe how rain affected his mood, said simply, “It makes my convertible leak.” There was, his tone implied, nothing more to say.

“People panic,” said Cadow, who noted that during one recent storm, several clients rescheduled their therapy sessions and a friend called to cancel a lunch date--even though they had planned to meet in a garage.

Jess Cook calls this phenomena “drizzle-denial.”

Cook, who works at RAND, the Santa Monica think tank, is amazed by Southern Californians’ legendary inability to drive in the rain. It fascinates him almost as much as “desert-denial,” which he defines as the predisposition of many Southland residents to ignore the climatological limitations of a semiarid plane and exercise their God-given right to plant lush lawns.

When it comes to rain-related Angst , however, David Fine, an English professor at Cal State Long Beach, thinks Angelenos contend with much more than a fear of traffic jams. An expert on Southern California fiction, he says that in the Southland’s literature--as in its everyday life--the novelty of rain makes it seem ominous, even when it isn’t.

“Rain doesn’t play a large part in the imagination of Southern Californians,” Fine said. “When we think of nature, we think of heat, we think of drought, we think of landslides and earthquakes. We don’t think in terms of the deluge too much.”

When writers do choose rainy Los Angeles settings, Fine said, the results are spooky. And that affects how we think about Los Angeles in the rain.

In Cain’s “Mildred Pierce,” the heroine’s attempts to move up in the world are foiled--metaphorically--when she encounters “the worst storm in the annals of the Los Angeles Weather Bureau.” Trapped by a flash flood on her way to the mansion-lined streets of Pasadena, Mildred is forced to abandon her car, climb a hill and stagger home to her tract home in Glendale in the middle of the night.

In books like “The Big Sleep,” meanwhile, Chandler often relied on rain to help convey “the world gone wrong--L.A. in ruins,” Fine said. Some of Fine’s students, meanwhile, evoke the rain for a more practical purpose.

“It’s the big excuse for not coming to class,” he said.

Not everybody chafes at the showers. Mark Karpman, a telephone salesman for The Network Club, a video dating service in the San Fernando Valley, said he thinks Los Angeles’ usual sunniness--while generally an asset--also robs people of the opportunity to hunker down with someone they like.

“You feel guilty for staying indoors,” said Karpman, who reports that when clients are asked to describe the elements of a romantic evening, the sound of rain on the roof gets more than occasional mention.

“Back in New York, it’s a pain,” Karpman said, admitting that he, too, feels more amorous in the rain. “Here, it’s something to take advantage of.”

With the help of one of her listeners, radio disc jockey Bonnie Grice has come to agree. Grice, who hosts KUSC-FM’s morning classical music program, has tried during recent storms to tailor her selections to the weather.

But Grice’s on-air reference to the hassles of rainy mornings prompted one listener to send a gentle reprimand.

“He said, ‘When will radio announcers stop presenting rain as something negative? It sustains us, and gives us life,’ ” Grice said.