Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : SEATTLE : Californians smelled the smoke. Here, we caught the whiff of fear.

It was fashionable to look down on California. Things are a mess there, Northwesterners sniffed.

You remember the bumper stickers-- Don’t Californicate. . . .

Maybe you heard of the TV ads warning people here not to patronize such-and-such bank because their money would go, oh no, to Los Angeles.

It was easy to feel smug.

Then came 1992, and troubles piled up atop one another to the south: drought, floods, earthquakes, the aerospace recession and military cutbacks. Then the bloody detonation of civil unrest in Los Angeles.

Suddenly, maybe surprisingly, the smug faces became somber.

Northwesterners looked to California and they saw . . . a harbinger.

“There is great sensitivity to the fact that California is a trendsetter. And in this case, it’s often for the problems we will feel up here,” said Walt Crowley, artist, author, civic activist and commentator.

In recent weeks, these things have happened in Washington state:

* Highway engineers scrambled to add bracing to bridges for the inevitable “subduction” earthquake.

* Boeing Co. began large-scale layoffs.

* Military bases were under attack from, yes, the Pentagon.

* Water rationing was ordered for Seattle--the long drought had come north.

* And Seattle’s Norm Rice--like Tom Bradley to the south, a soft-spoken black mayor--went face-to-face with racial unrest.

These were hard days to be smug anywhere on the West Coast.

It seemed if you lifted up a corner of the pretty green carpet that covered the Northwest, there was a troubled foundation below.

Welcome to the land of livability--gang violence, decaying schools, selective medical care, clogged highways, middle-class sprawl, crowded housing, a deteriorating environment, uncertain jobs and shrinking public resources. Oh yes, and Ferraris and billionaires and private art collections and personal jet planes--that too.

Black and white, rich and poor, posh, gated suburbs and squalid housing projects, waterfront mansions and greasy cardboard cartons--the Northwest found its citizens worlds apart, separated only by the morning commute.

My God, it was like L.A.

Northwesterners consoled themselves. It’s not nearly as bad as in L.A., they said.

Well OK, they conceded, the most recent crime rate compiled by the FBI ranked Seattle seventh highest in the nation and Los Angeles 36th. But, hey, that was just because people in California had given up even reporting many crimes. Around Tacoma they joked about gangs moving into the community. Imagine a place--L.A.--so bad that it forces hoodlums up here in order to find a decent quality of life. Ha Ha.

Then came the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial.

And the young, alienated, enraged blacks and whites of Seattle took to the streets to yell, bash in store windows, set fires and otherwise help rattle a nation that seemed to have lost consensus on the difference between right and wrong, between guilty and innocent.

What would Los Angeles make of itself now?

What would it say?

And what would it do?

The questions tied a cold, wet overhand knot in the civic gut, the same here as there.

There was no longer, really, a dangerous “inner city” and safe suburbs. That conceit is now as forgotten as breakfast. There was no longer any place to hide. The great restless westward migration ended years ago at the Pacific Ocean and then turned north to the promised land of the Northwest.

In recent years, it had been Us up here and Them down there. Now it seemed there was just We.

Californians smelled the smoke. But up here they caught the unmistakable whiff of fear.

“Portland officials brace . . . Task of Oregon rights coalition becomes urgent . . . Spokane citizens call for reform . . . Tacoma’s taking no chances . . . Seattle recovers.” Those were the kinds of headlines that brought this region into a new fellowship of foreboding with California.

Maybe the scariest headline of the whole bloody mess came from the farthest corner of America, from Anchorage: “Nation: Anarchy Rules.”

“What do we feel here? Not estrangement, but kinship,” said Washington state Sen. Tim Erwin, a conservative Republican from Mill Creek. “It has come down to the haves and the have-nots. This is a problem for us all, and we’ve got to do something about it.”

You see, Los Angeles, it’s not just your future riding on this one.