COLUMN ONE : Freeways: the Noisy Neighbor : Cars plunge off the embankments, rocks come flying and the roar is deafening. Homeowners near the fast lanes seek refuge behind double-pane glass--and hope to escape.

All day, all night, the noise is the same: a booming, guttural roar, as thunderous as the pounding surf.

Eddie Leon lives with the racket year after year, like some laboratory mouse caught in a cruel sensory-bombardment test. But this is no test, no heinous experiment running past his tidy tract home in Downey.

This is the Santa Ana Freeway.

“I’m really (bleeped) off,” Leon, 72, nearly shouted in his yard as late-morning traffic hurtled past scarcely 30 yards away. The banging, rumbling trucks, the oily black dust and the terrifying collisions that come crashing into the freeway’s chain-link fence have exacted a toll on Leon’s embattled nervous system.

“Right now, I can barely hear,” he said, gesturing to his ears, lamenting the you-can-have-it attitude of anyone who might consider purchasing the home he has owned for 21 years. He stepped to his front windows, pointing indignantly. “Look at the putty falling out--that’s from the vibration!”

Leon is not alone in a region whose vast, forbidding latticework of freeways has redefined the landscape and stamped its own gritty texture on urban life. In only half a century, Los Angeles has spawned a freeway labyrinth of 510 miles, the busiest in the world. A few cloverleafs away, Orange County roars with 140 miles of freeway.

But as the freeways--and the region itself--have expanded, a hidden and mostly troubled subculture has emerged at the edge of the fast lane. Like villagers forced to share the jungle with King Kong, the people in the shadows of the freeway, where sound walls are years away, endure a nerve-racking place of noise, danger and inconvenience.

Imprisoned by the economic realities of jobs and a costly real estate market, they subsist by the thousands, people given to wagering on the size of wrecks, who surround themselves with double-pane windows and block walls, who follow their dreams with one hand on the aspirin bottle while the other reaches for the earplugs.

“You’re listening to the TV . . . full volume, and it’s still low,” said Alicia Noble, whose Highland Park home rests only a few feet from southbound lanes of the Pasadena Freeway.

Not only are her dogs going deaf, Noble said, but her windows keep getting broken from rocks propelled by car tires. “The window in the kitchen is shattered and I haven’t even replaced it,” she said with exasperation. “It will happen again. Somebody will hit a little rock and break the window again.”

Janet Agius, who bought a starter home near a freeway nearly three years ago, has insulated her rooms but still awakens to the roar. The din is so loud that she is embarrassed to invite guests to a back-yard barbecue. She longs for the day when she and her family can move.

“When diesels go by, if they’re on the right (CB radio) frequency, you can hear the conversation on the television,” she said. “It’s crazy. We’ll be watching TV, it’ll get all staticky, and we’ll hear the truck driver talking.

“We just laugh. What else can we do at this point?”

For even the sharpest real estate agent, selling a freeway-close home requires special aplomb. Santa Monica-based agent Carol Clarke likes to say that the drone of the road can almost mimic the sound of “waves crashing on the beach.” In more candid moments, though, she says you have to find someone willing to have noise and dust as roommates in exchange for a cut-rate price.

Psychologically, those exposed to the cacophony of nonstop traffic can suffer irritability, depression, even personality changes, according to Dr. Michael Singer, a Long Beach psychiatrist with expertise in excessive-noise cases. In some instances, marriages collapse. Men and women have trouble sleeping. They end up venting their rage on each other and their children.

“Anger and resentment . . . come bubbling out all over,” Singer said. “People will go to great lengths to sue their neighbors because of barking dogs. (But) that’s minor compared to constant freeway noise.”

In extreme situations, Singer said, prolonged exposure has even been know to trigger latent mental illness.

Ed Cullens is not such an individual. “I’m too (bleeping) old for it to have any impact on my mind,” the 72-year-old El Monte resident snorted, closing his door to the din of the San Bernardino Freeway. “Nothing has an impact on my mind any more.”

Nonetheless, Cullens talks in hardened cadences about the racket he has endured in a home his family bought in 1939, years before the freeway was built. Rush-hour is his daily reveille. It starts at 4 a.m., as rousing as any bugle.

“From then on,” Cullens said, “it’s a bastard.”

About an hour before dawn, one truck driver in particular comes through, jamming on the “jake brakes,” a set of anti-jackknifing devices that create a ratcheting noise of ear-splitting proportion. “It can raise you right out of the bed,” Cullens said.

The sound is an apparent signal to the driver’s wife, who lives nearby and hurries to meet the trucker as he pulls off the freeway, Cullens added. The routine has gone on every two or three days for 10 years--one reason Cullens has abandoned his front bedroom. But there is no thought of moving, not until someone repeals the laws of supply and demand.

“You couldn’t afford to sell this place,” Cullens said.

For thousands like him, the freeways came snaking through neighborhoods like so many concrete serpents.

During the 1950s and 1960s--the halcyon days of freeway planning--state engineers stretched their web across Los Angeles with a grand vision of unrestricted travel and utopian convenience. They sought the most logical and natural routes, taking advantage of features such as the Sepulveda and Cahuenga mountain passes to bridge downtown with the San Fernando Valley. They ran freeways past major universities, tourist attractions and beaches and linked the inner city with the airport and the harbor.

It was a vast, connect-the-dots approach, the inevitable outgrowth of urban sprawl. In some cases, the freeways preceded neighborhoods that grew up around them; in others, they cleaved populated areas like a guillotine.

Money and political clout helped to shape the labyrinth. About half the proposed freeways were never built. During stormy public hearings in the 1960s, for example, the people of Beverly Hills were able to quash a freeway project along Santa Monica Boulevard. Angry homeowners elsewhere defeated a plan to turn Pacific Coast Highway into a freeway extending from Malibu to Newport Beach.

Where freeways did go, they traversed rich and poor areas alike, though not always equally. Targeted communities were torn asunder along the poorest streets, with the state buying and removing homes in wholesale numbers, said William H. (Bill) Minter, a member of Caltrans’ route adoption section at the time.

“We’d take the worst part of the community,” Minter said. “What was left was a higher class. . . . We thought that was to the benefit of the community. But there was a criticism that we were taking the people least able to take a move and running them out. We couldn’t win.”

Homeowners adjacent to the new routes flocked to raucous hearings and demanded to know about noise. “I’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it, because the freeway is wider than a street, then there’s an area where there’s no street--(a) slope--plus, we’ll landscape it and this will absorb the noise and you won’t have a problem,’ ” Minter said.

“We believed it. It turned out not to be true.”

No, it was not true. Not only were freeways noisy, but, by most accounts, they have become increasingly so. A reduction in the speed limit--from 65 m.p.h. to 55 m.p.h.--helped, but truck traffic has escalated and more and more freeways have been scored with safety grooves, which scatter sound.

Making matters worse, the overworked California Highway Patrol has had to cut back in citing vehicles for noise violations, allowing faulty mufflers to proliferate almost unchecked, Minter said.

On top of that, particular stretches of freeway feature their own eccentric curses--the dusty shoulder that kicks up clouds of oily grit, the hospital off-ramp that sings with ambulance sirens, the unmarked curve that tests the faculties of the drunk and reckless alike.

Carson resident Walton Bunch, 67, lives near one such kink in the San Diego Freeway, a bend where careening cars and trucks sound as if “they’re going to come through the house,” he said.

Occasionally, they try. Bunch recalled a time, years ago, when a car plunged off the 10-foot-high embankment and rammed his north wall, knocking down the paneling in the living room. The driver, unhurt, “didn’t have nickel one in terms of insurance,” said Bunch, who picked up the $500 cost of stucco repair.

And then there was the time Bunch bought his teen-age children an old Ford convertible to drive to the beach. Before he could pay the registration fees, Bunch recalled, a Navy man in a borrowed car came hurtling out of the No. 4 lane, landing on the convertible’s roof.

“Totaled it,” Bunch said.

Marion Martinez, 70, can look straight up the leafy freeway embankment from the kitchen of her home in unincorporated Whittier. She remembers five occasions when vehicles have plummeted down the hill into the same stout eucalyptus tree, 10 feet from her patio.

But her concerns extend beyond mere danger. There is also the problem of dust, dust like something out of “Dune” or some other science fiction horror. Even with all the doors and windows closed, Martinez has to keep the clothes in her closet protected inside zippered plastic bags.

“It even comes through the walls,” she said.

Because her home lies below an emergency call box, Martinez endures the additional discomfort of hearing stranded motorists up on the embankment. Every so often, they come wading down through the foliage, gray figures at night passing through her yard or past her front door.

“I worry about that,” she said. “You never know who’s going to come down off there.”

Ruth Villalpando, 42, a neighbor across the street, said she once heard cries of “Help! Help! Help!” and looked out a window to see a man scrambling down the embankment. Another, up at the freeway, was pointing a gun at him.

“He said, ‘Come back here, damn it, I’m going to shoot you!’ ” the homeowner said. “I just stayed away from the window and closed the drapes. I didn’t want them to think anybody was home.”

To this day, she does not know how the drama ended.

With all the noise, the grit, the exhaust fumes, the wrecks and near-wrecks, freeways are “an environmental mess,” in the words of well-known consumer advocate David Horowitz. But Horowitz has not reached that conclusion based on abstract theory or the second-hand complaints of the hoi polloi. Fifteen years ago, he bought a home near the 405 Freeway.

Never mind that he was settling into fashionable Westwood Hills. Escrow had scarcely closed when Horowitz realized he was saddled with that old bugaboo of consumers everywhere--a lemon. “One of the most horrendous mistakes we’ve ever made,” he said of the home. “A truck would backfire and it would sound like someone was firing a howitzer into your house.”

To a man who goes on television preaching caveat emptor, the situation was especially galling. “You might say, ‘Why buy the house when you hear the sound?’ ” Horowitz said recently. “Well, when you’re buying the house, you’re not out there at different times of day listening to the sound.”

No matter. Horowitz tried to adapt. He spent close to $30,000 building a wall in his yard and installing double double-pane windows--five layers of glass in all--pretty much to no avail. Along with his neighbors, he launched a campaign to acquire a state-funded sound wall, similar to one protecting residents of Brentwood on the other side of the freeway.

By the time Horowitz moved out--and far from a freeway--seven years later, a wall finally went up, bringing Westwood into parity with the people of Brentwood.

End of story? Not quite.

Outraged Brentwood homeowners reacted as if traffic had been diverted right through the dichondra. Residents there--including rival TV newsman Hal Fishman--claimed that freeway noise was striking the Westwood wall, rebounding over the Brentwood wall and shattering the tranquillity of their manicured yards and gardens.

“They ruined everything,” said John E. Baskin, 47, a Brentwood television writer-producer who contributed money toward a lawsuit against Caltrans, seeking to have the spanking-new Westwood wall torn down.

“If you have a sound wall on both sides, it amplifies the noise,” Baskin explained, holding his hands wide apart and motioning vociferously back and forth. “It creates a tunnel that bounces the noise between the two sides and it becomes a roar.”

Ultimately, Brentwood residents dropped the lawsuit, sensing defeat. But the conflict still simmers like a plugged radiator. On a recent morning, Baskin was polishing off yet another angry letter to Caltrans, and he has thrown his whole-hearted support behind the Jericho Coalition, a San Francisco organization that is out to bring sound walls everywhere tumbling down.

Of all the concerns facing freeway dwellers, sound wall issues are perhaps the most volatile. Sound walls are the one variable that government can control--the one imperfect defense against the roaring beast. Nearly every member of the tormented freeway subculture falls into one of two distinct camps--those with sound walls, and those who want them.

Since the first one was unveiled in 1969, sound walls have proliferated rapidly; they now line 112 miles of freeway in Los Angeles County alone. And, at a cost of $1.25 million a mile, more are going up every day under a statewide, $150-million construction plan.

Still, the priority list is 10 years long, and great swaths of suburbia may never get them because they fall shy of the state’s 67-decibel threshold.

“It’s a very, very, very emotional issue,” said Caltrans’ Minter, who oversees sound wall construction in Los Angeles. In that role, Minter finds himself caught up in community brouhahas far from the media spotlight. At one vocal meeting not long ago in Sherman Oaks, Minter recalled, a trial lawyer tore him apart as if he were a criminal on a witness stand.

“I figured I was doing them a favor,” Minter said, “because I had gotten them on the priority list. Then they asked when it would be built and the answer was, ‘Not in this century.’ ”

Some politicians can prove helpful in a neighborhood’s pitch for a sound wall. In Orange County, there was such a hue and cry from Anaheim residents that Councilman Irv Pickler, who also sits on a the county’s Transportation Authority board, saw to it that money was advanced for a sound wall along the Riverside Freeway.

Pickler’s push was notable because he overcame objections from Caltrans that the sound wall would only have to be torn down during widening planned later in the decade along the freeway.

The solution? The state’s first portable sound wall.

In many communities, residents spend nights and weekends drafting letters and signing petitions to demand sound walls of their own.

For years, one of them was Tami Dragovan, 33. Her tidy Lawndale home rests in the shadows of the San Diego Freeway. About 10 years ago, a sound wall began going up. It reached the point where Dragovan’s yard began--and stopped.

“The whole house shakes when the trucks go by,” she said, describing how the vibration moves figures in her curio cabinet. “We get up in the morning and they’re turned around.”

Appalled, Dragovan launched her own campaign, badgering state officials for months until they finally promised to extend the wall--in 1993. But she was not waiting around. On a recent weekend, she and her husband were moving, many miles from the nearest freeway.

“We have to get out of here,” she said. “I can’t stand the noise any more.”