In Landers, Temblors Are Talk of the Town

The same earthquake that put this desert outback town on the map almost shook it off the face of the earth.

Flood, fire, earthquake--on Sunday, Landers had it all.

The magnitude 7.4 temblor centered nearby made a hash of the town’s few roads, crumpled a 250,000-gallon water tank and spilled a two-mile river out across the desert floor, knocked houses and trailers off their underpinnings, roughed up the new schoolhouse, ruptured propane tanks and set some homes afire.

At the Halliday Mini-Mart--the only store on a main drag that hasn’t got much more than a post office and a Moose lodge--folks were making the best of it, chewing the fat between the aftershocks that came about every 10 minutes, good-naturedly queuing up 20 deep for ice, sodas, beer and food.

The power was off early Sunday and, in the stuffy heat, clerks rummaged through goods that had fallen off the shelves and items that sat, growing warmer by the minute, in the useless refrigerator. Clerk Judy Reil handed out free cans of soda to reporters and others. “We’re used to the desert, you guys aren’t.”

As he waited in line, Robert Woodall, 50, said: “I don’t ever want to go through that again. I’m shaking all over.”

“Aw, it wasn’t so bad,” guffawed Ed Finch, 44. “My wife was kind of climbing the walls but I thought it was kind of exciting. I’m ready to do it all over again.”

“Well, we sure beat those fellas up north,” Woodall said. “They only had a 6.9. We had a 7.4.”

Finch grinned. “You know, as long as you can walk and talk and breathe, it’s OK. And we sure put Landers on the map.”

Most people in Landers seem to like the place because it barely is on the map--a hardscrabble town of retirees and weekenders, working folks and refugees from the cities “down below,” isolated in Homestead Valley between a vast Marine Corps training area and Ruby Mountain, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles. “Where the hell is Landers?” the bumper stickers read, with good reason.

The closest restaurants are way down on California 247, the biggest businesses are Gubler’s Orchids and Desert Septic Systems. The mobile homes and wood-frame and stucco houses are set well apart; the desert comes right up to the doorsteps.

“Landers is a great little community,” said Galaxy Motel owner Jan Blevins--but not as little as when she moved out here in 1985, when there were 750 people.

“There’s over 10,000 (in the Homestead Valley area) now. The air, as you can see, is clean,” Blevins said. “I worked at Hughes Aircraft at Newport Beach for 11 years and left a wonderful job, great pay, benefits, but I would not go back for anything.”

The air wasn’t quite so clean Sunday because of the dust stirred up by the temblors. And in the Galaxy’s eight rooms and the Blevinses’ own residence, almost everything danced out of the cupboards and onto floors. She stepped gingerly around the mess, taking Polaroid pictures of spilled food, glassware, pots and hanging plants. The electricity was off, the phone came and went, and the toilet lids “look like they’ve been picked up and thrown.”

For once, the real thing looked like a movie earthquake. Cracks threaded out across the tile-hard desert floor, among the Joshua trees that were lashed like willows by the quakes. On California 247 and Reche Road and Linn Road, the ground truly did open up, making this remote town even more inaccessible.

Roads snapped into pieces like taffy on a cold day. Stephen Hearn, president of the Landers Area Chamber of Commerce, got his car stuck in a crevice and neighbors had to help pull it out.

Linn Road runs in front of the Salyerses’ house, and the home where they have lived for 30 years was rooted up by the same force that buckled the road.

“It looks like a couple of guys went through here with tractors and plows,” said Robert Salyers, 71. The ripple yanked a chain-link fence 15 feet off its moorings and passed under one corner of the house. Plaster and stucco cracked, windows shattered, and one wall moved about two inches.

The yellow sign in their front window, put up by safety inspectors, warned “Limited Entry, Owners May Enter at Own Risk to Remove Property.”

Rosalia Salyers, 68, was lifting an 1822 vintage mirror off the wall for safekeeping. Her beautiful china closet had already smashed face-down on the floor with its contents, old crystal and fragile china, in smithereens beneath. She didn’t have the heart to look.

Farther down Linn Road, up a small dirt lane, is a turn-of-the-century house built from huge stones taken from Goat Mountain. It belongs to a weekender and neighbor William Johnson went over to check on it. Both sides had collapsed and Johnson could see right through it.

Johnson’s home still stood, but the inside looked like it had been trashed in a “Terminator” movie. The oven was thrown into the middle of the kitchen. And Johnson, 29, a driver of a cement truck who had been up and out early Sunday, had to crawl through a window and over the fallen refrigerator to get back inside; the washer and dryer had danced over and blocked the back door.

Just as he was cleaning up after the first quake, the second one hit, “and everything we’d put up fell back on the floor.

“I’m just cleaning up all the mess in the kitchen and I’m going to pack my clothes and get out,” he said, joining his wife and two daughters visiting family in Riverside. He picked up a wine cooler. “About three or four more wine coolers and I’ll be OK.”

Otho Elmer’s nearly finished house had to be “right on the fault,” the building inspector told him, judging from the six-inch-wide crack through the concrete slab floor. “I’ve got the Grand Canyon running right through the middle of my house,” he moaned.

Landers was founded in 1950, when Newlin Landers and two fellow flying enthusiasts--named Reche and Belfield--flew out from Los Angeles and liked the looks of the place. Local lore holds that “they flipped a coin on who they would name the town after, and Landers won,” said Annamarie Ferguson. Reche and Belfield got streets named after them. Landers’ widow, Vernette, 81, still lives on Landers Lane and sponsors the Brownie Troop.

Folks who live this far out usually relish roughing it. John Etter is a volunteer fire captain at Homestead Valley Fire Station. His parents have a ranch nearby, and he came back up about eight years ago when he got tired of Orange County. Landers “is a laid-back community. There’s not a whole lot that goes on up here most of the time.”

The locals do brag of numerous UFO sightings, of the white “integratron” dome that concentrates psychic energy and is supposed to act like a fountain of youth for certain people.

The last time Landers made the big-city papers was in 1979, when clairvoyants and healers showed up for a three-day psychic fair. The leader, Bishop Bea Winsor, told the crowd with perhaps more foresight than she knew, “This place is alive with vibrations.”