THE LANDERS AND BIG BEAR QUAKES : Love of the Desert Remains Unshaken

They’re a tough and resourceful breed, these people of the California desert.

They joke of eating rattlesnakes and fighting off coyotes with sticks.

Just because the strongest earthquake to hit the state in 40 years wiped out their water supply, tore up their roads, cut off their electricity and threatened to bring their isolated homes down about their ears--that doesn’t mean they’re about to quit.

“We’re desert rats. We’re gonna stay,” 31-year-old Carmen Mendoza said Monday as she watched her four young children and a nephew wolf down eggs, French toast and cinnamon buns at an emergency shelter set up at an elementary school in nearby Yucca Mesa.

“I love it here,” said Mendoza’s friend, Elizabeth Loy, 32, who had to spend the night in a tent after damage from the magnitude-7.4 quake left her home uninhabitable.

“I had a friend who, after the 6.1 quake (last April), took off that night, packed up the kids and left for Arizona,” Loy said. “She keeps wanting me to come there, but I don’t want to leave.”

“We’re survivors,” 30-year-old Adrian Campbell said, gazing out across the bleak, empty landscape as he waited in line for beer in the dusty yard outside Landers’ de facto social center and only store, the Halliday Mini-Mart.

“If you get lost out here, you’re kind of on your own,” he said. “If your car breaks down, you’re kind of on your own. If something breaks, you’ve got to fix it yourself.”

The people of the desert were drawn here by a variety of forces.

Some are middle-aged or older, couples on fixed incomes who found the big cities and their suburbs too expensive. Landers and tiny communities around it such as Flamingo Heights and Big Horn--scattered across a barren, wind-swept plateau 125 miles east of Los Angeles--were affordable, the sort of places you can still get a marginally livable cabin and a couple of acres for less than $25,000.

“It’s awful quiet and lonely,” said William Malpey, 58, who moved here from El Monte 1 1/2 years ago. “My wife doesn’t like it, but I’m retired and broke.”

Others living out here are young and simply fed up with urban life. Campbell, who says he fled “the rigmarole of L.A.--the traffic, the congestion, the gangs, the people, the crime,” is one of them.

There also are those who are a little different, who sought out a place remote enough, and private enough, to pursue dreams on their own terms. Take George Van Tassell, for example.

Van Tassell, a former test pilot, lived in a cave out here for a while, developing theories that he said enabled him to communicate with UFOs.

Eventually, Van Tassell built a large domed structure on the outskirts of Landers that looks like the kind of building designed to house a telescope. This structure, he claimed, was a sort of Fountain of Youth that would “physically rejuvenate all who enter the facility.”

Whether it worked is subject to dispute. The building still looks fine, but Van Tassell has long since died.

And there are the people who moved out here because--in all this arid emptiness--they found a special kind of beauty.

They talk about the air--how clear and sweet-smelling it is.

They talk about the wildlife--the quail and the road runners, the coyotes and the lizards, the hawks that glide for hours on the silent thermal updrafts.

They talk about the contrasts--the withering heat of the summer, the mellow sunsets of autumn, the crisp snowfalls dusting the Joshua trees in the winter and the carpets of wildflowers after the first spring rains.

“You can go up in the mountains here, if you want, and get big, beautiful rocks and bring them down,” said Marga Stopher, 69, who stopped by the tiny Landers post office to pick up her mail. “In the evening you look up and the sky is just beautiful. And the moon comes up and you can see it so much better than you can in town.”

This is the sort of place where they made a lot of Western movies--nearby Pioneer Town was the site for many films from the Gene Autry-Roy Rogers era.

Today, there are a lot more pickup trucks than horses. Most of the young men wear baseball caps instead of cowboy hats and the holsters on their belts carry buck knives and wrenches instead of six-shooters.

But the bravado is still intact.

Harold Phillips, whose sweat-streaked biceps sported a tattoo proclaiming him “Born to be Free,” talked about his recipe for rattlesnake chili as he waited in line with Campbell at the mini-mart.

“It tastes like chicken,” he said. “You gotta eat around the bones.”

Allene Payne, 46, said she and her husband cooked more conventional food on their outdoor grill when they camped out on their front lawn Monday night, but they still had to deal with wildlife.

“We used our ski poles to keep the coyotes away,” she said.

People talked a lot Monday about the earthquakes they had just been through and what they would have to do to repair the damage. But what they talked about most was the quality of their lives in the desert.

“There’s no smog,” said Tom Clemens, a retired trucking supervisor, sounding off a checklist as he stood shirtless in his front yard. “You can see the stars. There’s the solitude. There’s not that many people around, so the ones who are here tend to be more friendly.”

Charles Walton, 63, may have summed it up best.

“I’m free to do what I dang please,” he said, “without anybody bothering me.”

Times staff writer Eric Malnic wrote this story.