PERSPECTIVES ON THE NORTHRIDGE EARTHQUAKE : Crouched Together In Common Prayer : A family, like the city, comes together as the land is shorn apart, asking for another 100 years of sunlight.

The power came on at 1:26 in the afternoon, and then we could see it: the broad slabs of the Santa Monica Freeway--not severed, but sagging massively, across a narrowed gap of overpass; 20 miles to the north, the gray cement section of Interstate 5 snapped off, trailing its twisted rebar; the frantic milling around the wreckage of a shattered apartment building out in Northridge. More than 20 dead, hundreds injured. On the television we could see it, as the country, as the world had been watching it for hours on CNN. Los Angeles, the city that only appears together as it is shorn apart.

And to us who live here, huddled in our common terror to the sound of bridges snapping, freeways rupturing--feeling the connections pulling closer, tauter, even as they are cut adrift. The bed goes leaping, now, across the wood floor in the darkness; the dog is skittering and howling, pressing close. The old house strains against the root of its foundation. Somewhere down the hall, the shattering begins; glass and cupboard doors, then heavier thumps and pounding and, suddenly in the dark, the cool shock of a cabbage rolling past my foot.

And from my tired, shipwrecked family, crouched in the pitching, fragile doorway, down on hands and knees inside the darkness, whispering to ourselves a common prayer: Come on, mother, let it out, urge it out, let out your terrible pressure, let it go and do your worst. Then let us rest and have another 100 years of sunlit peace again.

The shaking eases; slowly, we release our tender grip and then survey the sea of unlikely wreckage in the flicker of a flashlight: a slender glass lamp that survived the fall from a mantelpiece; familiar dishes, joined in heaps upon the floor. We move gingerly across a shifting tide of aftershocks, the Earth still swaying, across shattered glass and back eventually to bed. What can we do?

By dawn, things seem quite precious--a holiday! Rearranging a wave of books that block the hallway give us glimpses of words we have not seen in years; and, in a dusty closet, a morning spent sorting through old letters from a friend. The day begins to pass, so like another. Then calls from home; “No, we’re all right. No, really. Yes.”

We search for water, jug in hand. People on the street seem lost and strangely happy; a neighbor calls out across the street: “Yes, we’re OK.” And now the damage; a chimney hanging by a pipe, a line of telltale cracks creeping up a wall of bricks. The side of a building, fallen away to reveal a shelf in someone’s bedroom, hanging in the sunlight, a candle still upright.

And the wonder: How could buildings take such a thrashing and still be standing? The damage seems, in all, so little in a city still so big. And then to learn, in disbelief, the numbers: What, a measly 6.6?

Then quickly follows a second awful thought: How much is there still out there, waiting in the Big One. The One that levels blocks and buildings into rubble? The one that brings our families together for an instant, then lets the city rest, in sunlit peace another 100 years--to begin our slow departure from each other once again.