Once Again, an Island on the Land

One decade ago Los Angeles was braced for disaster. The Olympics were coming, and the wisdom of the moment was that the city’s freeways would fail under the crush of visitors. Most frightful was one particular Friday when major events were scheduled to begin at rush hour all across the basin. Black Friday, we called it, a term that will seem over the top only to those who do not understand the relationship between L.A. and freeways. Los Angeles without freeways would be like a clock without hands, or a human body without arteries. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t live. That simple.

Now as it happened, Black Friday happily turned out to be a fiction, as did any notion of a city paralyzed by sport. The freeways never flowed better than they did during the 16-day Olympics. In part this was because the actual number of Olympic visitors had been exaggerated. In part it was because we newsies unwittingly scared commuters out of their cars, or at least out of their regular travel patterns.

Today will be different. Today will be no drill. Today Los Angeles must begin to learn to live without much of its central mechanism.

*

The reason of course is the earthquake. To those who lost people, or at least property, a discussion of the quake’s impact on infrastructure might seem callous, off-key. This is not the intent. It simply is true, however, that for the vast majority of L.A. residents the most tangible loss Monday was that of the freeways. And it is no small loss.

I was not in town when the quake struck. I was in Northern California. Heeding initial reports of shutdown airports, I started south by car. Along the way, radio stations from Sacramento to Fresno to Bakersfield were filled with nothing but earthquake coverage. Most simply turned over their broadcasts to Los Angeles affiliates. And so driving through the San Joaquin Valley I could hear survivors of the collapsed Northridge apartment complex recounting their terror. I could hear one man describe the quake, not as a rolling motion, but as a “bomb.” I could follow, minute by frantic minute, efforts to dig out a man buried in his street sweeper.

While such communiques flowed freely from ground zero, not much else did. As the day progressed, increasingly fidgety government officials assessed damage to what they called “the infrastructure.” One of two essential aqueducts was knocked out. The city was cut off from the far-away hydro projects that provide its electricity. And, one by one, freeways were being taken down. First it was the Golden State and Santa Monica. Later, reports told of closures on the 101, the 405, the 14 all the way out to Mojave, even the Angeles Crest Highway. It was then that I began to imagine a Los Angeles with a broken freeway system. It was then that I began to contemplate Helen Hunt Jackson’s long ago description of L.A. as an “island on the land” in a new and bleaker context.

Traveling to L.A. had taken on the feel of slipping into some besieged city, a city cut off by quake from the rest of California, from everything. Yes, the airports would reopen. Yes, the telephones would come back to life. But essential connections were broken, and in ways that cannot be quickly overcome. At truck stops along I-5, telephone banks were full of truckers who had concluded they could not make it over the hill to Los Angeles. “What am I supposed to do?” I heard one grizzled fellow quizzing his dispatcher near Kettleman City. I don’t know what he was hauling, but I saw other rigs loaded with everything from produce to, I swear, funeral caskets, all stalled north of the Tehachapi.

*

My travel options were more varied than that of the typical trucker. I simply dumped my car in Bakersfield and caught a midafternoon flight to LAX. From there I took a cab Downtown. My driver was a newly arrived immigrant from Russia named Alexandre Martchenkov. “English, no,” he said when I asked how his day had gone.

“My first,” he said, shaking his hand in rocking motion. “Los Angeles beautiful,” he said, “but too much.” And here he trembled his hand again.

The word earthquake might not come easily to Martchenkov, but after six months here he was capable of conversing in the language fundamental to cabdrivers and, for that matter, anyone else who needs a car to get around Los Angeles. Which is to say everybody. He could talk freeway talk.

“405,” he said gravely. “Closed.

“10 closed.

“Many freeways closed.

“No good.”

This much he knew. This much everybody knows. This time Los Angeles will have no choice. This time the city must live, not for 16 days, but for a long, long while, not as a matter of hyperbole, but as a matter of fact, without them. Welcome to the island.