Los Angeles Times Special Report : On the Fault Line : Southern Californians Take Stock of the Earthquake : The State From Hell? : Southern Californians debate the risk-reward ratio of life in the land of the shifting sand

So which is it: Do we live in Eden or in a hellhole?

Is this place trying to shake us off, or is it only doing this to test the worthy?

Has Southern California made a Faustian bargain with a devil wearing Ray Bans and slouching behind the wheel of a BMW ragtop?

The ground had not yet stopped quivering when the long-distance calls from the frost zones commenced. After “Are you all right?” came the importuning: “Move back here, where it’s safe, move back here, where there are no riots, no fires.” Where you can get hypothermia just retrieving your newspaper from the lawn. Where, in Rochester, Minn., 24 hours after the earthquake, the wind chill factor was bottoming out at 74 below.

Within hours of the 6.6 at 4:31, a Connecticut expatriate living in the Fairfax district got a phone call that promised her everything--free meals, free rent, free heat--if she would just come back to the Constitution State. Her mom would move all those clothes out of her old bedroom. Her dad would put his barbells somewhere else.

Another New England woman who came here in 1989 fended off calls--more insistent than post-riot, post-flood, post-fire calls--demanding that she return home immediately. The woman answered her L.A. friends more delicately: “Hell, no! We’ve suffered through the worst L.A. has to offer. I’m not leaving till I get a taste of paradise. Southern California owes us!”

From Minneapolis, early on quake day, a woman wheedled her Los Angeles friend: “At least with 40-below weather, you can plan . And you know it’s not going to hit you in August. . . . So for at least part of the year, you’re safe. But you’re never safe. Guess you’d better think about moving back home, eh?”

Think again.

“Disaster is not an enduring discomfort--cold weather is an enduring discomfort. Cold weather emptied the Midwest and filled California,” said author and California sage Kevin Starr. “I do think there’s a special ability to live in high-reward, high-risk situations. That’s different from a long, steady winter.”

After Monday’s latest basic training exercise in Southern California connect-the-dot disasters, brace yourselves for another kind of shock: the usual death-of-California pronouncements in any publication with offices east of the Continental Divide.

This one came Tuesday from a news service, solemn, even elegiac in tone: “The covenant was once fun in the sun. Now Southern California’s promise seems to have turned methodically bleak: fire, flood, riot, drought, stubborn recession and reprise earthquakes.”

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The first action-news report of a Southern California earthquake--from the Portola expedition of 1769--set the style for civic nonchalance that was to hold for 200 years. Juan Crespi’s diary from Aug. 1, 1769, a Thursday: “At ten in the morning the earth trembled. The shock was repeated with violence at one in the afternoon, and one hour afterwards we experienced another. The soldiers went out this afternoon to hunt, and brought an antelope . . . it was not bad.”

In 1924, a German geographer ruminated that an earthquake might one day fulfill Southern California’s singular destiny, cutting it free from the rest of the continent so it could drift into the South Pacific, there to become a little tropical paradise.

John Weaver, Los Angeles’ unofficial historian, watched the latest goings-on from his new Nevada home. “I think it’s in the genes. It’s the kind of people who come to California--they’re the ones who are not satisfied at home. People like that don’t give up. . . . If one thing goes wrong, they’ll try something else.”

Today, the neo-pioneers of Southern California lay bravado bets on the strength of aftershocks and go on, in aplomb and denial and eternal risk, buoyed by the odds--two score people dead among millions--and the same adrenal exaltation Winston Churchill described from his soldiering days in the Boer war: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

The exhilaration--and the worry--sent people to Roberta Goldfeder’s Extend-a-Life store in Pasadena on Tuesday, where clerks handed out “Don’t Panic” buttons.

“Some who are coming into the showroom have heard their neighbors say (they’re leaving). We heard it after Whittier Narrows (quake), we heard it after Loma Prieta--’We’re going to leave.’

“I don’t understand that psychology,” the former nurse said. “I would never go back to New York. California is still, as far as I can see, the place to live. Anywhere you go you have problems. I lived through Hurricane Donna in 1960. I was stuck in a subway during the great blackout in New York. It’s your daily life that makes the difference--to wake up in January and walk outside with no coat on.”

Yet another New Yorker--an actor who just moved to Sherman Oaks and wouldn’t give his name--was waiting in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Quake Day. His wife, an actress, had cut her forehead and wanted it stitched up so it wouldn’t get in the way of her getting parts.

A few seconds of earthquake, he said with a laugh, were more frightening than anything he’d experienced in his years in the Big Apple. There, he said, you just have to worry about the constant shootings on the streets or subway. Here, you worry about a seemingly endless onslaught of floods, fires and quakes. He’d rather face the risk of human violence--unless he gets a part.

From a gurney at Granada Hills Community Hospital, Michael Jafari, 27, of Northridge, decided he would finally relent. For years his relatives in New Mexico have chided him to get out of this place.

“Everyone tells me the Big One is coming and that I should move to New Mexico. But I always laugh at them.” The physician began suturing Jafari’s leg wound. Now it has happened. “I’m out of here.”

The new U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles matched the city’s resilient, quotable self perfectly. In the wreckage of her Studio City townhouse, Nora M. Manella remarked: “My place looks like a broken pinata, except that instead of candy, there are shards of glass all over the floor.”

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No less pithy was Valley resident Richard Goodis. After the quake had crushed his red Isuzu Impulse and a lot more and sent them fleeing, he returned to retrieve some things. On the floor lay “Meditations on Philosophy” by Rene Descartes, the “I think therefore I am” man. Goodis glanced at the book. “I quake, therefore I am!” he declared, and tossed it into a box to take with him.

Queen Elizabeth II, whose visit here more than 10 years ago coincided with some of the worst storms in memory, sent condolences. Filipinos--recent survivors of coup and volcano--offered help.

Listen to the residents of Moscow, a city that survived fires, Napoleon and Stalin.

Igor D. Bespaly, 36, a businessman: “They have an earthquake or a riot in L.A. about once a year. Big deal! It is nothing for them because they live in bliss the rest of the time. . . . I would gladly go and live and work in L.A. even if they had earthquakes more often than that.”

Tatiana V. Statsenko, 22, a medical student: “I admire these Americans! They have this terrible earthquake in the middle of a densely populated megalopolis and there are only 29 people dead. Of course I am sorry for those who died, but the whole thing just shows the great security potential this nation has. They would easily survive five Chernobyls, God forbid. Look how organized they are! They are not moaning or whimpering. They are not asking anybody to help.”

Irina B. Makarova, 49, a vendor: “Americans have too good a life to complain of earthquakes. Their life is so good that maybe this is the price they have to pay for it. On the other hand, I can’t understand people who live in constant danger of earthquake and don’t try to move. Their life must be really great if they prefer to stay and wait until the roof caves in on their heads.”

Any one of them could have made an ad for the Chamber of Commerce.

Ray Remy is the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, a man paid to be of good cheer, and it’s easier in some ways to be upbeat about an earthquake than a riot. His family came here from Boston in 1852--”They left Ireland because the potatoes weren’t grown anymore, and I think they must have left Boston because they couldn’t get the potato out of the cold ground.”

His mother and grandmother went through the 1906 San Francisco quake, and he’s ridden out many shakers here. “My family has enjoyed and prospered in this state, and so have 32 million other people.”

Poet Robert Frost, fed up with California boosterism, penned this verse: “I met a Californian who would/talk California--a state so blessed, he said, in climate, none had ever died there/a natural death.”

The narcissism and mythology of our own stamina are powerful but not altogether untrue.

“This quake,” Starr said, “may be the disaster that turns L.A. around. . . . There’s something depressing about an urban riot because that shows human failure. . . . But an earthquake is an act of God, it’s nobody’s fault, nobody can be blamed for it, and we have behaved so beautifully.

“I think this is like the Olympics of 1984--a turnaround event, not a doom-and-gloom event.”