Searing Images Depict Pieces of a Disaster

These are the sights and sounds of disaster.

A father begging rescue workers, please, not to leave his son’s body under the rubble of his hillside house in Sherman Oaks overnight.

A 3-year-old girl sitting in a rusty wagon in her pajamas, surveying the still-smoking ruin of her family’s mobile home in Sylmar. “I don’t have a bed anymore, mom,” she said over the dull roar of an open gas main flaming up like a Roman candle just yards away.

Good Samaritans rescuing neighbors trapped in apartment buildings that had folded in on themselves like popup books. “I’m not going down,” said a woman, terrified of heights, as she surveyed her precarious escape from her balcony down a flimsy ladder.

“Yes you are,” ordered a man she had never seen before. And she did.

It’s very human to try to distill cataclysmic events into a single, searing, defining image. But this earthquake was so fickle in its choice of victims, and so erratic in its effects, that no image could possibly hold all the tragedy and death and generosity and goodness and greed and cravenness.

Each event tells its own story, on its own terms. All you can do is let the images parade through the mind, one after another, reciting their tales like characters in some medieval play.

The first thing you think as you drive around is that when the world is over they will probably board it up with plywood and drape the whole thing in police tape. At least judging by the prevalence of the stuff after the quake. Plywood is the great equalizer. It covers the shattered tinted windows of upscale athletic clubs in Chatsworth as well as little carnicerias in Pacoima.

And there was so much tape strewn across intersections that the Valley looked like a Christo exhibit.

“We’re getting it from everyone we can,” said Officer Chris Mandala of the Devonshire Police Division, outside the Northridge Fashion Center, where a parking lot and part of the Bullock’s store had collapsed. So far, unlike bottled water in some areas, supplies were holding up.

The mall itself was completely closed off by tape. Peering into the Bullock’s store, which now reads “BULLO” because the last letters have broken away, reminds one of Illustrated Man models. The veins and nerves and lymph nodes of the building were exposed. Racks of women’s clothes were perched perilously over an open canyon of rubble.

Inside the mall itself, closed off and empty, you find the marquees of many of the stores still lighted. There is the loud hum of electricity in the air, futilely pumping life into the place, like a heart that continues to beat even after the head has been severed.

At Gary’s Tux Shop, one of the well-dressed mannequins lies on its back while the others stand alertly and oblivious, resembling party-goers determined to ignore the bad manners of a guest passed out on the couch.

Another common sight was toppled brick walls, lying in little heaps as if a child playing with his Legos had suddenly lost patience and knocked them over. Secrets were exposed to the passing world. An untrimmed bush, a dirty pool behind a $400,000 house.

Many people seemed to need to give this quake a personality. A man in a bar on Ventura Boulevard said it was like having someone come in and rearrange your furniture. “I want it over here,” the man said, gesturing. “No, I think it would be better over on this side of the room.”

Another man said it was odd the way the quake unearthed portions of his past life, like an urban archeologist. After the shaking stopped, he found the stub of a 1986 opening day Dodgers game ticket.

“Why did I save this?” he asked himself absently.

Surveying the damage, you are left with the feeling that the quake had done far more than was visible to the eye. Also left in the ruins was our shared belief in the complexity and well-ordered nature of modern cities. Environmental impact reports, City Council meetings, seismic studies--all the fine bureaucratic machinery that was supposed to tame the natural world was ground into dust.

It was at once a scary thing, like a child hearing its parents fight for the first time, and a liberating thing. That’s why some people crept along the roads at 10 miles an hour, not because the ground would open up and swallow them, but because the natural world had swallowed all this accumulated human planning.

Others, suddenly freed of the constraints of society, drove like maniacs weaving in and out of traffic, celebrating the Apocalypse.

You can drive for blocks past neatly laid out neighborhoods under spreading ash trees, and the lulling sense of the familiar and safe begins to creep in.

Then you come upon an entire block of apartment buildings that look like some large animal had raked their facades.

Kim Owens, the manager of the Woodman Apartments, leaned against her car and tried to warn people against going inside the building, the front of which was cracked in scores of places.

“I’m saying it’s not a good idea,” she said.

“We’ve got to get our stuff,” a man with blond hair persisted.

Across the street, similar scenes were being acted out at the Jeri Manor, where the lobby appeared to have collapsed, and the Oakwood Apartments, where a long line of residents were being ushered into the building one at a time to retrieve whatever they could carry.

Many events that would have topped the news on any other day went unremarked in this disaster. Roundly ignored, three wood-frame houses and a four-unit apartment building in the 200 block of Hager Street in San Fernando went up in smoke. The fire made homeless 11 members, and several generations, of the Garcia family. Things would have been worse but for the efforts of a volunteer fire crew led by Joseph Ortiz, who wore his fire hat at a cocky angle and tried to protect his broken arm by hiding his hand inside his long-sleeved shirt.

Coming upon the rare open store, you are tempted to wander in, even if it’s just a Tae Kwon Do studio where a woman is screaming in the dark on the phone. Shops are, in some ways, the most comforting places we have, because they are where we go to conduct the business of life. So we wander in, buying nothing, just to feel the sense of purpose that comes with shopping.

Then, as the hours passed, there were the slowly returning sounds and smells of normalcy. The smell of baked goods as a Coco’s restaurant prepares to reopen. And the surest sound of recovery, when the radio news begins to sound repetitive and your fingers twitch to turn the station for the first time in 24 hours. Field reporters begin doing stories about the outdoor barbecues in the parks, where thousands gathered to wait out the aftershocks.

“What are you having?” one reporter asks.

“Ribs and carne asada ,” replies a man with a Spanish accent.

“ Carne asada ?” the reporter replies, making sure he got this critical information down right.

The camps begin to take on the look of permanency. Portable toilets are brought in and stacks of firewood appear near the makeshift home sites. This disaster will not be over soon. At a park on Winnetka Avenue, young men in sleeveless T-shirts chose up teams for a soccer game, using a Lakers cap and an old jacket to mark off the goal.

Maria Gonzalez, 33, the manager of the heavily damaged Keswick Apartments, had brought most of her tenants with her to the park.

“I don’t have anything left,” she said. She and some of the other women washed up after lunch Tuesday while a handful of children wandered around. Everybody was pitching in, but that wasn’t enough for Barbara Cowart, 47, sprawled on a blanket under the afternoon sun. She had moved to Los Angeles three months ago from Las Vegas.

“Between the shaking and the desert, I’ll take the desert,” she said.

She was thinking of going back, but she was already adapting to the West Coast lifestyle. “If I stay here I’m going to buy plastic plates and cups. If they fall out at least they bounce.”

Seeing the Valley at night was to rediscover dark. On Monday night, much of the Valley was Mojave Desert dark, hall closet dark, the river Styx dark.

By Tuesday night, many street lights and traffic lights were on and Ventura Boulevard began to return to life. The Insomnia Cafe in Sherman Oaks was open for business, serving double cappuccinos at $2.50 each out on the sidewalk, while a generator roared in the background. They had already served 14 National Guardsmen and several firefighters.

“We’re the oasis in the middle of the desert,” said Scott Gatewood, who was serving up the drinks.

Doug Hyun, a photographer on the television show “Sea Quest,” wandered in with a flashlight strapped to his head.

“I think the city should keep the electricity off all the time,” he said. “The city became a village.”

Gayle Walker, a guitarist in an outfit called Girl Jesus, which she described as a Middle Eastern, industrial, gothic, thrash band, struck up her guitar on the sidewalk and did a pained version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” doing her best to out-sing the noise of the generator.

Showing that lust hardly ever takes a holiday, just about the only other businesses braving the night were those catering to sexual tastes. At Le Sex Shoppe in Studio City, Gerardo Cuevas, 21, sat watching television alone. “Usually by this time I have five videos sold,” he said. It was about 10 p.m. “I haven’t sold one.”

As the 11 p.m. curfew approached, upscale quake refugees straggled into Residuals, a bar in Studio City that attracts film industry people.

“Take Phil down there,” said Mark Robertson, a man in a billed cap who tended bar, “he just couldn’t take any more tremors. He was feeling tremors that weren’t there.”

So Phil was throwing darts, focusing as intently on the small cork board as on a law school exam.

Residuals was running out of supplies, but nobody was ready to leave.

“It’s good seeing you,” said a man, walking in.

“In fact, it’s good seeing anybody.”

The curfew came and went, but nobody left. Mark kept serving drinks, Phil kept throwing darts. From time to time, Robertson announced it was last call. Nobody paid him the slightest attention.

“They’re making it hard on me,” he sighed. “I can understand them not wanting to go home tonight.”