A NEW LEAF? : A Year Later, Angelenos Either Prepare for the Worst or Pretend the Quake Never Happened

Like every other passage through the seamless seasons of Southern California, the new year doesn’t necessarily begin when the calendar dictates it should.

So we are entitled to mark the new year as commencing on Jan. 17, the anniversary of the day last year when Angelenos woke up to a 6.7 seismic reveille. We all resolved thenceforth to be prepared, only not so coherently. In the shaking darkness, we gabbled something like: “Oh God oh God please please please I promise to check the flashlight batteries every month if you’ll just make them work now!”

Ordinarily, I am not one to embrace New Year’s resolutions. Doing so is like breaking your own heart--an unnecessary effort, for there’s invariably someone else around ready to break it for you. But after last January, as the problems outlasted the shaking, our pledges got more elaborate. We would buy a cellular phone. Strap the water heater. Master the gas shut-off. Copy important documents and send them out of state. Move out of state ourselves.

Now it’s reality-check time. Jan. 17, 1995, has come and gone, and quake scientists are warning us about the barrage of 7-pointers that are long overdue. Happy new year. How are we ants (obsessive and punctilious) and grasshoppers (feckless and casual) doing?

Grasshoppers live in denial, and when that’s impossible, on the kindness of strangers. They don’t even keep Kleenex on hand, yet they count on coming over and borrowing a crowbar and spotlight and a few gallons of water after the Newport-Inglewood fault explodes. When the Santa Monica Freeway was repaired in record time, grasshoppers patted one another on the back as if they’d lifted the pickaxes and mixed the cement themselves.

They are likely to gird for emergencies on impulse, erratically, going to the Price Club and coming away with enough beef jerky to feed the Sierra Club and more loaves than Jesus ever multiplied--and no place to store any of it.

Ants are annoyingly compulsive, and no one can abide them except in a crisis, when they are unbearably superior about being prepared. They own a portable generator that can power a space station. They meticulously recycle their vast selection of canned goods every six months.

Ant homes are tricked out in industrial-strength Velcro, straps, nuts, bolts, wired shelves. In every closet is a closely packed fireproof box of duct tape, antibiotics, water purification tablets, candy bars and toilet paper. You could invade Haiti with less.

I am haphazardly inclined toward the ant school, for two reasons:

In nightmares, I still remember a “Twilight Zone” episode about a Cold War bomb scare in a town where some neighbors were prepared for nuclear holocaust, and others were not, and didn’t that play hell among the bridge foursomes?

Then, too, my father was a Civil Defense volunteer, and we had a fallout shelter. Our well-stocked refuge was just a little basement room, which we kids used as a dungeon or a clubhouse. It had a window, which helped claustrophobics but was no protection against radiation poisoning.

On dull winter days, when playing “chicken” with the wringer washer palled, my brother and I would creep in, take cans off the shelves, open them (and here’s the insidious part) from the bottom , eat the food--we favored peaches--and replace the cans on the shelves. They looked intact. Had we ever faced nuclear disaster, we’d have starved to death. The Commies themselves couldn’t have been sneakier.

So I try not to kid myself about readiness. And knowing the depths of human perfidy from my own peach thievery, I try to be ready.

I have a dog who knows how to open doors. So far, she hasn’t figured out the can opener. Still, every few months, I check my canned goods, top and bottom.