Tale of 2 Cities Worlds and Climates Apart

They are two worlds so different and yet so close, and nothing emphasizes the contrast like a hot day in August.

In one world you may be forced to put on a sweater at 6 p.m. when the evening fog rolls in.

At the same minute in the other world, as little as a 15-minute drive away, you may be longing for a canopy over part of your swimming pool because it’s still too darn hot to soak in the sunshine.

One world barely requires a ceiling fan. The other is virtually uninhabitable without air conditioning.

This week, there have been 30 degrees of separation between these worlds--the Westside’s coastal communities luxuriating in 75-degree highs, and the San Fernando Valley sweltering in triple-digit heat.

While temperatures in Santa Monica hovered a little below normal Tuesday, record heat roasted the Valley. Chatsworth’s 109 topped the old record of 107 set last year. At 106 degrees, Woodland Hills tied a record for the date that stood for 15 years. And in the Antelope Valley, Lancaster’s 109 topped a 29-year-old record for Aug. 4 by one degree. It’s an example of the myriad experiences that lie cheek by jowl in Southern California. Here’s what it felt like Tuesday between noon and 2 p.m. on both sides of the Santa Monica Mountains:

At noon at a bus stop in Chatsworth, Cedric Harbert wipes his brow and lets out a sigh. The green painted boards of the bus bench are hot as a skillet, so he stands under the slender shade of a nearby tree. Not far away, two men jog at a steady pace in floral running shorts and sweat-stained T-shirts. One man clutches a melted ice-pack in his left hand.

“Ten minutes more for the bus,” calculates Harbert, a 22-year-old Valley College student. “It better come or I can’t stand it. I swear I saw the devil just run across the street.”

Meanwhile, fog envelops the shoreline at Santa Monica Pier, the product of the normal onshore flow of air that is not reaching the Valley because of blockage by a high-pressure system. A bevy of pier fishermen in long sleeves convene across from the roller coaster.

Harold Atkins, 50, rests his fishing pole against the railing and surveys the 2-foot perch he’s just caught. It gasps for life in an old paint bucket.

Atkins observes that when he walked down to the pier at 8 this morning it was “downright chilly,” and he thanks his lucky star that he was born and raised here rather than yonder over the Sepulveda Pass.

“I don’t need that,” he says sternly. “I like it right where I am and I ain’t leaving.”

On the other side, people move sluggishly. A security guard on a bicycle at Topanga Plaza mall in Canoga Park leans against a tree and takes a drink of bottled water. The digital temperature sign at California Federal Bank reads 111 degrees, with this message: “Have a Nice Day!!”

Carlos Miranda, 40, sits on a steamroller with his feet up and his straw hat tipped down. The road crew is waiting for another load of asphalt to arrive.

“It’s hot. It’s hot. It’s too hot,” he says. Seconds earlier he’d envisioned his way out of this mess, closing his eyes and letting his mind drift.

“The beach,” he’d said. “That’s where I should be. I should have gone to college, then I’d be in a nice air-conditioned office looking at pretty ladies.”

He might have been imagining himself here, at Pacific Palisades Park, the dramatic stretch of lawn overlooking the ocean where the sun is finally breaking through the fog and a lone figure in a lawn chair contemplates the sweeping view.

The 77-year-old woman, who declines to identify herself, says she came to Santa Monica from Hollywood because she couldn’t breathe comfortably in her apartment. Only on this patch of ground could she be appropriately dressed for a Southern California summer, in a long-sleeved blue dress, a bonnet and stockings.

Back in the Valley, Biri Guerrero, 12, sits with her neighbors under a park’s picnic shelter. Across the street in her oven-box apartment there is no air conditioning, so she spends nearly every day at the park. In her hand, she holds a frozen treat, still sealed in the container. She will wait to eat it.

The park sprinklers spin arcs of water around and around, children screaming and calling others to the fun. In their diapers and brightly colored flip-flops, 2-year-old Kimberly Hernandez and her twin sister, Yajaira, approach uncertainly.

“We come out three times a day,” says their mother, Leticia Hernandez. “The sprinklers come on every day in a different part of the park. The apartment is just so hot.”

Jose Elizondo, who lives a couple miles away from Leticia Hernandez in another apartment, has surrendered and come to the other side of the mountains, where he watches serenely as his children play a game of tag in the pounding surf.

“Aqui es el paraiso,” he says. “Here it’s paradise.”

He and Maria Elena Torres, cursed with only a tiny apartment complex pool, endured the hourlong drive through rush-hour freeway traffic to bring their four school-aged sons to Santa Monica Beach. They arrived in the morning, lugging an enormous cooler full of tuna salad, soft drinks and melon, vowing not to return to their two-bedroom apartment until sunset.

They’re not missing much. Only the sound and smell of dump trucks rattling as they pull down Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Only the sight of Randy Cervantes, 29, waving the driver into position and signaling for the dump truck’s hatch to be released. Steaming black asphalt pours onto the road.

Miranda--that steamroller operator who is wishing he’d gone to college and gotten that beach-front office--looks at the load.

“That’s anywhere between 280 degrees and 350 degrees,” he says. “Once you dump it it’s about 250 degrees on our feet and 100 and whatever up at our heads.

“It’s like being on a barbecue but they don’t even have to turn us.”

Twenty minutes later in Van Nuys, 9-year-old Elisabeth Escobedo and her 1 1/2-year-old brother, Andrew, splash in a tiny molded plastic pool in their front yard. Their uncle, Manuel Escobedo, takes the garden hose and sprays the children, watering the dried-out vegetable garden in turn.

“It’s hot,” says Escobedo.

“Too hot,” says little Elisabeth. “Too hot.”

Back at the pier, 4-year-old Darian Patterson of Highland Park enjoys his first dip in the ocean and experiences something that little Elisabeth can scarcely imagine: shivering.

Darian’s mother, Sonia Patterson, wraps him in a tan blanket and utters an eternal truth relevant only on this side of the Santa Monica Mountains.

“I’d rather be cold trying to get warm,” she says, “than hot trying to get cool.”

Updated five-day weather forecasts for Los Angeles and 800 U.S. and international cities are always available on The Times’ Web site. Go to: https://www.latimes.com/weather