Survivors Recount Terror in the Darkness

The pipe’s in here somewhere, Loren Chapman is thinking as he digs at the side of the road. He laid the pipe out himself, a black plastic hose about four fingers wide, to carry water from his glassworks studio through the front fence to a drain at the edge of Laguna Canyon Road.

But that was before the hill moved. Before the natural forces, which created the beautiful narrow canyon in the first place, resumed their timeless work.

Before the darkness, and the fear, and the palpable sense that Chapman could very well die right out here on the mud-flooded road in front of his home for the past 12 years.

“I’ve seen it all--fires, floods,” Chapman says, distractedly jabbing the blade of a shovel into nearly three feet of still-gurgling mud. “But this--I had cottonmouth. There were screams all night. With the fires, we had time to get out. This one, you’re trapped. You didn’t know whether you were going to live or die. You didn’t know whether the slide was going to continue, or if there was going to be a new one.

“We were at the mercy of whatever was going to happen. That was profound.”

Along the Big Bend area of Laguna Canyon Road, residents struggled Wednesday to count their losses and comprehend their experiences.

They spoke of luck as they shoveled knee-deep mud from yards. They spoke of fear as bright sunshine and a cool breeze began drying the mud into hardtack. And they spoke of the incongruous. As the mud flowed Monday night, a man in a wetsuit emerged from the dark to tell Chapman and his neighbors they had to leave their homes.

“I think it was a lifeguard. He was wearing flippers,” Chapman said.

Massive disruptions of routine do more than turn lives upside down. They turn perceptions upside down as well, leading minds to work in unusual ways. So Wednesday, people found themselves focusing on the large, like the eternal shifting earth, and on the small, like Chapman’s drain pipe, buried under mud and backing up water into his studio.

It was about 9 a.m., dump trucks rumbling past as neighbors and workers scurried out of the way, when Chapman found the end of his drain. A small victory. Another step to recovery. Water now can seep out of his studio instead of in, joining the inexorable flow south past his neighbors’ homes and businesses, downhill, ever downhill, eventually to the sea.

As Chapman freed his drain pipe, Michael McDonald walked up the road, keeping to the side to avoid the heavy trucks and balancing on his shoulder a pet carrier with two cats. Police wouldn’t let him drive in, he said, so he parked his car at the south entrance to the canyon and began the first of several hikes to move some of his possessions back into the house.

In the light of day, McDonald was lucky. Water poured through his yard, but the mudslides went elsewhere. But in the dark of Monday, he didn’t know what would happen. So he left hurriedly that night with his cats and a few belongings, driven out not by the rain but by the sounds.

“The noise was frightening, all the earth letting go,” he said, swinging the pet carrier from his shoulder to his right hand as he walked on.

Some 36 hours after the hillsides began crumbling, Laguna Canyon was dominated by two types of out-of-place sounds--the scraping and electronic beeping of bulldozers and dump trucks, and the soft gurgle of water as it seeped out of the hillsides.

The flow cut channels in the layers of mud, and the road, where it had been scraped free, was covered with a film as slick as potter’s clay. Photographs only begin to capture the scene. High hills stand scored by fresh slides, soft-brown divots cutting into the steep, verdant slopes where the mud flowed down and around trees at the hill bottom, then through buildings and over yards before smothering the road.

Unlike water, mud doesn’t keep flowing to the sea. It slows, then stops, congealing as it dries and making islands of houses, like absurd gumdrops atop a massive chocolate cake.

Jan Shoemaker’s house is part of the decoration. She works slowly but methodically in the morning sun, digging mud from around the gas meter. She and her husband had barricaded themselves in. Fearing rain runoff, they followed the canyon custom of blocking the driveway gap in their 4-foot-high front wall with boards held in place with sandbags.

They were in the living room, dinner over, children in bed, the fireplace going and cocktails in hand, when Mark Shoemaker said he was going to tempt fate by going to see how their makeshift dam was working.

“He came back and said there was mud halfway up,” Shoemaker said. “I called 911 right when I saw the boards break. They said they’d put me on the list.”

The couple watched mud build in the yard, then decided to get out. Mark Shoemaker’s car became stuck in the driveway entrance, but Jan Shoemaker was able to drive her Jeep over the wall itself. They loaded in the children, 2 years old and 4 months old, and went to her mother’s house in Laguna’s Top of the World neighborhood.

“I’ve got a cabin out in Holy Jim Canyon,” she said, referring to the remote stretch of the Cleveland National Forest from which residents were evacuated earlier. “I was watching the news and saw all my friends getting off the helicopters. Then the next one to get hit is Laguna Beach. I know how to pick ‘em.”

Shoemaker stood in her sideyard where a tool shed used to be, near a beer can perched on the section of remaining wall. A small yard dozer, looking like a cross between a riding lawn mower and a front-loader, was parked in the yard. It belongs to a friend who decided pretty quickly that the job needed a bigger piece of equipment and went off in search of one.

“All of this is a pain,” Shoemaker said, gesturing to the mud that buried the yard and seeped across the first floor of the house. “But the scary part was getting the kids out.

“My son just kept saying, ‘Uh-oh.”’

Scott Martelle may be reached at (714) 966-5974. His e-mail address is scott.martelle@latimes.com