Recalling the Lessons Learned at Ground Zero

It’s an anniversary that may pass unnoticed in much of Southern California . . . an asterisk on the calendar, a vague reminder of the kind of adventures that tend to occur in this wacky state.

But for many of us living here at ground zero, near the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake, today marks the fifth anniversary of the most frightening few moments we’ll probably ever live through.

It was the most costly disaster in our nation’s history, the 6.7 temblor that killed 72 people, injured 12,000, caused more than $40 billion in damage . . . and divided life for many of us into a kind of “before” and “after” that still affects the way we spend our days.

For some, earthquake recollections have been tucked away, buried beneath rebuilt homes, with gourmet kitchens and plush new carpets muting memories of that dreadful day.

For others, there are still the physical signs--the closet doors that don’t quite slide, the crack that runs along the floor--of a home thrown permanently off-kilter, marked for life by those 90 savage seconds of rock and roll.

*

I still feel my heart racing some nights as I lie in bed, shaken by winds that roar through the canyon, raking my backyard and rattling my bedroom windows and walls.

To be sure, much of the terror has faded. I no longer line up our shoes by the bed, sleep with a flashlight under my pillow or rotate canned goods through our front porch stockpile.

But earthquake memories still shadow my life . . . like each night when I put my children to bed and ritually clear a path from their rooms, through the hall, down the stairs, to the front door.

Dog bones, tennis shoes, laundry baskets. . . . Even when I’m bone tired, I kick aside the detritus of the day to reopen the route that represented our salvation.

I’d had to crawl that path on my stomach in the predawn dark with two children in tow and a 3-year-old tucked under my arm--as all around us, windows shattered and furniture crashed to the ground.

I can still feel the marks of that trek on my psyche. On a recent visit to family in Ohio, I mindlessly cleared a route to the door. My brother watched as I paced the floor, shoving aside suitcases, rearranging chairs.

“Expecting to make a hasty exit?” he joked.

I answered straight-faced: “In case there’s a quake.”

My friend Bob, who rode out the temblor at his home in Mar Vista, once likened people near the epicenter to combat veterans, who bear battlefield scars that others will never know.

That’s how we felt on that chilly morning, huddling around a radio in the eerie dawn listening to reports of freeways damaged, streets on fire, malls and schools and homes destroyed . . . and realizing that the source of our communal terror would be called the Northridge earthquake, and its center was just a few miles away.

*

It is human nature, I suppose, to see even the greatest disasters in intimate terms; to struggle to assign them personal meaning; to search the rubble for signs of a message.

My search carried me to church, to the office of my pastor, whose window looked out over the rubble of the Northridge Meadows, the collapsed apartment complex where 16 people died.

He was tired, red-eyed, spent from counseling families who’d lost their homes, businesses, loved ones, neighbors.

My losses had been less . . . but “hope” may have been among them. It was a horrible month for me . . . the death of my husband, a car accident, now an earthquake that threatened to cost me my home.

“I give up,” I told him, in a whisper through tears. “What is God trying to tell me?”

My arrogance made Rev. Dave smile. “God wouldn’t make an earthquake just to reach you.”

There are lessons, he said, in every disaster, every mistake, every thing gone wrong. The challenge is not to decipher what God means to say but to discover the lessons on your own.

I thought of that in the weeks that followed, as my friends exchanged their earthquake stories, bemoaned their disasters, tallied their losses . . . antiques, wine collections, expensive Lladro figurines. And I felt my perspective shift, discovered that I’m lucky in ways I’d never realized.

In the end, I lost little of value. There were shattered windows, broken dishes, furniture and appliances ruined past repair. But the house was still standing, and I’d saved the only treasures I have: I’d carried them down the stairs and out the door, shivering and crying, but certain that Mommy would keep them safe.

I look back now and remember how frightened and helpless and small I felt, as I held onto them and braced myself in the bedroom doorway while our house shook with such force that the doorjamb bruised my back and knees.

I had to yell, so they’d hear me above the sound of breaking glass, crumbling walls and their own frenzied cries.

“Don’t worry, it’s just an earthquake. . . .”

I shouted it again and again, as if the words made sense against the backdrop of the horror we faced.

Then the shaking stopped, and my voice sounded out clearly, in the sudden quiet of the night.

“We’re OK. It was only an earthquake.”

How foolish. How brave. And how very true.

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.