A collective grief for La Conchita’s loss

The images of La Conchita that flash across a television screen are even more disturbing when viewed in the context of sunlight, after the storm has passed. We see over and over again an avalanche of mud descending on a place that rarely makes the news, replays of a tragedy almost too surreal to register immediately.

How could it happen that suddenly an entire hillside turns into a liquid flow of earth and rock and swallows up homes and lives as if they had never existed?

The mind at first rejects the very notion. And yet, there it is, as television zooms in on a neighborhood surviving in the rain one moment and gone the next.

What remains for those who witness from afar are scenes that follow us into a troubled sleep and words that claw at the heart. We see a woman, her face twisted in agony, saying, “My son didn’t make it,” and an old man, shaken by the memory, reliving the moments when he thought he would die, telling his wife to get out, to crawl over his body, to leave him, as the dark river descended upon them.

The instant that separated life from death, the moment that altered destiny, is brought to us through the happenstance of a documentary cinematographer who was there at the time, capturing that split second of a collapsing hillside.

It seems almost too much for him too as he stands amid an army of reporters who descend on a town otherwise ignored on the Ventura County coast. Now it is the focal point of bulletins, hard and immediate evidence of what a storm can do beyond rainfall records and closed roads.

My wife summoned me from my writing room to the breaking news of the small community’s devastation, just as a brief lull in the storm had passed and rain was once more pounding on our roof. I couldn’t believe what was on our television screen, and had to force myself to accept that it was real, and not the witchery of special effects.

Suddenly, the column I had prepared for today’s space seemed inconsequential, making light of the single leak in my roof and the single sandbag I had filled and placed by the back door. Humor falters in the presence of large disasters.

What was happening at almost that very moment was too terrible to ignore. While lacking the scriptural immensity of last month’s tsunami, the mudslide in La Conchita was, individually, just as terrible because death is a personal affair, no matter the number involved. We die as one.

The avalanche of mud happened, in effect, next door in a neighborhood of homes not unlike ours, to people not unlike us. And its instantaneousness was recorded as it occurred, to be replayed as a reminder of God’s awful caprice.

I returned to my writing room wondering at the apocalyptic nature of events that are traumatizing a world wobbled by earthquake and bloodied by war. Natural disasters and man-made calamities collide even as we struggle to make sense of our destiny.

We ignore warnings of past slides or rising waters. We march into wars that seem to never end. And we die singularly or by the tens of thousands when at last the consequence of our ignorance or our foolishness catches up with us.

The storms have past now and sunlight comes, following the horror that, in a single thunderous moment, has thrust La Conchita into our consciousness. The day is as bright as heaven, illuminating a search for more bodies in a slide that has rearranged the landscape and established a kind of permanence where once it didn’t belong.

Rescue workers who tirelessly dug into the mud in the fading hope that someone might still be alive, clinging to a last breath and a faltering heartbeat, finally had to give up.

I sit once more at my computer, deleting the words I had prepared for today and creating new ones to fit the melancholy nature of a community’s despair. We are all, in a way, citizens of La Conchita, and we are all participants in its grief.

Memories of war and nature’s calamity dim as we trudge past them on our way to tomorrow. That’s as it should be, otherwise the pain of multiple disasters would be too heavy for humanity to bear. We go on down the road, allowing time and distance to ease our hurt, small creatures on a small globe, grateful for the sunlight.

If only it would last.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com