by Vanessa Whang
I don’t know when it started or who made up the story, but as kids growing up in the San Fernando Valley, we all lived in fear of the Big One—the massive earthquake on the San Andreas Fault that was going to separate L.A. from the continental U.S. and make Palm Springs beachfront property. In science class, we were shown black-and-white films of earthquakes toppling tall buildings and wreaking havoc on hapless populations. This would be our fate. This is what we should be prepared for (though it didn’t seem like there was really any way to prepare). Mostly, we just accepted the notion that one day it would all be over; that was the way things were. Besides, other places had hurricanes or tornados or ice storms, so it wasn’t like you could escape disaster. It was a matter of picking your poison.
So it wasn’t a mystery to me what was happening that early morning on February 9, 1971. I knew immediately it was an earthquake. I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed in the room I shared with my older sister, and I woke to the sound of screaming. At some point, I realized I was the one who was screaming. But somehow, I felt as if I were observing myself from a third-person point of view. I thought, “This is it. This is the Big One. We are going to get swallowed up by the earth, and we are all going to die.” I was 13.
The bed was locomoting parallel to the wall for what seemed like an eternity. The bookshelves on metal rails lining the opposite wall were flying off their brackets, and the dresser seemed to be walking toward us. A small bookcase at the foot of our bed slammed into the door so hard it sheered the doorknob off.
My family lived in Sylmar on a lower-middle-class block of tract homes somewhere between the Olive View and VA hospitals. It was the kind of neighborhood where some people (including us) had an enormous amount of junk in their driveways and more cars or car carcasses than seemed reasonable for a single-family dwelling.
Our part of town was already multicultural then, although that wasn’t what we called it. There were white folks, Mexicans, Asians, and probably some others. My mother learned to make enchiladas and taquitos from Mrs. Tellez, the lady across the street. She, her husband, and maybe their Chihuahua came from La Paz. My sister and I pretended to be the Beatles with the Japanese-American kids up the street. (It was coolest, of course, to be John. My sister, who is left-handed, always wanted to be Paul. I’m left-handed too, but for some reason I thought George was more interesting. Nobody wanted to be Ringo.) It wasn’t a tight community by any stretch of the imagination, but we knew our closest neighbors and had at least a nodding acquaintance with most everyone else on the block.
The foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains were the ever-present backdrop to our daily dramas. It was a quietly imposing landscape—steep hills outlined against an arching expanse of blue sky, the L.A. basin below, and us gloating above the smog line.
I climbed out of my bunk and my sister jumped out of hers, and we rushed to the door, now knobless, to find we didn’t have a way to get out. We screamed for my parents, who were already trying to open the door, but there were books and furniture blocking the doorway. Eventually, we escaped from the house. My father, mother, brother, sister, and I walked over scads of debris—stuff that had been knocked over or dumped out of cupboards and closets, including broken glass, record albums, clothes, bits of furniture—and we freaked out during each aftershock, thinking the house would collapse on our heads and bury us before we got out. But we did get out, miraculously without a scratch, even in bare feet and pajamas. In hindsight, it felt as if we were all protected somehow by a force field—like we were superheroes with special powers that kept us from harm.
Once outside, we started looking up and down the block to see who else had come out. We checked in with our immediate neighbors, and they were okay. So we looked a little further afield to see who hadn’t come out of their houses. One family down the block had survived the quake but refused to come out of their house, no matter what the rest of us said.
We were lucky to live in single-story houses with more asphalt, lawn, ice plant, and ivy than tall shade trees that could have come crashing down. I stood in the driveway, cold, in my bare feet, looking up the empty street at the foothills. The sky was pink with the sunrise and the air was still. It was quiet—except for the odd whiny howl emanating from dogs around the block. Turns out some of them broke loose from their fenced enclosures and never came back.
The first couple of days after the quake we spent sleeping in our cars in the driveway, too scared by aftershocks to be inside the house. My sister and I lucked out and scored the back of the station wagon. I got pretty hysterical when my dad first went back into the house to survey the damage. But soon we all went in to see what was left. I won’t describe all the dirty details—like what happened to the 25-gallon tropical fish tank (let’s just say: so much for the fish and the carpet) or to the scores of old baby food jars full of nuts and screws and nails that had been stacked to the rafters in the garage—since we’ve all had to clean up an unpleasant mess at some point, right?
We were lucky. Nobody on our block died or was seriously hurt. Things got organized pretty quickly. It wasn’t long before the water trucks showed up in the parking lot of the Alpha Beta grocery store down the street, the Andy Gump portable toilets were brought in, and everyone figured out how to shut off their gas so nobody’s house blew up.
Still, a couple of families on our block took off right after the quake, and we never saw them again. I always figured they must have been from some other part of the country because real Californians just live with earthquakes. You develop a kind of earthquake machismo once you’ve ridden out a largish one. (“That was a 5.5? Big deal.”)
No, it wasn’t the earthquake that drove me out of Sylmar, a place that had one bowling alley and zero movie theaters. If one of your biggest entertainments is climbing fifteen feet up a tree in your front yard to spy on your neighbors, you don’t have to be a genius to know there’s probably a lot more of the world to discover. So, like one of those dogs that saw a broken fence as its lucky break, I bolted after I graduated from high school and didn’t look back. College took me to Berkeley, a job took me to Washington D.C., and frustration took me to New York City.
I didn’t know what was eating at me on the East Coast. I had wonderful friends, interesting work, a great apartment. I didn’t have to bolt my bookcases to the wall, and I could finally put knickknacks on living room shelves without fear of breakage. But at some point I realized the landscape looked puny to me (a weird thought for a provincial in a major city). Everything seemed too close to allow for any real perspective on it. I longed to look out and see an ever-expanding vista—like when you drive down Interstate 5. I guess I was one body in the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but I needed to do it in California. As it happened, family concerns finally brought me back west, this time to Oakland.
A few weeks ago, during a visit to L.A., I decided on a whim to cruise through Sylmar. Oddly, it hadn’t changed much. My old elementary school looked the same. The Vons we shopped at was still there, and so was the Jack in the Box where I had my first job. (But like everywhere else Jack’s bouncy head is gone. Do kids now even know what a jack-in-the-box is?)
There’s a nice park where the VA Hospital used to be, right at the base of the foothills. As I strolled through the park, overcome by an unexpected nostalgia for that landscape, I realized I’d never really left Sylmar behind. I learned there’s an internal geography that doesn’t leave you—and that earthquakes never keep real Californians from coming home.
Vanessa Whang is the director of programs at the California Council for the Humanities.
*Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.
I remember Feb. 9 1971 well. It was a date branded on my mind for years. I was 9 years old and never knew an earthquake until that one. And like Vanessa, I saw images of the world being swallowed up by huge cracks. I was petrified of earthquakes. I lived in Encino above the valley and ran right into a wall trying to get out of my room as it shook. I had a big bump on my head for a week and my siblings made fun of me for weeks. The valley lights went dark, we were kept out of school and I slept in my sister’s room for days. I have been in 4 big quakes and run out of my house like that terrified little girl in 1971 when they get big. I still live in California and suppose I always will. The Sylmar quake set the tone for my hard wired reaction to earthquakes. I can’t believe it was 41 years ago today. Hopefully we don’t get that big one but if we do I’m pretty sure I’ll run for a something, a door jam, hopefully and I won’t get hit with a piece of Spanish tile from the roof of my house. Gotta love California.
If you are interested in doing more with the Sylmar earthquake, UCLA conducted a county-wide survey immediately after the earthquake. That data set and publications from the study are available at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/da/earthquake/erthqkstudies2.index.htm. In particular, there is a report that was written at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/da/earthquake/publications/TheUnpredictableDisaster1971.pdf, and an article published in 1976 by Bourque, Cherlin and Reeder, which is listed in the web site’s bibliography.
Linda Bourque
Vanessa, Thank you for sharing your personal earthquake story. You’re a great storyteller and made the situation come alive. As a longtime Californian, I may be the only one to have missed all the big ones (too young, away for college, or on a trip). I shared in all the earthquake drills but never experienced a big one. I’m not too sorry about it, but it does leave me feeling a bit like an outsider sometimes. However, I’d much rather re-live what I missed through accounts like yours.
“…there’s an internal geography that doesn’t leave you…” You are exactly right! We all grow up with an innate sense of space and place, whether it’s the flat farmlands of Kansas, the green mountains of Vermont, or the central coast of California. You carry this geographical instinct everywhere, and you never feel more “at home” than when you are in familiar surroundings. Great article Vanessa!
This made me homesick. I’m in GA now.
I like that concept of an internal geography that never leaves you. Maybe it’s not so much geographic as it is a cultural and emotional landscape that draws us back. Even though I’ve been a Californian for a very long time, I am still tethered to the woodlands of the so-called “mid-west.” Family history is a combination of Great Lakes, and rivers! And even though one wouldn’t necessarily feel the same way if you actually went back to live there, there’s something about an actual visit (or a mental one_ that just feels like home. Sometimes psychologists call it a “fantasy location”— as in “if I only lived in ____, all my woes would vanish and life would be perfect. (We often see that in immigrant communities. ) But, alas, woes are portable. And nothing stays the same–even when it feels like it does. And it’s good for us all to be portable and even shaken up now and then. There had been more quaking than the ground in Sylmar by 1971! Assassinations, civil rights, Viet Nam, the draft, Woodstock, and all sorts of revolutions had already shaken the whole country. The result, of course, (or at least it would seem so today) is that shaking and quaking shook some sense into some people and apparently resulted in a screw-loose for others. I remember when I was first in California, one day at the gym I got into a conversation with a guy in the sauna who had been working in an operating room in Sylmar when that 71 quake hit and the ceiling suddenly collapsed half way down. And yet, why is it that when quakes hit in the United States, the death tolls are so dramatically lower than when there’s a quake in Mexico, or Italy, or Turkey. It’s because of higher building standards and requirements– mandatory retrofitting, and planning. Take that to your Tea Party and let it steep! That evil government spending sets standards for roads, and bridges, and structures– and, when necessary, responds to whatever comes at us. The very folks that responded so”brilliantly” to Katrina (NOT)– don’t want to spend money on infrastructure. Back in Vanessa’s Sylmar– new housing, new hospitals look onto that mountain backdrop because the government helped recover and rebuild and re-think. People still can’t necessarily go to those new hospitals in Sylmar if they don’t have insurance coverage. In January at the 13 year old Scandinavian Film Festival L.A. which I founded and direct, recognition and an award was given to Finnish film maker Reny Harlin. He received the “Bridging the Borders” award from a web-magazine Cinema Without Borders for his film Five Days of War about the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia. But Vanessa’s piece reminds me of another movie of his– “Blast from the Past” which takes place in the valley. Brandon Frazier has grown up with mom and dad (Sissy Spacek and Christopher Walken) in the family bomb shelter. They “think” there has been a nuclear war but it was actually a plane crash. And after the quake and blast they retreated to the shelter for a number of years. Then it’s finally time to go out. This year’s Oscars take us back as well to some “pre-quake” days in Mississippi with the movie “The Help.” In some ways it’s good to shake things up and rebuild! I want to go back and see that “Father AND Mother know Best!” And I want to say hi to the couple next door– Ozzie and Harry. And when someone says “Guess who’s coming to dinner?!” I want the possibilities to be endless. Instead we still hear “Oh, you live in California, the granola state– fruits, nuts, and flakes.” I say “God bless the state that stood up to Prop 8.” And let’s keep shaking things up– for the better!
Hey y’all (a hangover from living in DC – I like the way the South has retained the distinction between second person singular and plural) –
Thank you for your memories and reflections of that time. I loved reading them (and look forward to checking out the study on the quake). I became aware of the notion of internalized geography from a guy who ran an organization in Holyoke, MA called Nuestras Raices that promotes community gardens and environmental justice. (I believe his name was Daniel Ross.) He helped immigrant campesinos from the Caribben who had ended up in Western Massachusetts reclaim abandoned lots and turn them into productive food gardens. The group understood that connecting people who had knowledge of the land with opportunities to practice that knowledge was a powerful community-building act. So kudos to them! I do believe, whether we are very aware of it or not, the environment we live in becomes a part of who we are. All the more reason to take care of it.
I was 16 and going to Van Nuys High at the time of the Sylmar quake. We were warned that the Van Norman Dam might collapse and flood the entire Valley. That sounded more fascinating than dangerous to me at the time. School was closed, but the DMV was open, so I took my driving test and got my driver’s license.
Due to growing up in Seattle, my internal geography has mountains on the horizon, and they need to be tall, steep, and preferably glacier-covered. The midwest and northeast were way too lacking in topography. LA or more precisely Pasadena was pretty good in this respect, the San Gabriels sometimes even have snow on their peaks. But much as I like LA, now that I’m living in Portland OR there’s just something right about seeing the towering white peak of Mt. Hood.
From decades of living in LA I partially internalized the earthquakes: anything below a 4.5 draws a yawn from me unless it’s really really close. But they were also the one thing that had the potential to push me away from LA. The smog, the congested freeways, etc. didn’t bother me. But those major earthquakes (pretty much one over couple of years between 1987 and 1994) were the one big thing that I regretted about living in LA.
I remember the earthquake very well. My wife and i lived in La Crescenta in a frame/stucco house with a large basement with 14 inch walls. Being somewhat of a geek, i had a 2500 watt Auto Battery to 12V DC to 120V AC inverter wired to the house lights and some plugs. If the power went off, the inverter came on. I was asleep when it hit and the house rocked a lot. Even though it was not bolted to the foundation it stayed in place. Our lights continued to operate even though mains power was off for several hours. Aside from damage to things that fell over, there wasn’t a lot more. A china cabinet full of dishes was intact.
Many were less fortunate. I recall the pictures of the VA hospital buildings that had fallen over. Also of the motorcycle officer who was killed when he rode full speed off the broken end of a freeway, the red/blue lights still flashing 30 or 40 feet below. Later TV showed what was left of an overpass being dynamited.
There was the view of the once two-story apartment house that had pancaked trapping and killing a couple in bed on the first floor. In the semi-darkness before dawn, it was not obvious that the building had once been two stories.
I believe there were also a couple of men who were killed when their truck ran into a fallen section of freeway.
In La Crescenta there were some buildings damaged beyond repair. They were brick front.
Sorry that i can’t recall specific names of locations, only events and their aftermaths. After all, i just thought of these things when i read the lead story.
Thanks for the memory:(