Shipping Out

In our garage on Gaviota Street you could find a fabulous miscellany of keepsakes to fuel the imagination. Of particular delight was the huge steamer trunk into which my mother had packed for safekeeping trinkets from her marriage. There were salt and pepper shakers from her honeymoon to Niagara Falls, and doilies and tablecloths from an era when she'd decorate the Passover table, photo albums of aunts, uncles, and cousins from a bygone life of comfort in Brooklyn: pictures of sun-kissed relatives frolicking on Brighton Beach or necking in Prospect Park.

I was always drawn to the quartered storage section of the steamer trunk that held my father's war memorabilia. There was an officer's samurai sword and seppuku blade he had collected in Tokyo, Japanese coins in odd shapes formed around a cut-out center, paper money from ports of call in Brazil and the Pacific Islands.

He had assembled a photobook of snapshots of Rio's Sugar Loaf, rising like a dream of happiness from Buenos Aires, pictures of himself--a chief petty officer in a white liberty uniform with jaunty sailor's hat--mugging with his buddies outside a bar on shore leave, a snapshot of him towering over a geisha in her kimono in a Tokyo street, the rubble of the bombed-out city behind them.

My father, to whom I owe my debt of gratitude for the wicked magic of puns and wisecracking humor, wrote a delicious line of parody beneath each photo. Today it's a wondrous keepsake of oxymoronical history told in a montage of wartime snaps tempered by an irony that life would one day in an imaginary future be filled with peace, prosperity, and funny-bones for all.

My favorite: a photo of my father in an outrageously over-sized helmet sitting behind the anti-aircraft guns on the USS Patoka, the tanker on which he served through both Atlantic and Pacific campaigns. He wears a steadfast grimace as he aims the "double barrels-of-trouble" skyward at imaginary formations of Mitsubishi Zeros and suicide planes.

His appended caption: "If the Japs had ever seen this picture, they never would have surrendered."

While I attribute my ever-sustaining love of music to my mother (who played the violin as a child and spun countless records of crooners on our turntable), it's my dad who infused a happy admixture of irony and wanderlust in my veins. The trinkets and lore in the steamer trunk fuelled my lifelong fascination with Japan, with world travel, and with the absolute necessity to carve a wicked pun in the face of mortal combat--real or imagined.

I grew up with my share of plastic machine guns and war toys, marched soldiers across parade grounds I had scraped in the mud outside our garage, played frogman in the Doughboy swimming pool that my folks had erected in the backyard.

By junior high school I had mixed feelings about it all. I hated the Vietnam war, collected my own scrapbook of photos torn from the pages of Newsweek, shots of helicopters ferrying out the wounded after a pointless battle in the Mekong Delta, writing my own wry and cynical remarks about the lies of the Johnson Administration--all remarkable for a 12-year-old. But I still loved military hardware, having been raised in the mid-1950s mythology of peace through might. I loved to pause during the day when then heavy pop and roar of the propellers of a vintage DC3 or Neptune submarine-chaser flew over the playground. I loved the B-36 bomber most of all, with its six rear-facing engines and obscenely long fuselage that accommodated hydrogen bombs.

But in my second year at Granada Hills High School, the U.S. Navy (doubtlessly faced with grim press in the middle of the War) had launched its own public relations campaign, enticing adolescents to join the ranks for a weekend as Navy journalists. The notice came to my high school journalism class and said I could come, armed with notebook, camera, and a best friend, down to the barracks in San Pedro for a weekend tour of duty. How could I refuse?

My chum Matt Garbutt and I took a Navy bus from the Valley to the Depot, racing each other to capture the top bunk in the barracks when we arrived that evening. In the morning, we woke at reveille, attended classes on Navy operations, ate a huge breakfast of eggs and potatoes, and then were shuttled out to the harbor where a mine sweeper waited to take us to sea. Navy photographers took photos of us posing in the open doors of Marine helicopters, walking across the gangplank to our ship, standing with the smiling crew in their blue utility uniforms.

It was a mistake. The sweeper had a wooden hull, to protect it from the magnetic detonation of harbor mines, and so bobbed like a cork on the mild Pacific waves outside San Pedro harbor. Worse, it ran on diesel fuel, belching out fumes that would make even the most hearty soul lean over the rail and puke. In less than a half hour out to sea, I was green and spinning, having chucked my eggs and potatoes overboard, and spent the balance of the "Day in the Navy" rolling in agony in the First Officer's bunk, trying to keep down the saltine crackers he fed me before abandoning me to hours of a steady pitch and roll.

A few weeks later, a manila envelope from the Navy came to my home. It contained a certificate attesting that I had completed my Day, along with a glossy 8x10 photo. Before we left the dock--I had neatly forgotten-- they had taken a picture of me where I sat behind the double barrels of an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the deck. I had pasted my father's ruthless determination across my mug.

At that moment the shutter had clicked, I had been too excited to recall the photos of flag-draped coffins stacked neatly on a pier from Newsweek, the infamous picture of young Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked through the streets outside Trang Bang, the clothes burned off her body by American napalm.

It was one hell of a photograph that the Navy sent in an effort to recruit me.

If the Commies had ever seen that picture, they never would have won the war.

Marching Orders

If there was anything I feared and hated in childhood more than having to climb the metal ladder up to the roof it was the rare, but impressionable sting of my father's belt. Considering how few chores I was asked to perform on a regular basis, it makes any rant about weeding, clearing the table, mowing the lawns, and taking out the trash cans an awfully telling detail about how well I had it.

But my father lacked--shall we say--essential communications skills when it came to issuing directions, which made every small deed into a fully evolved emotional trauma. On weeding day, he would march up and down the driveway, pointing at the ivy, indicating which sprouts you missed. He'd supervise as my brother and I would descend into shame. We'd pout and toss weeds and cuttings on the driveway and dad would ensure that we'd rake them into neat piles, stuff the piles into bags, and carry them to the street. No matter how you did it, you did it wrong. And dad, former chief petty officer, would make sure you knew about it. "Move out!" he'd say, as if we were shouldering our packs and rifles and making our way up Mount Suribachi.

But the order I dreaded most was the one to climb up that miserable ladder to tend to the swamp cooler. We had moved into the house on Gaviota Avenue in 1963, and my mother and father never had adequate air conditioning until 2003. Homes in the San Fernando Valley were chilled by central air conditioning or by swamp coolers. The cooler unit was a metal box that sat on the roof. Cold water was pumped in and showered down over bales of straw. A fan drew air over the moistened pads and the cooled air would feed into the house. In theory.

Pads dried out, pumps failed, and the cooler would stop in the middle of a 103 degree day and everyone would share the misery. There was plenty to go around.

That was when dad would ask me to head up the ladder and help him diagnose the problem. I was good on the way up. The last rung of the ladder was well over the eave and you could step down onto the roof. The roof was covered with white rocks. I couldn't look down, so I focused on the metal cooler.

I don't know exactly how I developed a fear of heights. Perhaps from my mother's genetic contribution. Once we vacationed along the northern California coast and while my dad drove along scenic Big Sur with towering cliffs over the Pacific, mom turned green and refused to look out the window. (I even took hang gliding lessons to get over my fear of heights, but quit after the instructor killed himself in a wicked dive. It's not flying that scares me; it's the dying part that rankles.)

When we were done swapping out pads or clearing the pump on the swamp cooler, dad would be the first to the ladder and over the edge. Once safely on the drive, he'd hold the ladder and issue his orders for me to descend. If I looked at the top of the ladder, I managed to make it to the side. But if I looked down, it was impossible to step off to the ladder. And the white rocks would slide around, weakening what little resolve I could muster to make the edge.

"Move it," dad would say. "Let's go!"

For years I'd hike the Sierras, the Olympic Range, volcanoes on three continents, stand in the wind atop the Hancock Towers, the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building. I'd close my eyes on looping roller coasters. I'd fly in small planes and tolerate rolls and stalls. I've survived near misses in heavy commercial jets. Last year, I took the small cable car up the interior leg of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and peered out the slat of a window at the ground below. But little has changed. It's sad to have been trapped in so much angst when you consider I never fell, or came close to falling. It reflects some discredit today to confess to being an adult roof wuss.

Ask anyone in my life and they'll be delighted to recount the many ways in which I am brave. I can say that with utmost confidence.

Rocked

It began with a bang and ended in a series of distressing whimpers.

The Russians had finally bombed Los Angeles. It was not so much as a deafening boom, but a long tympani roll that gained power, then curled off to the distance in a series of decrescendos. The official report reads like this:

The 1971 San Fernando earthquake (also known as Sylmar earthquake) struck the San Fernando Valley near Sylmar at 6:00:55 a.m. PST on February 9, 1971, with a magnitude of 6.6.

Six-point-six...hardly worth a bother in the arcana of bad hands dealt humankind by our living planet. There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and my parents were forced to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But in the dark on this day, in my first semester of college, two minutes before my alarm clock would have gone off--except that there now would be no electricity or water for two weeks--I was lifted from bed, tossed like yesterday's pair of socks against the opposing wall, and then the bookcase fell down on me, raining a small stack of volumes, then more and more like an argument against illiteracy.

The roar had not abated when I crawled across the darkened room to the closet door, cutting my kneecaps on a mosaic of debris. Isn't that what the atomic disaster drill said: crawl to a small space without windows and sit patiently for your skin to melt.

As I sat in the closet, arms braced against the jambs for the inevitable end, you could hear the groaning of the earth as it rolled, the creaking of beams in the ceiling--hundred-pound monsters that could come down on you--glass shattering in the kitchen as cabinet doors opened and dishes cascaded to the floor, and members of my family, in their darkened rooms amidst whatever was truly happening and what their senses led them to believe was going down, screams of "Oh, God, let it stop."

The rolling stopped, along with the loud cry of the earth, and then we made our way in the dark to the front door, stepped out into the morning light that was beginning to rise up over the San Gabriel Mountains. My mother sat on the front step and fished for a cigarette. My father walked to the end of the driveway and, seeing little evidence of why any of this had happened, came back and shrugged. Up and down Gaviota Avenue people came out of their homes in their pajamas and bathrobes, hair disheveled, faces ashen and grim. Dogs, cut loose when the masonry walls of the neighborhood came down, raced up and down the avenue in packs, barking madly, tongues streaming from gritted jowls, their eyes fierce and searching.

The earthquake ruptured a segment of the San Fernando fault zone, a set of north-dipping, high-angled reverse faults along the southeastern margin of the San Gabriel Mountains. It caused more than 10 miles of discontinuous surface ruptures with average displacements of about 3 feet both horizontally and vertically. A strong aftershock sequence followed the main shock and included four quakes in the Magnitude 5 range. The quake claimed 65 lives and caused more than half a billion dollars in damage, including the destruction of two hospitals, two freeway interchanges and the Lower Van Norman Dam. Damage to the dam caused concern that the dam, of the earthen bulwark type, might collapse, in whole or in part. Much confusion ensued as various agencies declared a need for the mandatory evacuation of 40,000 people, or voluntary evacuations of various portions of the San Fernando Valley below the dam. This depended on which agency was consulted, and often the evacuees were not able to be informed of the status of an evacuation in a timely manner, often returning home just as the police arrived to notify them of a new evacuation order, or evacuating at a moment when officials decided not to evacuate. Communication was made difficult by disruption of telephone, water, and electrical service.

Twenty minutes, a half hour after the quake, we had our first aftershock where we stood in the driveway waiting for the sun to warm us up. I was sitting on the hood of my dad's Dodge and it fell beneath me, then bounced back up, and kept bouncing for half a minute. There would be two week's of these, spacing themselves out, diminishing in strength, but their unpredictable intrusions at all hours made sleep nearly impossible. With each, you experienced the trauma of the first blow that morning.

It took a while for the police to send a motorcycle down Gaviota. The officer spoke into his handset as he drove along slowly, advising us to get in our cars and drive south--preferably out of the San Fernando Valley entirely. By now it was fully light and people went back into their shattered homes to gather their belongings. If the quake had lasted two seconds longer, there would have been no motorcycle; there would have been the thunder of waves, then silence.

It was hard to think of leaving in such a hurry, but we were terrified of the consequences of remaining. There was no power in the house; it was strewn with wreckage; and somehow water from the backyard swimming pool ended up in the living room.

There have been stronger earthquakes in the Valley's history. The Northridge Quake in 1994 registered 6.7. It damaged my family's home, weakening walls and destroying joists, and they had to move into an apartment for months while repairs were completed.

But this was our first quake, and as we found flashlights and searched for essentials to pack into the car. The second of the four-successive 5.0 aftershocks rocked us again and as we dropped our lights, we were plunged into darkness again.

I was in my first semester of college, so it was important to me to pack my books, in addition to my toiletries and a few days' change of clothes. My parents and siblings packed their own satchels.

Moments later we walked back into the sunlight and put our belongings in the trunk of the Dodge. As we backed out of the drive, you could see everyone in the neighborhood--up and down Gaviota--lugging their essentials to their cars. Apparently I was the only one taking books. People carried huge televisions, armloads of rifles, cargo boxes the size of pirate's chests, skiis, power tools.... It astonished me how many of my neighbors owned rifles.

Even as rescue and firefighting efforts continued, police arrested three looters in Newhall and reported others stealing form quake-damaged stores in the desert community and sporadic looting at shops along Hollywood Boulevard.

The giant tremor swayed Los Angeles' new forest of high-rise buildings. Jutting Occidental Towers three-building complex has been closed as building crews check for structural damage.

Olvera Street, a picturesque tourist attraction adjacent to the Plaza in the heart of old Los Angeles, is a shambles of collapsed stalls and strewn merchandise.

The quake was so intense it briefly knocked out some voice communications at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, according to a spokesman. The agency said that it lost telephone contact with the Long Beach control tower.

Buildings swayed and cracked from Los Angeles west to Santa Monica, northeast to Hollywood and Burbank, then throughout the San Fernando valley and the Saugus-Newhall area.

Up the street we drove, along the shops on Devonshire where looters had already found the shattered windows on supermarkets and drug stores and were racing out with armloads of food, radios, appliances, whatever they deemed valuable and entitled to steal. People on street corners sold huge jugs of water at insane prices.

That night we tried to sleep without success at my cousin's home at the farthest end of the valley from the damaged reservoir. The morning paper ran a photograph of a small pickup truck that had been crushed when a freeway overpass dropped on it, killing the two occupants. Nine people died in their beds at local hospitals when the walls collapsed. Statues toppled off their bases and three-hundred-year-old adobe walls crumbled at the Mission San Fernando.

Once, during the week, I was allowed back into my home with police escort, to recover my asthma medication, and walked the dim halls strewn with wreckage. In the middle of the afternoon, the house shuddered under the lash of another aftershock and I braced against the walls as they wobbled.

My world had been rocked off its foundation by the power of the earth, the stupidity of its petty residents, and the end of what had been a magical suburban existence just miles from the where they filmed the television shows that portrayed simple, funny, and normal families residing in tidy homes on clean, orderly lanes lined with palm trees and manicured lawns.