The Coastline Pilot/LA TIMES

June 10, 2005

 

Chasing the Muse

Catharine Cooper 

 

The scream of sirens jolts me from my meditation, followed by the roar of acceleration as police cars race past the house, their undercarriages smashing the top of speed bumps. Down the hill, I hear more sirens - fire trucks and ambulances, until I am sure that every city emergency vehicle has converged in one location.

 

I can see nothing from the window.  No smoke. No flames. I pick up the phone to call mom.  We always check on each other during emergencies, but she doesn’t answer.  It’s too early for golf.  Maybe she’s in the shower.

 

Out the window, I see a brigade of helicopters as they sweep in from Los Angeles.  Knowing they will expose what I cannot see, I turn on the television. I hear the words before the picture. Landslide. Homes. Injured. The first image on the screen is my mom and dad’s house surrounded by a mountain of displaced earth.  Wait.  My mom and dad’s house!  The mind processes the picture as the feet run for car keys and the door.

 

Streets are barricaded. Traffic is snarled, confused.  I park my car a short distance from the barricades and begin to run, down Bluebird, past the park and up the hill. Police and fireman raise their hands, but I keep running. I keep running until I see them, hand in hand, dusted with dirt, slowly making their way to safety.  We clutch one another, sobbing.

 

A normal morning, my dad had gone to get the paper at the top of their easement from Madison.  They had just sat down to a breakfast of cereal and bananas when mom began to hear strange noises.  At first, she thought it might be a deer, oddly scratching on the front porch.  Then she thought that somehow some animal had been trapped inside the broom closet.  Dad got up and slowly opened the front door.  He looked at her, told her to get up - that they had to get out of the house. 

 

They stepped across the threshold and watched the house slip several feet from the porch.  They stepped off the porch onto the concrete steps that led toward the driveway, and watched the porch slip away from the steps. They screamed at their neighbor to get out - that the houses were moving.  Around them, garages cascaded down from the hillside, windows exploded in showers of glass.  The driveway in front of them buckled, folded and vanished in fissures that appeared in the earth.

 

They stood alone on what remained of their concrete stairway, a tiny dark grey island surrounded by devastation.  Above them, the sheer face of a newly formed cliff, the top of which had formerly been their driveway.  Beside and below them, more broken earth, strewn concrete culverts, and their house, broken into two pieces.  The crackling of electrical wires mingled with the groan and tear of structures ripping apart. 

 

For 45 minutes the stood, waiting to be found.  Officer Bob Van Order and Battalion Chief Jeff LaTendresse finally heard their cries of ‘help’ and ‘over here’.  Together, the two men carried or assisted my parents over and through the rubble and mountainous piles of heaved earth to the relative safety Oriole Drive. 

 

Behind them, my parents’ home of 1044 Flamingo Road rested uncomfortable about 100 feet lower than when dad went to get the morning paper, and 80 feet to the south.  Surprisingly, they had ridden the entire slide while spooning cereal and contemplating the day’s chores.  Smack dab in the middle of the two sheer walls, the earth beneath their house slid gently on a slippery bed of moist clay.  The olive tree outside the kitchen window traveled with them, a constant in their view.  The crystal in the cabinets never budged.

 

My parents are physically unscathed, and emotionally holding together, which is all that really matters.  The process of recreating a life is not easy for anyone, and certainly unplanned by them at 78 and 86.  Disaster wears a different face when you are the one in its grasp. 

 

Mom spoke of filling the bird feeders and watering the rose on the porch, the one that carries the ashes of her father and his wife.  When you live in one house for 39 years, there is a sense of roots, a knowing of place and neighbors.  The olive tree, the avocado, the tomatoes and the flowers in earth you have worked with your hands for those long years.  A particular morning view with one’s coffee that satisfies the senses.

 

While (gratefully) the helicopters have grown infrequent. the swell of support for all those affected has been momentous.  Laguna’s community and infrastructure – the police, fire, building department and staff have provided tremendous support, compassion and understanding.  Words are inadequate to express the gratitude I feel toward all who have offered help and assistance.  Simply know, my heart thanks you a thousand times each day.

 

Catharine Cooper’s parents, Kay & Lewie Wright, have been Laguna residents for over 50 years.  She can be reached at 949 497 5081 or ccooper@cooperdesign.net.