Aftershock The latest catastrophe in a string of disasters rocks the state to the core, forcing Californians to ponder their fate and the fading luster of its golden dream

By NANCY GIBBS

Lisbon in 1755 was the Los Angeles of its day, a great city made rich by trade, a capital of the world. But it was a decaying place, ruled by a King who sired bastard sons by comely nuns until he lost his mind. The wealthy traveled in sedan chairs during the day but rarely ventured out at night. Those who did wore long capes to hide their illegal weapons.

It was about 9:30 on All Saints Day when the streets began to heave and toss, darkening the city under a cloud of dust raised from collapsing buildings. Church bells clanged by themselves, until they fell out of their towers. The tremors could be felt as far away as Scotland. Soon the fires broke out. Some flames were doused by the tidal wave, which reared 30 ft. high and crashed to the shore, drowning survivors who had not been crushed or burned. Once the water receded the looters came, including the inmates and galley slaves of the local prisons, plundering anything worth saving and killing anyone who interfered. "What a wretched gamble is the game of human life!" wrote the French philosopher Voltaire, overwhelmed by the horror of it all. "Why could it not have burst forth in the midst of an uninhabited desert? Why is Lisbon engulfed while Paris, no less wicked, dances?"

Why Lisbon? Why Los Angeles? "Why did it have to be my daughter?" cried a broken father after his child was crushed last week in a collapsing building in California. "Why did I move here? To lose my daughter in an earthquake?"

One could hardly watch the disaster unfold without wondering just how much more pain a place could bear. In a city scorned because it has no seasons, Los Angeles residents now say there are four: riots, earthquakes, fire and floods. The sturdy, aerobic city of dreams is out of breath, its spirits fragile. "We don't call them disasters anymore," says Dan Schnur, an aide to Governor Pete Wilson. "We call them plagues. And we're just two behind ancient Egypt -- frogs and boils."

This is hardly the worst quake in California's history, but it might turn out to be the most important. Years from today, when historians mine its lessons, the Northridge earthquake may be recalled as a natural and bureaucratic disaster that tested the city's spirit, threatened hopes of economic recovery and jolted some of its scarred population into packing up and leaving. Or it may turn out that Californians, known for their reckless hopes and short memories, will find blessings in the rubble -- like the bearded man in the mackinaw and shorts who stood, just an hour after the quake, at the intersection of Reseda and Sherman Way, only a mile from its center, and directed traffic with a torchlight.

Once the fires were out and the electricity was back on, the residents of Los Angeles spoke of both terror and gratitude. Unlike other disasters of more nameless suffering, each death could be counted and mourned. A 20-year-old man died after the power failure cut off his hospital respirator. Another died in a fall from a sixth-floor window of a downtown hotel. Then again, what if it had come three hours later? What if it had not been a holiday?

In the immediate aftermath there were small graces everywhere. Crime went way down. Drivers engaged in sweetly elaborate pantomimes as they arrived at intersections without stoplights. In Van Nuys Park, Tracy Calderone, a young rock-group cameraman, gave his tent to a Mexican family of total strangers who needed it more than he did. Neighbors in West Los Angeles found themselves sharing breakfast. "What a great way to meet people," one said. "We should do this more often." At a comedy club that offered free admission to anyone who brought something broken by the quake, Rick Alves presented his toe -- broken during a barefoot dash from his rattling apartment.

The rest of the country, iced over and snowed in, curled up in quilts to watch the reconfiguration of the California Dream play out on television. The record cold wave killed twice as many people as the quake and disrupted, though far more briefly, far more people's lives. In years past, such a week would have triggered the Rose Bowl Effect, whereby frostbitten football fans in Minneapolis or Buffalo lust after the visions of palm trees in Pasadena and vow to move there. Now, if anything, the vision is reversed. More Americans are leaving California than arriving; an estimated 580,000 fled last year to other states, for a net loss of 150,000.

"We are not talking about migrant farm workers or roustabouts following the latest oil gusher," says University of Southern California geographer Thomas Jablonsky. "These are people with degrees, in their 30s or 40s, with some money and property, in midcareer with professional ambitions -- the very people who would have flocked to L.A. in the past." With them the state loses the economic value of their skills and the social value of their activism in the communities where they would be raising families. "They will be missed, absolutely," Jablonsky adds. "Southern California seems to be losing some of the leading talent of the 21st century."

If California were a country, local politicians like to point out, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world. But that economy may not be eternally resilient. The seven-year drought in the Central Valley cost farmers roughly $1.7 billion. The three days of rioting in 1992 cost 57 lives and $1 billion in destroyed property. Last summer brush fires devoured nearly 1,000 homes in some of the richest enclaves in America. All the while the re- engineering of America's post-cold war economy drained California of 202,000 aerospace jobs, plunging the state into the country's most stubborn recession and lifting unemployment up near 10%. During his three years in office, Governor Wilson has issued 27 declarations of emergency covering 56 of the state's 58 counties. "I want to thank you for all the help you gave me to become Governor," he wryly tells his political supporters, "and I want you to know that I've almost forgiven you."

Long ago, Californians resolved to live with their particular dangers. They come packaged with the sunshine, the freedom and the raw possibilities of paradise. But now, after Northridge, for some the most telling decline is a kind of mortal normality. "We are in the process of rediscovering our reality, our ordinariness, aren't we?" observes Neil Morgan, a columnist for < the San Diego Union-Tribune. "The uniqueness we assumed we had has come unraveled. We are so much more like the rest of the country, and we have problems. I mean, what the hell, they have snow and ice, and we have earthquakes. No, there's no redeeming uniqueness anymore."

Recent immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and elsewhere, even those cast into the tent camps, declared fatalistically that they had no intention of moving away. On the other hand, psychologist Michael Gellert noted that many longtime residents had heard so much about the danger that they took earthquakes for granted. When the possibility became real, many were jolted out of their denial. "I used to figure that if you have a life-span of 70 years, you'll have to go through one really bad one -- three minutes of absolute hell and then a few months thereafter of cleanup and inconvenience," says John Barber, a businessman originally from Connecticut. "Given the benefits -- the business opportunities, the weather, the life-style -- I used to think, 'That's a fair bargain.' Now I'm not so sure." Others feel helpless. "If they say my house can't be saved," said political consultant Jill Banks-Barad, whose Sherman Oaks home was damaged, "I don't know what I'll do or where I'll go."

Scientists admitted that the quake erupted around a hidden fault line that they could not immediately identify. But there are other fault lines that concern Californians just as much. During the past three months, a running turf battle between rival black and Latino gangs in the largely middle-class districts of Venice and Culver City on the west side has left 14 people dead. The prisons seethe with the conflict. In one big jail alone in northern Los Angeles County, there were 55 racial fights last year; early this month 80 were wounded in a brawl among 600 prisoners wielding sticks and knives, which led to the segregation of black and Latino inmates. Residents of rural Northern California are so sick of paying for Southern California's urban nightmares that they loudly proclaim proposals for dividing the state into two or three.

Such a notion arises naturally when the state runs budget deficits that for the past three years total nearly $10 billion. In the summer of 1992, for the first time since the 1930s, California had to resort to IOUs to pay its bills. And Los Angeles again has taken the hardest hit. The police, who have not received a raise in three years, launched a series of job actions this fall. The city's teachers had their pay cut 10%. It now costs a resident student $3,727 (excluding room, books and board) to attend the University of California, compared with $1,820 in 1991. State treasurer Kathleen Brown scrambled last week to reassure the financial community so the state's bond ratings would not suffer further.

The timing of last week's catastrophe was especially painful, since some economists had finally found a few faint hopes. Tourism, services, commercial real estate and housing construction were all showing new signs of life. Now, of course, tourism is bound to suffer, just as San Francisco's did for a year after the quake of 1989. Just as obviously, the state's budget will sag under the weight of rebuilding $500 million worth of freeways and $700 million worth of schools if they don't receive the money from Washington.

The task of rebuilding, of course, will mean jobs and money and more federal aid. "In the balance," says economist Jack Kyser of Los Angeles' Economic Development Corporation, "maybe the region can reclaim that potential comeback before too long." Futurist Philip Burgess of the Center for the New West goes further. "The only thing that's predicted more often than the Second Coming is the end of California," he scoffs. "Our view is that California is going to be the epicenter of the emerging world economy." In any case, Kyser adds, "out of this tragedy has come something very valuable: a sense of community, people caring for each other."

After its earthquake, a devastated Lisbon -- and Portugal -- slipped further into decay. Will Los Angeles -- and California -- find the optimism to avoid that fate? Will optimism be enough? In the aftermath of the 18th century disaster, Voltaire turned his wrath on those cheery philosophers with their faith in eternal progress in this "best of all possible worlds." How could they explain the suffering of the guilty and innocent alike? Good will not spread, nor evil die, on their own, he insisted, in words that now echo for what was once regarded as the best of all possible states. "It is up to us to haul ourselves out of the slough of despond. We must act. We must cultivate our garden."

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Northridge, Dan Cray and Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles and David S. Jackson/San Francisco