Community

Saturday morning. I went to a morning business meeting in San Diego and no one felt much like doing business. They didn't feel like doing anything. They felt flat, dragged out, no energy, depleted.

Including me. "I think we're all enervated," I said. "Just like after you've had an orgasm."

Not everyone identified with that. But the enervation I felt was identical to the post-orgasm kind. It made sense to me. I don't think anything focuses a person quite like the runup to orgasm. But the fires had an approximate effect. People in San Diego may have tried to involve themselves with other focuses this week, but somewhere in their minds, there was a constant presence of fire. Doubt, fear, anxiety, blood pressure, expectation, hope, flight in many cases, preparation for flight in many others, long black nights trimmed in bright orange. It has been a hell of an affair this week, shared by three million people.

In 1978, in San Diego, there was a midair collision of airplanes over the North Park section of the city. A Pacific Southwest Airlines 727 overtook and collided with a Cessna 172. The Cessna and its two souls on board were knocked straight down to the ground. The 727 crashed, in a near-vertical attitude, at the corner of Dwight and Nile streets in North Park. In the planes and on the ground, 144 people were killed.

After its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in its compulsory "Survival Aspects" paragraph: "This accident was not survivable." It was the greatest disaster in San Diego to that date. Thousands of us remember 9:01 a.m., Sept, 25, 1978, and the stories and images that followed. To this day, in San Diego, people all over the city watch jetliners on approach to Lindbergh Field in a more than impersonal way.

One of the stories I wrote after the crash addressed community involvement. I interviewed Dr. Michael Mantell, chief psychologist for the San Diego Police Dept. He said that after such a crash, people experience three emotional stages: shock or disbelief; a "cataclysm" of emotions (anger, fear, guilt), and, finally, equilibrium.

He said a city reacts in the same way. After the crash, San Diego suffered its own collective emotional passage, also defined by stages of shock, emotional chaos, and finally equilibrium. In San Diego today, some number of people, torn from homes that then were torn from them, no doubt are still in deep shock. Others, probably most, of us, felt shock giving way to vigilance and emotional chaos by Tuesday or Wednesday. A member of our business meeting this morning told of a friend, forced to evacuate on the first day, by the third day was insisting on buying and delivering goods to other evacuation centers.

Yesterday, Friday, we started to see a chance to breathe, carefully, because the air quality over this beautiful region was dangerous, from the mountain foothills to the beaches. The media and the people are entering the post-mortem stage, looking back, summing up, some with pride, some with anger, but all in more or less total connection to their community.

Equilibrium? Out there somewhere. Dr. Mantell said equilibrium arrives when the city can think about the disaster without the urge to "do" something. He said reaching equilibrium takes time and effort, for both individuals and the city.

He said there is also an anniversary effect. What a strange future this city has. This October's fires started on Oct. 21. The 2003 Cedar Fire, another true disaster, started on Oct. 24. Next October will be the Cedar's fifth anniversary, and the Witch/Harris's first, both major anniversaries in the human process of remembering and observing.

I remember the Cedar's first anniversary, in 2004. I remember watching the weather as Oct. 24 approached, praying to God to wake up that day to blue, clear skies. Instead, it was dark that morning, low, gray clouds from an early storm arriving from the Gulf of Alaska, that poured rain on the county for two days. I remember the relief like it was yesterday.