Scraped

Scraped

by Garrison Frost

It's hard for us in the South Bay of Los Angeles – looking at the pictures on the television or newspaper – to imagine what it's like for the residents of the Gulf Coast to see their homes, cities and communities smashed into piles of shattered wood and rubble. Mother Nature doesn't tend to descend upon our little corner of the country quite so often. We don't get hurricanes, snowstorms, hail or tornados. Sure, we fear earthquakes, but the last big one was in 1994 (which, in local memory, might as well be 1394). Our forest fires make for dramatic television, but really it's almost embarrassing to try and compare your typical brushfire to Hurricane Katrina.

But really, the big reason we can't imagine seeing our homes, cities and communities end up like those in the Gulf Coast is because that kind of thing usually happens in much neater fashion around here. Our stuff tends to just vanish, get wiped clean. One day there's a building, next day there's nothing. Who in the South Bay – or Los Angeles, for that matter – hasn't experienced that sick feeling that forms when one discovers a clean empty dirt lot where a favorite house or building used to be? It's like one of those sci-fi thrillers where people or things just vanish and everyone denies that they ever existed. When these things go, there's no pile of rubble, no smell, no indication that the thing you loved was ever there.

We have a word for this. When a house vanishes like this, we say it was "scraped." And that's a particularly fitting word for what has happened. The house has been scraped away, as if a giant prep guy has descended from the sky with a little metal tool, pulled up a corner of the house with it, and in one quick motion wiped it right away.

It's kind of like microdermabrasion for the neighborhood.

Usually there's no warning of any kind. The house is there when you drive by it on your way to work, but it's gone when you return in the evening. The backs and sides of the houses surrounding the now empty lot are exposed for all to see – they look naked, exposed, embarrassed.

While to the uninitiated these "scrapes" happen with no warning, the veterans have come to see the warning signs. First, the yard goes unattended – grass grows, weeds pop out of planters. Then the chain link fence goes up, and the house sits quietly in jail for a while, like a death row inmate waiting for word from the governor. Then, just when the chain link fence has been sitting there long enough to appear benign, it happens. The house is there when you leave for work, gone when you come back. Usually the fence is gone too, and you imagine that it has descended on some other unsuspecting little house.

Of course, these things happen on purpose. It's not Mother Nature that scrapes away these buildings, it's an owner who has something else in mind for the property. And when you fall in love with an old house or building in the South Bay, you know you're taking your chances. You're always subject to someone's else's profit motive. The fence can go up any day, you know. Even new buildings get scraped now and then.

Still, it's sad when the scrapes happen. For the folks on the Gulf Coast, seeing their neighborhoods in rubble was terrible, but at least what is left is a reflection of what was once there. In Los Angeles, all we get is dust.

(Oct. 7, 2005)