EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Tent City May Be Damp, but Sense of Community Prevails : Shelter: Quake refugees say the noise of rain is comforting--and helps drown out the snoring and the babies crying.

You go to bed early when you sleep in Tent City. It’s like living on a farm and turning in with the chickens. Except this is Los Angeles, and the sound of the sirens and the chop of the copters overhead lull you into an uncomfortable repose.

On Monday night at Reseda Park on Victory Boulevard, where a makeshift refugee camp housed about 500 earthquake victims, there was also the rain.

It began shortly after dusk and fell in gray needles throughout the long night, piercing the roofs of green canvas army tents, dripping down onto faces like the cruelest of water tortures.

At its hardest, the rain swallowed even the wail of the anonymous sirens, its sledgehammer blows waking you up, making you feel the cold outside like an unwanted bedfellow, as though this were some urban camping trip gone terribly awry.

But these were hardy souls, this gathering of working-class men and women--most from Central American countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua--pious people who stared unflinchingly at the ink-stained skies and gave thanks for what little they had left.

“Actually, I don’t mind the rain,” said Leticia Lopez, 41, a nurse’s assistant from El Salvador. Under the bright lights of a soccer field, she slept in an oblong tent with 17 others, most of them relatives who, like her, had been driven by the temblor from their nearby apartments.

“It’s a downpour, but it has a nice rhythm and it helps me go to sleep. It drowns out the sounds of the babies crying and the men snoring. That’s the worst sound of all, that snoring. You can hear it in your nightmares.”

The helpers--National Guard soldiers, Red Cross workers and wide-eyed volunteers who showed up here offering a hand--searched for words to describe this collection of 40 tents.

Summer camp in the wintertime, some said. Family boot camp. Or some water-logged Purgatory. But there were brighter images.

“It’s like a community campground you see along the freeway,” said Jim Alexander, a first lieutenant with the National Guard--the unofficial police chief of some 70 Guard troops who help supply security here.

“They don’t need us here as policemen. These people are taking care of themselves. I’ve seen it happen before. When a crisis occurs, instead of causing problems, people pitch in and help. People do.”

This Tent City, like the others, did not exist a few days ago. People appeared in droves at the Reseda Park Recreation Center the morning the quake hit. They slept under trees, cooked meals in the public grills, set up pup tents. But it was not until Saturday, when the National Guard moved in, that this bustling city took form.

The soldiers used mallets to drive the wooden stakes into the ground and string up the tents, many of which had been used during the Korean War--tents they said a prayer would hold up amid the oncoming wind and rain.

Some did. Others leaked like jailhouse roofs, turning the grass floors of these temporary living quarters into a mud-and-water cocktail. But few complained. Speaking Spanish in quick bursts, they moved their Red Cross-issue cots to another corner of the tent and went back to sleep, listening silently to the rain.

Still, in the middle of the night, there were patrols to count heads and take stock of the water damage. Their flashlights darting about the park, the beams capturing the full force of the drizzle, Red Cross center manager Liz Dewar and Tom Murotake, a National Guard staff sergeant out of Long Beach, walked the squishy grounds on night patrol.

She is the wife of a San Bernardino County pastor. He is a family man. But on this night, they were soldiers of ill-fortune. Their beams moved across the sleeping faces. The cots were lined up barracks-style in tents that smelled of musty canvas and waterlogged clothing.

Other cots were clumped together in family groups, a baby carriage or child’s truck here, a wrinkled suit on a hanger there.

At times, you could see the mist as their hot breath hit the early morning chill and you knew their noses, hands and feet were cold to the touch. The leakiest tents were abandoned. In the end, the Guard troops shook their heads.

“Some of these tents have been around for a long, long time,” Murotake said, hurrying to get in out of the rain. “Tomorrow, when the weather turns, we’ll fix ‘em up real good with epoxy.”

The coffee and the diapers, like everything else here, were free. After completing a form, new residents were issued a cot, blankets and a Red Cross comfort kit containing essentials such as toothpaste and shampoo.

But the promise of something for nothing brought opportunists.

Scores of cots were lost to people who showed up at the park, collected their handouts and walked off. There was the woman who demanded a red cot, not a green one, and then disappeared as quickly as she had come.

By Monday night, armed soldiers were stationed inside two tents that held enough supplies to feed an army. “Some guys were coming in here with camouflage pants, saying they were Guardsmen,” said Valsin Francois, holding an M-16 rifle. “But they didn’t fool me. They didn’t have name tags.”

Then there was the phone fiasco.

On Saturday, two telephone companies supplied a block of a dozen phones for earthquake victims to call worried relatives back home--anywhere in the world--free of charge.

The mistake, volunteers say, was that the phones were at first placed along busy Victory Boulevard. Soon, news of the free calls rumbled through the neighborhoods.

“People were coming in by the busloads,” said volunteer Steve Novak, who flew to the San Fernando Valley from New York City after hearing about the quakes. “People were calling Iran and Pakistan and India.”

Murotake said: “I saw a guy with a phone book where all the names were in Arabic. There was a woman, some marketing representative, making her calls all around the country. It was, like, out of control.”

At one point, a fight broke out between two men arguing over the length of a call. The police were summoned and the phones were moved near the office and restricted to use by National Guard troops.

But there were selfless acts of charity, too.

On Saturday, well before the warehouse of Red Cross supplies arrived, people appeared with donations. A woman brought 100 homemade sandwiches. Another produced 200 meals purchased at a McDonald’s. Still another brought food for stranded pets. Indian food arrived from Beverly Hills, clothing from San Diego.

“At one point these lawyers and hairdressers from Orange County showed up with a truckload of hot dogs and the Red Cross was saying, ‘Get it out of here’ and an LAPD cop on the scene was insisting that they be fed to people. They were really going at it,” said Lorin Ginsberg, a volunteer emergency medical technician.

Then there was the mountain of ice--hundreds of bags piled up on the grass near the tennis courts like some mound of melting snow. No volunteer could remember where the ice had come from. Or what they were going to do with it.

Despite the glitches, a family atmosphere has grown in this Tent City and others like it: Volunteers have bummed cigarettes from Guard troops, then bought them small gifts in return. Addresses have been exchanged. And embraces.

One day, a rap band showed up unannounced and performed a free concert. Early Tuesday, a woman and her 8-year-old son offered a bed for the night to a teen-ager shivering in a thin blue blanket. And then there is the goose that playfully chases the children every morning. And the little boy with the bow and arrow who walks up to the soldiers and says, “Hey soldier, where’s your gun?”

One night, while Sgt. 1st Class Louis Ortiz played his harmonica for a group of people, a woman approached and said that in her country, people ran in fear from men in uniforms. “She had tears in her eyes,” he said.

But the sense of community has its limitations. Not everyone abides by rules against alcohol or public urination. Some husbands complain that other men gawk at their wives. Then there are the crying babies. And sometimes the stench from the nearby public outhouses wafts through the tents like a bad breeze.

In the sick bay, several children screamed as they were treated for chickenpox. Their parents complained of headaches, colds or diarrhea.

One resident said a cockroach had crawled into his ear while he slept. He screamed in agony as workers struggled to extract the bug, grinding his teeth and praying aloud. Finally, with the bug in sight, the medical team was forced to give up and send him to a hospital.

At 3 a.m. Tuesday, Tent City’s command center is like some near-deserted Army outpost. Deserted Jeeps are parked chaotically. With the lights dimmed since 10 p.m., the generator’s steady hum is no longer heard, nor are the voices that once chattered inside the tents in the darkness. The dawn would come slowly, almost imperceptibly, with the geese that populate the park honking like drill sergeants.

One by one, wrapped in blankets and wool caps, the residents emerged from their shelters. They built fires, made breakfast and stomped their feet to stay warm. The brave ones splashed cold water on their faces, trying to come alive and face another day.

Some would go off to work. Others would play a waiting game. Waiting for repairs to their damaged homes. Waiting for better weather, for better times.

Waiting for night to come again in Tent City.