Rescue workers were looking for survivors. Adam Stroud wanted a change of clothes.

It was Tuesday morning and Stroud returned to the site of the slide that took dozens of peoples' clothes, homes, medicines, everything.

As much as he wanted to see where his home once was, he wanted at least a pair of jeans. He was wearing all that he owned.

"There's my motor home!" he yelled as he walked to the scene, pointing to a pile of lumber and steel where the chassis of his overturned home was the only thing visible. "There's my generator! That's all mine right there."

He climbed into the rubble, over the smashed cars and mountain of muck, until he reached his home, suspended in the mess 10 feet from the ground.

"Dude, I might be able to get some smokes out of here," he said to a friend. "My car is underneath that home over there."

Stroud, 31, moved to the funky beachside community three years ago, working as a short-order cook in the neighborhood La Conchita Market.

"I had people come from Lompoc for my hamburgers," he said.

Between flipping burgers and fixing surfboards, he got to know everyone, if only by their first name, including John Morgan.

Stroud moved his motor home into Morgan's driveway, living out of it while he started another job as a mechanic. The two were helping another friend, Tony Alvis, shore up his home against runoff Monday afternoon. Stroud went back to his to change out of his soaked and muddy clothes, then to a friend's house on the west side of town for a few beers.

In that time, Morgan's body was crushed by Stroud's trailer. Alvis was buried in the mud.

"That was John's truck," Strand said, pointing to a taillight that jutted from the pile.

He stood and watched much of the day under a porch of a home deemed uninhabitable, pulling his Chihuahua-pit bull mix, Munk, by a surf leash. Munk's leash was buried among everything else.

Rescue workers got to know Stroud through the day, asking him questions about the neighborhood that was.

"Were there homes all down the street?" one asked.

"Yeah, they are all buried," Stroud said.

Hours went by much the same, until an excavator unearthed a demolished BMW that Stroud said "was cherry" before the slide. The car belonged to his friend Kyle Larson, a photography student at Brooks Institute.

A firefighter pulled a digital camera worth thousands of dollars from Larson's car, still intact.

Stroud looked at the photos, images of the flooding along the highway in the hours before it all happened. He called Larson, who asked that he look for his negatives that made up his life's work.

Rescuers pulled a surfboard from the wreckage, which Stroud recognized as his. He ran to the heap and grabbed the patched-up, sun-faded board, looked at it and smiled. He didn't have much, but it was something.