Watching the Past Slip Away : Well, I have news. The quiet places are disappearing.

I used to own a horse named Shorty, which my daughter blackmailed me into buying. Either I got her a horse or she would resist every effort to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which she considered the geographic equivalent of hell. She would run away and join a commune that practiced free love or dance nude in a bar frequented by sexual perverts.

Since she was only 11, it would have been illegal to cast her adrift among the crazies up north, so I bought Shorty, an animal everyone thought was cute. I hate cute.

I was raised in the streets of East Oakland where horse was something that junkies injected into their veins. The only pets we kept were dogs and cats. Everything else we ate.

To own a horse was a new experience, and, although Shorty and I were never close, I came to understand how a person might become attached to something without an engine that could be ridden along dirt trails to the quiet places.

Well, I have news. The quiet places are disappearing.

What brought this specifically to my attention was a telephone call from a woman in Canyon Country who described herself as a horse-lover. She called Canyon Country Condo Country and complained that the land was being bought up by builders who were erecting apartments and condominiums where there had once been trees and fields and gentle hillsides.

Almost as bad, these multiple-unit dwellings with names like Live Oak Villa and Wellington Place were attracting occupants with town house mentalities who hated horses and who, as small-minded people will, gloried in circulating petitions that demanded the removal of anything faintly resembling a horse near their stucco enclaves in bourgeois heaven.

The woman who called wasn’t just talking about Canyon Country. The same transformations were occurring in Newhall, Valencia and Sylmar. Freeways, high-speed engines, better housing prices and our almost maniacal desire to get away are altering the nature of the landscape north of the Valley.

The architects of the new environment are not earthquake and volcano but profit-motivated contractors who measure the human experience in terms of maximum land usage. Without laws, they would build closet-sized condos 18 stories high in a riverbed that flooded every three years.

I spent time wandering the area from Sylmar to Canyon Country, taking the back roads as well as the main thoroughfares. The woman was right. New structures rise like outposts of a false paradise among ranch houses and old wood frame homes that have been there since the days of the olive orchards.

They stretch from populated districts into the back country and etch jarring symmetrical patterns against the casual beauty of the surrounding mountains. Their pennants flap in a gentle breeze and their fluorescent yellow signs are noisy requiems to the quiet places. Grand opening! Five percent down! No closing costs!

A pool here, a spa there.

Well, all right. We all have to live somewhere. I don’t blame anyone for ducking the cross fire of urban combat, and God knows you have to go where the price is right. But I keep wondering why the tracts can’t fit better into the green country, why greater areas of land aren’t preserved for just wandering, and why a horse seems such a threat to the new settlers in an old land that the horses occupied first.

If I can coexist with a horse, you can coexist with a horse. At worse they draw flies, but at best they are evocative of gentler times, those places Glen Campbell used to sing about in the back roads of our minds. Quiet streams and summer memories.

Horse-lovers are militant in the declaration of their rights to own and ride their animals wherever they damned well please. I heard all about their God-given prerogatives and their constitutional guarantees.

But I gained more in two sentences from an old man on a porch swing than from anything contained in the lofty polemics of the horse people.

His small wooden house off Foothill Boulevard resembled a shack from a Norman Rockwell painting. The railed porch tilted on one end, a window was boarded up and the front yard was overgrown. The old man sat perfectly still, observing without apparent interest whatever happened to move across his patch of vision.

I explained who I was and asked his opinion on the encroachment of condominiums in the rural environment surrounding his home. At first he wouldn’t even look my way. I rephrased the question. He finally turned toward me but still said nothing. I asked again. Silence.

I was about to give up when he suddenly spoke. His voice was as low as a wind through the trees, a stirring in the mountains, a rustle in the forest.

“It’s all gone,” he said simply. “Everything’s slipping away.”

I thought about that all the way back to the office and realized that without saying much, the old buzzard had said it all. The condos are building. The land is changing. The quiet is going.

Everything’s slipping away.