Fire or Slides, Canyon Folks Fight

Despite rock slides, rattlesnakes, cultists and brush fires, Box Canyon homeowners would rather fight than move from their rocky hideaway above Chatsworth.

In the tradition of western homesteaders pitting their wits against the elements, the residents used hoses, shovels and sheer grit to battle the fire that threatened to engulf their rustic homes Monday and Tuesday.

Ventura County Fire Department officials pronounced the fire controlled Tuesday night. It burned 1,600 acres, and one death was attributed to it. A 54-year-old man suffered a heart attack while climbing a hill above his house to reach a water tank to fight the fire.

Many homeowners still had a wary glint in their eyes Tuesday as they watched the smoldering brush and sniffed air pungent with the smoke of old fires in Box Canyon and Malibu’s Decker Canyon, and of new fires in Simi Valley.

“You’ve got to do what you can,” Jim Kinnan said wearily, as he filled a 2,500-gallon tank truck and headed up a canyon road to water a smoking patch of hill. Fires are nothing new for Kinnan, an eight-year resident who saw the fire threaten his property Monday, then jump the road and take off in another direction.

“I guess we’re lucky,” he said with a shrug. What he can’t abide are young spectators like the ones who drove onto his lot to watch the fire and clap with glee. “They thought it was great fun. They’re probably the ones that set them,” he said.

A resilient bunch who guard their homes zealously, the canyon’s residents have seen their share of arsonists, actors, cultists and plain criminals.

The residents recall a cult called WKFL--Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith and Love--that built a monastery in 1948. Ten years later, two disgruntled former members returned with a bomb, setting off an explosion that killed 10 cult members, including the bomb bearers, canyon resident Beverly Bulen said.

Problems in the eight years she has lived in Box Canyon, Bulen said, include auto accidents, gunshots in the night and pets abandoned in her front yard. But trouble, she said, comes from visitors, not residents.

“We do not drive through here and throw out our beer cans,” Bulen said. “We don’t paint on rocks or dump our animals out here. And we don’t like the people that do. I’ll tell you something, if we catch them, they better know how to run.”

Standing on the wood porch of the house she and her husband finished building two months ago, she surveyed the burned land on either side and bristled at the mention of arson. Two months ago, she said, her husband sighted several youths setting a fire at the top of Box Canyon Road. She said they stamped out the fire and ran away when he approached.

“They should be shipped off to some desert island,” she growled.

Along with 200 others, Bulen was told to evacuate the canyon Monday. She packed important papers, animals, and a new mink jacket into her truck and got ready to leave, then looked at her new home and changed her mind. A neighbor helped water down brush behind her house. That action saved the home, she said.

Bulen speaks fondly of her neighbors, and so do other Box Canyon residents.

Marc Matson, a Northridge chiropractor who moved to Box Canyon from Calabasas a year ago with his family, said neighbors pitched in to help. Matson, who was told to evacuate, also decided to stay and fight. When there are no fires, he said, “it’s quiet and peaceful here, like another world, like going back 100 years.”

The movie industry also thought that the canyon looked picture perfect--as a setting for Western movies.

In the 1950s, a movie maker built a Western-style town in nearby Sulfur Springs, complete with saloon and barbershop, for use as a film set. Studio personnel who followed built weekend cottages and fantasy retreats in the Canyon. One spectacular example, complete with a drawbridge, turrets and a moat, was called the Castle.

Structure Survived

Built high on a ridge, the Castle was home to Johannes S. Leembruggen, 54, a widower and retired employee of the Department of Water and Power. Although the fantastic structure survived the fire, Leembruggen suffered a fatal heart attack while fighting the flames that encircled his home.

Leembruggen’s niece, Joan Cannon, who arrived at the Castle on Monday from her home in Sherman Oaks, said, “The whole mountain was on fire. It looked like a volcano erupting.” Cannon said her uncle, like many Box Canyon residents, had opted to stay in his home, just as he had during three big fires in previous years.

Despite danger, fires and isolation, many residents said they would not consider moving. Bulen, who grew up in Arleta, said: “This place has a spiritual energy. I wouldn’t live anywhere else, no matter what.”