‘Jungle’ Below Worries Folks on the Hill

Cheryl Kepler hasn’t actually seen them, those people, but she knows others who have. She says they watch her and her neighbors, spy on them really, and creep out of their hiding places when their victims are at work, asleep, at the supermarket or enjoying a night on the town.

It was one of those nights, when Kepler and her husband were out listening to Liza Minnelli, that her town house was burglarized. Her pearl jewelry, an expensive camera and the coin collection her husband started when he was just a child vanished.

‘Really a Yuppie Community’

Cheryl Kepler, wife, mother and businesswoman, is one of the haves. She says she sobbed over the loss of her possessions, over the very idea that her privacy had been so violated, but she has carried on. She is president of the homeowners association at Costa Mesa’s Seabluff Canyon Village. There is still money in her bank account and two cars in her garage.

“Let’s face it,” she says. “This is really a yuppie community.”

Kepler and others at a neighborhood watch meeting want to make sure it stays that way. They have paid their dues and their taxes. But they are worried about their neighbors, the ones not invited to tonight’s meeting, the ones in the overgrown no man’s land below them, the ones with no street address, no car and almost no money.

The jungle people.

Jim, a 35-year-old former Marine, is one of those people to whom Kepler and her neighbors refer. He lives in the “jungle,” what Costa Mesa’s street people call the untamed patch of land between 19th Street and Victoria, the 137 acres bordering the Santa Ana River that the county one day plans to convert into Talbert Regional Park.

Jim has the rugged look of someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors--all told, maybe about seven years, give or take a few nights in shelters for the homeless.

Like the other jungle people, a floating population that can sometimes swell as high as 10, he offers only his first name. And like his more affluent neighbors, he sees problems in the neighborhood.

“Oh, those people ,” he says with a disgusted wave of his calloused hand toward the expensive homes on the Costa Mesa bluffs. “Well, I have my own complaint. There’s this dog named Milt on the corner and every time someone goes by, he barks. He’s a pain in the butt.”

Jim, too, claims to be a crime victim--”I just got ripped off $60 worth of groceries”--and takes umbrage that those peopl e blame him for the neighborhood burglaries.

“We don’t do that kind of stuff,” he says. “We make more money panhandling than we could stealing.”

He ponders the proposition a minute, then comes back with fury. “That’s ridiculous! If the people who were homeless were thieves, they wouldn’t be homeless, would they?”

Jim claims to have the longest continuous residence record in the jungle, not counting the foxes, rabbits, songbirds, water fowl and maybe even a few coyotes that he could pass en route to his bed. Jim’s jungle home, first built in May of 1985, is so well camouflaged by the dense brush that perhaps only an infrared sensor could spot it from the air.

He sleeps in a one-man pup tent, occasionally cooks on a hibachi and saves his aluminum beer cans for the recycling center.

Gathered at their homeowners association clubhouse, sandwiched between the community tennis courts and swimming pool, the residents of Seabluff Canyon Village have come to a special meeting of their neighborhood watch committee. Many of them are munching on Cheddar cheese and crackers and sipping wine from plastic glasses. But they are concerned, bordering on angry.

Last week they sent Costa Mesa Police Chief David Snowden a rather curt letter, with 80 signatures, demanding that their concerns about home burglaries be taken seriously. Since May 13, the residents say, there have been 22 break-ins in the community of 82 town houses that have sold for prices as high as $195,000. The police have no suspects.

“We have had no response to our letter, dated June 12, 1987, to the Costa Mesa Police Department, requesting adequate patrol of the wilderness area surrounding our community,” the letter read. “Seabluff Canyon Village is again asking for action curtailing these incidents.”

Action came Wednesday night in the form of Sgt. Mike Millington of the Costa Mesa police, a surprise guest at the neighborhood watch meeting.

“I got a copy of the letter sent to the chief indicating that you have some concerns about the wilderness area below you,” Millington tells the assembled residents. “What are your concerns?”

“What are those people doing there?” shouts homeowner Laura Moody, bouncing her baby on her lap. “I don’t like it. Is it illegal?”

“It probably is,” Millington replies, poker-faced.

The officer attempts a few jokes, makes some sympathetic comments and tries to explain the workings of local bureaucracy. His officers can pursue crime suspects in the jungle and even fly their helicopter over the area when they get a complaint, but until the county tells them to evict the squatters, their hands are tied. And besides, he adds, there are no signs telling people to stay out.

Some of the residents nod their heads. There is talk of writing yet another letter, this one to the county Department of Harbors, Beaches and Parks, which manages the area. Others mutter about passing the buck, about how the police don’t even seem to know that Seabluff Canyon Village exists.

“Why can’t we just bring in the National Guard and get those people out?” resident Bill Slippy wants to know.

Millington tells the homeowners he is on their side. He says he will call the county “and see what they are willing to do.”

Dennis Jefcoat, Costa Mesa’s senior police officer at the Placentia Avenue substation, has his own theories about the jungle people. He’s been on his beat for 17 years and knows all the regulars by name.

The jungle people, he suspects, aren’t capable of pulling off a crime as sophisticated as a house burglary.

“I don’t think they are into crime,” he says. “They are into getting their food and finding a place to stay. And besides, there has been less crime in the area this year than there has in previous years.”

But Jefcoat says he doesn’t mean to dismiss the homeowners’ concerns. “I can very much sympathize with these people,” he says. “Especially if I were a lady, I’d be very concerned, seeing all those men down there.”

There is no exact head count, official or otherwise, of the number of people who call the jungle their home. Jefcoat says the most he has ever seen is eight at one time; street people say that goes up a little at times.

But even though there are no signs warning people to stay out of the jungle, Jefcoat says those who go there are still guilty of trespassing.

“Periodically we enforce the (trespassing) law, when there’s a need,” he says. “It’s done to keep things honest, if you will. But going into the bush ties up a lot of men and you have to wear jump suits--it just ruins your uniforms--so it’s something you have to specially prepare for. It’s not the kind of place where you want to go in unprepared.”

When the station gets a complaint, Jefcoat says a helicopter usually swoops down low over the jungle and warns any suspected trespassers to get out.

“We utilize the helicopter a lot,” he says.

Seated in his office in the maze of county buildings in Santa Ana, Eric Jessen, the chief of planning for the Department of Harbors, Beaches and Parks, is talking about his plans for the jungle, what he calls the proposed site of Talbert Regional Park.

The county bought the land for $2.1 million from State Mutual Savings & Loan Assn. in 1977 and until recently managed it with a policy of what Jessen calls “planned neglect.” That was before Jessen and his staff discovered that the county’s largest willow trees are growing “right down the center” of about 40 acres of the property.

“Willows have a very high habitational value,” Jessen says enthusiastically, explaining that the big trees can shelter many different species of birds and animals. “I’m in awe of the size of these willows, which are usually pretty puny.”

The California State Coastal Conservancy Board got excited enough about the find to recently award Jessen $50,000 to work up a plan for “habitational enhancement” of the willow area.

But Jessen, too, has some problems with the neighbors.

“The last time I walked into the wilderness area, I was absolutely horrified by the shocking vandalism that has occurred to the willow trees,” he says. “I’m not sure if it is the hobos doing it to build shelters or whether it is the neighboring condo residents in search of firewood. But we are still very, very chagrined about the damage to this regionally significant willow forest.”

Tim Miller, the county’s manager of regional facilities operations, says he’s unaware of any nearby residents’ complaints about the jungle. If they want “no trespassing” signs they’ll get them, he says. He has received exactly zero calls on the issue.

“We have never been put on notice,” Miller says. “And if they don’t call me, there’s no way I would know. And if we would have heard, we would have done something about it.”

But Miller seems a man of action. He says he’ll get to work on the signs right away, today . They will be in place within four weeks, he says. “OK, two weeks, two weeks.”

But Miller says the signs won’t stop anybody from walking on the property, or even living on it.

“What it will do is give the Police Department clout to cite people if they get a report,” he says. “It’s not going to stop the live-ins.”

Jean Forbath has her own perspective on the live-ins, one that comes from shouldering their problems. She is the executive director of Costa Mesa’s Share Our Selves, or SOS, a charity that gives free food, medical and dental care and, occasionally, cash to those in need.

“They call that place the jungle, and it really is,” she says, seated at her cluttered desk in the Rea Community Center. The laws that govern the jungle are primitive, she suggests, and the weak rarely survive it.

“The women never go in there alone,” she says. “They sort of latch on to men because it’s safer to be with someone who might abuse them occasionally than it is to be on their own. The other day we had one woman come in here with a broken jaw.

“It’s sad, really sad,” she adds. “We do what we can for them, which isn’t very much.”

Costa Mesa’s homeless plan their lives around SOS and other nearby charities--free groceries one day a week, a hot meal at a local church on another. But those who are not in need grumble that the good Samaritans are attracting an unsavory crowd, maybe even nurturing criminals.

“It doesn’t sell houses,” says Laura Goetz, a volunteer at the Church of Christ who helps serve dinner to the poor every Tuesday night.

“Nobody likes to think that in glorious Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, there are homeless,” she says. “A lot of people close their eyes. It’s easier not to see them.”

Greg and Janet are hard to miss. Whether they are panhandling or just hanging out waiting for a free meal, they have been an inseparable duo for the last 14 months, when they met at a bar just up the street.

Greg, 32, who wears his hair in a ponytail almost as long as his beard, is a talker. Janet, 30, rarely shows any expression beyond puckering her mouth to drag on a cigarette. They call each other husband and wife--currently the jungle’s only couple.

“Yeah, she used to be a housewife,” says Greg, standing outside the couple’s makeshift bedroom. “Now she’s a jungle wife.”

Greg and Janet are unemployed, but they say Janet’s monthly Social Security Insurance check of $620 has fueled a feast-or-famine life style. At the start of the month, they have lots of food, drink and recreation, even nights in a motel.

“I’ve gotten used to this,” says Greg, who says he’s been on the streets for about nine years, after serving two years in Oregon’s state prison for robbery.

“After a while you don’t even apply for jobs,” he says. “A guy was going to train me to be a diesel mechanic in South Gate, but I said, ‘Forget it.’

His time is worth more than $6 an hour, Greg says. He once earned $18 an hour as a meat cutter, in Washington state but says he was was fired for stabbing a Mexican co-worker in the thigh.

Greg looks up at the homes on the bluff overlooking his jungle hideaway, a full-size mattress covered by a roof of plywood, canvas and plastic. Sure, he says, the difference between that and this bothers him. “But the rich get rich and the poor get poorer,” he says.

Yet the suggestion that he and his friends could be responsible for the neighborhood burglaries makes him sarcastic.

“Yeah, right. We crawl up the bluffs to get to their homes,” he says. “They leave me alone, we leave them alone.”

And after all, Greg says, it’s not really that bad in the jungle. “It’s mellow down here. The Mexicans sing, scream. We all get drunk.”

For protection, he says, he flashes a switch-blade knife that he keeps in his back pocket. At night, he leaves it open next to the mattress he shares with Janet.

“What we do is kill time,” he says. “It’s a circle and once you get caught up in it, you can’t get off.”

It’s been nearly a week since Cheryl Kepler and her neighbors at Seabluff Canyon Village got together to demand better police protection from their unknown, unseen tormentors. As far as they know, there have been no new break-ins since then.

“The other night, that (police) helicopter was going and going, seemed like all night long,” she says. “So maybe they are paying more attention.”

And a couple of evenings ago, Kepler says, two men who were walking behind her house may have been caught off guard by the lights she recently installed that automatically shine when someone steps within 70 feet of them. She hopes so.

“Look, I know that I’m going to come off as this middle-class person who doesn’t really care about the homeless, about other people and their problems,” she says. “That’s not it; I think it’s good that people run charities, that people are helping each other. But I don’t feel guilty about trying to protect what’s mine. I worked hard for it.”