Octogenarian’s Quest to Preserve Part of Escondido Ends in Ashes

A fast-moving fire fanned by Santa Ana winds sped down the steep slopes of Bottle Peak last weekend and consumed about 200 acres of brush and the dreams of Frances Beven Ryan.

The spunky 88-year-old widow had hoped to save the 15 acres around her cottage as an educational preserve, to teach future generations what Escondido had looked like in the past. Now it is a blackened graveyard of native vegetation.

Last Saturday evening while Ryan slept, with the help of medication she had taken for the flu, the flames came dangerously close to her home. Concerned neighbors and friends alerted firefighters to her presence in the tiny home hidden in a grove of huge oaks.

“I never knew a thing about it until they brought me out of the house,” she said. “They told me to take just the most important things and get out fast. I guess I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I took my hairpins and my purse.

“And now it is all gone, all that I had hoped to save,” she said.

What Ryan is left with is the irony that one of the sights she most disliked--a scar of cleared land where construction on the acreage was planned--saved her house and probably her life by acting as a firebreak.

The fire was started about 3 p.m. Saturday by an unattended campfire, officials believed.

Firefighters from several communities and crews from area honor camps battled the blaze to a standstill, just yards from Ryan’s home. The flames consumed some of the rare Engelmann oaks and singed others, but left untouched the cottage and Ryan’s pride and joy--the largest of the oaks, almost 6 feet in diameter and with a 40-foot spread of branches shading her house.

When Ryan returned Sunday to retrieve some clothes, medicine and other essentials, she found her home and her oak untouched.

Eight fire rigs and dozens of firefighters were on the fire line at the foot of Bottle Peak when the fire made a second run at Ryan’s house, said Bill Norman, owner of the property.

“I’ve got to give them all the greatest credit,” Norman said. “They worked like the devil. The men, and a lot of women, too. They beat it back again.”

Norman and his wife, Ethel, who is Ryan’s second cousin, bought the property when the University of California decided that the Ryan Oak Glen Reserve was too small and too distant from university campuses to be included in the UC natural reserve system.

Ryan and her late husband, artist Lewis Ryan, had deeded the virgin land to the university in 1975, believing it would be kept perpetually in its natural state. The Ryans retained a life interest in their home and the oak grove that surrounded it.

When UC regents approved the disposal of the property, Norman said, he and his wife agreed to buy it and keep it in open space as the Ryans had wished. But Frances Ryan could not accept the university’s change of heart in reneging on what she considered a pledge to preserve her tiny piece of the past.

“Now I guess all that is over,” she said. “There is nothing to save. Oh, I know it will come back, if there is ever any rain.”

But, for the first time, Ryan saw something good in the sale of her land and the home her father built in 1918. The pad that the Normans had bulldozed free of vegetation near the entrance to the preserve, in preparation for a home for their collections of vintage cars and other historical memorabilia, had brought many a dark look and a few sharp words from Ryan in the past.

But Sunday, as she recalled the weekend tragedy, she explained that “the only thing that saved the house and my oaks and me, they say, is that bare ground they cleared.”

So even Frances Beven Ryan had to admit that change might have been for the best after all.

“If that pad hadn’t been there, I probably would have died,” she acknowledged.

“The Lord moves in strange ways.”