Hard-Luck Life in Hobo Jungle : Homeless: As many as 100 men and women find shelter in shanties in the Ventura Riverbed. They were angered to learn that an accused child molester lived in their midst for a year.

The men and women who live in a makeshift camp along the Ventura River bottom known as Hobo Jungle are worried that the arrest of an accused child molester living among them has given their homeless community a bad name.

Members of the river-bottom camp say they were surprised and outraged when they learned that Don Ray Moore, a 56-year-old fugitive wanted on 21 felony counts of child molesting, had been hiding out in their midst for almost a year.

“If we ever find another child molester in Hobo Jungle he’ll have to dig his own grave,” said an eight-year resident called Silver because of the color of his hair. “It brings the heat down here, and they start asking questions.”

Ventura police do not believe other fugitives are hiding from the law among the tents and bamboo huts along the river bottom northwest of Main Street, they said last week. Men wanted for petty theft and public drunkenness, yes. Hardened criminals, not likely.

Homeless advocates describe the people of Hobo Jungle as desperate drifters, men and women who have fallen out of luck. Many drink too much. Some sleep off their hangovers in the afternoon. Others collect recyclable cans for petty cash or panhandle shoppers in town. But most do not commit dangerous crimes, authorities agreed.

“I think this guy was the exception,” said Lt. Art Farrar, who heads the Ventura Police Department’s patrol division. “We’re dealing with a lot of marginal . . . people that have been displaced by society. I don’t think we’re dealing with wanted fugitives.”

The area many Ventura residents call Hobo Jungle is actually known by the homeless themselves simply as the river bottom. It is about half a mile from the site of an earlier Hobo Jungle that was part of the town’s history during the Depression.

Before World War II, men down on their luck would jump off the train as it slowed into Ventura, pitching tents for the night among the lush vines and trees of Seaside Wilderness Park.

The park, a city preserve, allows no campers today, said Jeff Price, chief ranger with the state Department of Parks and Recreation, which helps patrol and protect the area.

Now the homeless live under the Main Street bridge and beyond in the river bottom parallel to Peking Street. Ventura residents, however, still casually use the phrase Hobo Jungle to mark the general location.

The homeless camp is hard to spot at first. While broken crates and empty beer bottles litter the area, most of the actual dwelling places are hidden in clumps of brush. On a recent morning, as the camp slowly awakened, one couple dragged themselves off a mattress after dawn to take two bags stuffed with recyclable cans up to town for change.

Marcy Canuet, 37, a former professional housekeeper from Connecticut, poked at her husband, Leon, and said he had been up until 3 a.m. combing the beaches for abandoned cans. She apologized for her makeshift home, which the couple moved into from another Hobo Jungle site only two days before.

“It’s not done yet,” she said. “We have to get a table and stuff. I want to get a table and put it over there.” The four corners of her house are tent poles covered with tarp. A ripped mattress covers half the floor area. Dirty pots sit by the remains of a campfire, and a blue dress hangs from a rope tied between a pole and a tree.

“It’s better than being up there in an alley,” she said. “You can smoke down here. You can smoke cigarettes, drink wine. You live in a shelter, you have to be in bed by 9 and up by 6.”

Police officers rarely hassle them in their territory, she said. “They want us down here,” she said. “They don’t want us up there.”

Plainclothes and uniformed officers patrol the area “regularly” in cars, on foot and by bicycle, Lt. Farrar said, “in proportion to calls for service.” Calls for service, however, are rare, and arrests in the area have been low.

Crime and arrest reports for the police district that includes the river bottom show nine of 112 arrests were made in the Hobo Jungle area since January. From January to December, 1989, 15 arrests were made in the river bottom. Many were for public drunkenness, said Revis Robinson, supervisor of the Ventura Police Department’s crime analysis unit.

“We arrest a lot more drunk people coming out of bars than we probably do in Hobo Jungle just because we don’t get complaints from people in Hobo Jungle,” Robinson said. “I don’t know if there’s really more crime down there.”

The people who live in the river bottom violate no city ordinances with their structures, said Carol Green, a spokeswoman for the city manager.

State, city and county officials are not quite sure how much acreage is occupied by the pitched tents and lawn chairs, but many place the number of people living there above 100.

“I mean, how many ants are in an anthill,” Price said.

Regardless of the number, several people in the riverbed said they regard themselves as family and resented learning that Moore was wanted as an alleged child molester.

In Silver’s camp Thursday morning a small group joined the 46-year-old Washington native and his wife, Sharon Foster, whom they call Ma, on the torn chairs and a couch gathered in a circle near their tent. A three-foot-high wall of dusty green wine bottles framed one corner of their camp.

“We’re probably all running away from something,” said 39-year-old Butch Ranquist. “But we’re not down here to hurt people.”

Foster nodded. “One bad apple makes the whole bunch look bad.”

The homeless range from families in financial trouble to the mentally ill to those who choose to drift as a way of life. Many of the river-bottom residents seem to be drifters, said Sue Sturtevant, business director for Project Understanding, an organization that helps feed and shower the homeless.

“If you didn’t have anywhere else to go it doesn’t sound that bad,” Sturtevant said. “I think I’d rather be in this riverbed then on whatever street it is in Los Angeles where all the drugs are.

“It hasn’t rained in so long, so there’s no water in the river. And the price is right.”

River-bottom dwellers say the Jungle affords them anonymity, privacy and the freedom to drink and to come and go as they please. A minister comes to recite prayers on Tuesdays, and last summer many residents attended a couple’s riverbed wedding reception.

Several men have dug holes for shelter under the Main Street bridge. They are affectionately called trolls by those in the riverbed. Into a space about as large as a pick-up truck bed, Clyde Simkins, 61, has hauled two ragged sofas and a bed. Discarded shelves line his walls, and the remnants of a shopping cart make a door for his dwelling.

“The fact that there are elaborate camps down there . . . is a positive testimony to human spirit,” said Nancy Nazario, homeless ombudsman for the county Public Social Services Agency. “People tend to like a territory that they can have an illusion of control over. I don’t know what homelessness in this county would look like if we didn’t have it.”

Nazario, who reports the county’s total homeless population at about 2,000, said the river bottom has a bigger proportion of single homeless, many with alcohol abuse problems.

Thursday morning, a few men roused Silver from bed and handed him a can of beer. Between sips he twisted his graying beard and eventually pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket to toss among the group. The men and few women chided one another about their habits and their pasts.

“We take care of each other and that’s more than the people up town do,” Foster said. “They’ve got their houses and their money, and they don’t care about each other.”