Back From the Ranch : Television: After four years of shearing sheep on her Valley farm and fishing for salmon in Alaska, she returns to Channel 7 Nov. 1 to anchor the 4 p.m. news.

Few people would give up a high-paying job as one of Southern California’s most popular TV anchors to learn how to shear and slaughter sheep, spin yarn, make paper and can food on a small suburban L.A. farm. Nor to spend summers without phones, television, washing machines or stores on an isolated, bear-infested island in Alaska.

Christine Lund did.

“I don’t want to be thought of as a kook,” she says. “But resourcefulness and learning skills and working with your hands, these hands, is something I have always admired terrifically. And to have been plopped down in the middle of Los Angeles with this wonderful job, I had a sense of becoming a caricature. I was sated, a glutton for everything that the material world presents us with.”

So in 1986, Lund walked away from her job as one of KABC Channel 7’s news stars after helping to lead the station to a longstanding position of dominance.

But after four years of spinning yarn at her eight-acre ranch in the San Fernando Valley and spending the summers with her two daughters hauling salmon out of the bay on her Alaskan island, Lund has decided that the material world is not so bad. Beginning Nov. 1, she will return to the air at Channel 7 to anchor the 4 p.m. news.

Now in her 40s but still possessed of the white-blond hair and crisp blue eyes that once made her an anchor superstar, Lund says she is eager to once again expand the parameters of her world.

“It was a wonderful four years in which I did all of these domestic things so hard. I accomplished a lot of goals. And before, when Sarah and Dana (her daughters, ages 9 and 7) were so small, I wanted to experience the area that they were aware of. Now their awareness is vastly expanded. They are very conscious of the world. And I think my going back into the world is legitimate and positive for them and for me.”

Four years ago, though, the news business had become a rather negative world for all of them. During ratings periods when anchors actually get out from behind the studio desk to report special mini-docs on hot topics, Lund had worked on several series on domestic violence and child abuse. The horror, the ruined lives, the children “held hostage and summarily destroyed in vast numbers,” she says, her eyes welling up with tears as she remembers it, consumed her thoughts all the time, seriously compromising the time she spent at home with her daughters.

She knew she was missing things with her children and she began asking herself, for what? Compared to the social workers and counselors she found quietly working with abused children behind the headlines to help heal some of the wounds, Lund’s own job, she says, began to seem meaningless.

So, blessed with the financial riches that years in television had helped her procure, she dropped out to work with her hands, to learn self-reliance, to become a full-time mother, to experience some basic human connection to nature.

“People thrive on that. I thrive on it, my kids thrive on it. I always hear them say, ‘Gee, I really miss Alaska.’ I never hear them say, ‘I miss the traffic jams’ or some other city thing. This is an important part of people, it always has been. It makes us all healthier and more positive and more cheerful and more resilient. That’s awfully good for anyone.”

When the cheerier, healthier Lund sent out feelers about returning to TV, at least four local stations ponied up serious financial offers in an effort to lure her in front of their cameras.

First, KCAL Channel 9 pursued her to head up its expanded prime-time news effort, but the station finally settled on Jerry Dunphy, Lund’s one-time co-anchor at KABC, and a bevy of out-of-town faces. More recently, KCOP Channel 13 made Lund what a station executive called a “very lucrative offer, perhaps even more than what she eventually got from KABC,” to spearhead its own revamped news effort at 10 p.m. KNBC Channel 4 also wanted Lund as the centerpiece for a new 9 a.m. news program that the station has been developing.

Lund settled on Channel 7, she says, for two reasons. First, “it’s home. It’s familiar. I have some wonderful relationships with the people there and it’s like a great big kitchen with lots of chefs. I love that. And KABC has always seemed more flexible to me than some of the other stations. Something happens, they just go out and do it. They don’t sit around and think about whether they should send out a crew or not. They just do it. Sure we make mistakes, but that’s what makes it a terrifically exciting business. Sometimes you get there and it’s just great.”

But the most important factor in choosing KABC was her children. Working at Channels 9 or 13 would have meant being on the air at 9 or 10 p.m., “the middle of the night as far as my kids were concerned,” she says. The morning show at Channel 4 would have meant leaving the house around the time her children were just waking up. Anchoring the 4 p.m. news allows her to see her daughters off to school in the morning and to get home in time to participate in the family’s dinner-time gossip.

Visiting Lund at her home, even when she is dressed up in her anchor finest for publicity photos, it is hard to picture her as a high-powered newswoman. She tells visitors that she is addicted to spinning yarn as she demonstrates the process on one of her many spinning wheels.

“It’s worse than heroin, and women back through the ages have known about it,” she says as she stares at the whirling wheel and slides for a minute into a blissed-out trance.

Her eldest daughter arrives home from school, disappointed that Mom is home to prevent her from sneaking in a new rabbit from the pound to join the menagerie of ducks, geese, chickens, sheep, dogs and horses that inhabit their little city farm. The younger one runs through the immaculately rustic living room carrying a white pet rat.

“I have a greater sense of calm now,” Lund says, “and I do think that will help when I go back on the air. I have a better perspective on the world and what’s important. I hope that comes through.”

Though she doesn’t permit her children to watch television--she’d rather see them playing and dreaming--Lund has been watching local news herself during this long hiatus. She knows its limitations: that it can at best be a “headline service”; that it too often aims to be “too slick and too glib.” But, while she truly wanted out four years ago, so much so that she went back to graduate school these last few years and is halfway toward her marriage and family counselor’s license, she also says she has a renewed belief in the value of television news, especially since fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers these days.

“I do think we need to mature and become more useful, more meaningful. Television has sometimes become too dependent on all the electronic gadgetry, become so slick for slick’s sake, that we sometimes forget who we’re talking to. Sure, we’re the shovelers. We shovel this bit of information and then that one and drop it in front of them. But I think that’s important to people.

“What I love about being on the air live, what I have missed these last few years, is that feeling that I am talking straight to someone out there on the other side of the screen who has just come home from work and is putting his feet up and asking us to put some order to all the chaos he sees out there. I’m happy to help him do that.”

BACKGROUND Christine Lund spent 13 years anchoring the news at KABC Channel 7, beginning in 1973. During much of that time, KABC’s newscasts drew the largest audiences in the Los Angeles area. In 1986, feeling “burned out” and wanting to spend more time with her young daughters, she tried to negotiate a reduction in her work schedule, failed and so left the TV business entirely.