A Toast to the Folks Who Live on What Used to Be Hills

Cook’s Corner may be as good a place as any in Orange County from which to reflect. It’s a little biker bar with a fry cook, two pool tables, country music on the jukebox and sawdust on the floor.

Anchored at the intersection two of the county’s most prominent roads--The Way Things Used to Be and The Way They Shall Be--Cook’s Corner therefore offers easy access to both. The beauty of the place is that if you don’t like what you see, you can at least calm yourself with the comforts provided by gazing into a shot glass.

Head off north from Cook’s, where El Toro road dissolves into Santiago Canyon Road, and you can look into as pretty a country as you’ll see around here, the kind of natural beauty you tend to forget exists if you’re stuck all day in an office. The splendor of the scenery lulls you into thinking that no one would ever want to disfigure it.

If you’d rather head east from Cook’s, up Live Oak Canyon Road and with Trabuco Canyon off to your left, you’re similarly hard pressed to picture anything being built over there. For one thing, it’s hard to see. The branches of the trees that grow on both sides of the narrow winding road bend toward the middle, nearly forming a canopy over your head. Thus shielded and semi-convinced you’re in some kind of natural preserve, you can delude yourself into thinking that no bulldozer could ever find this place. Or want to.

How silly. Bulldozers have noses that would shame the best of the bloodhounds, and if there is some undeveloped land to be sniffed out in Orange County, rest assured they will find it.

Hello, Trabuco Canyon.

The Board of Supervisors has given the go-ahead for up to 2,700 homes in the canyon, a decision that even conservationists applauded as thoughtful. Their reasoning apparently was that the previous plans would have done substantially more damage to the aesthetics of the areas, and, well, 2,700 homes sprinkling the hillsides aren’t as bad as 2,701.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe this assortment of 2,700 or however-many homes will enhance the natural beauty of the canyon or preserve it.

If you want a preview, however, continue farther along Live Oak Canyon Road away from Cook’s until it becomes Trabuco Canyon Road and then Plano Trabuco. Get to the intersection of Plano Trabuco and Las Amigas and gaze off into the hillsides and ridgelines to the east. You’ll see what development has done to the landscape.

I suppose the residents there consider what they have a neighborhood, although the houses look more like knickknacks placed on shelves. It’s by no means the ugliest or most lifeless-looking assortment of housing in the county; it’s just one of many.

Down below their neighborhood, a new strip mall is opening, with all the signs of urban progress: a Subway sandwich shop and Blockbuster video store are among the adornments. The retail center is so new that pennants announcing “Grand Opening” still flap in the breeze.

I walked around the area Thursday, simultaneously marveling at what the countryside must have looked like before the houses were built and lamenting what it looks like now. To those who live there, it’s hard to begrudge them--they’ve bought into a little section of paradise that, even with the permanent natural disfigurement caused by their homes, still beats my block hands down.

They are, quite obviously, the winners in all this--along with the builders, who say with a straight face how they feel for the environment, even as they continually submit plans that have to be scaled back because of their deleterious impact on the land. Left unchecked, one suspects, the builders would leave Southern California with a topography resembling that of Iowa.

Slowly but surely, we have acquiesced to this transformation. The only muted protest to it shows in the latest Orange County Annual Survey done by Mark Baldassare and Cheryl Katz at UC Irvine. Their findings from their 10th annual survey indicate that 57% think growth regulations aren’t strict enough. In 1982, that figure was 40%.

So God bless the builders and the people who move into their homes.

Let’s raise a glass to them from the sanctuary of the bar at Cook’s Corner, a conveniently placed stepping-off point to see what canyons look like untouched by man and what they look like after the bulldozers come.

A toast, indeed.

And, bartender, make mine a double this time.