Crowds, Crime Traded for Clean Air, Openness : Agua Dulce: Angelenos take to commute in return for healthier environment and more room.

Tari Cook says she’ll never forget those stifling summer nights back in 1985 when she couldn’t leave her bedroom window open for fear of attack from the notorious Nightstalker. That fear, she says, epitomized for her and her husband, Carl, 37, a fireman, everything that was wrong with suburban Los Angeles. Soon after, the couple sold their Granada Hills home and with their infant and toddler sons, moved to the rural Antelope Valley town of Agua Dulce.

These days the family contends with a different kind of intruder, namely wild rabbits that dine on their front lawn and relatively harmless California scorpions that occasionally pay in-house visits.

“My biggest worries out here are the snakes, scorpions and centipedes, but at least they don’t disguise themselves as anything but what they are,” Cook, 38, says with a relieved chuckle.

The couple paid $263,000 in 1987 for their 2,100-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style home situated on five acres in central Agua Dulce.

“We wanted to get out of the smog,” Cook says, “We wanted a healthier environment for the kids and we just wanted room.”

That’s a sentiment shared by a growing number of expatriate-urban and suburban Angelenos who are trading the crowds, crime and congestion for the clean air and open space of this affluent, high-desert town 40 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.

About 5,000 people live in Agua Dulce, a 27-square-mile community of mostly custom homes that sits at an altitude of 3,000 feet. Its northern and southern boundaries border the chaparral-covered hills of the Angeles National Forest. The town shares its western border with the Santa Clarita Valley community of Canyon Country and its eastern border with the town of Acton.

But unlike the communities surrounding it, Agua Dulce’s rural flavor is protected by strict growth controls established by Agua Dulce voters in 1984. Detailed in the special “community standards district,” the controls ensure, among other things, that homes are built on minimum 2.5-acre parcels and that the town’s roads have wider than average shoulders for children and horses.

The homes in Agua Dulce are mostly custom built, except for two small developments, and are serviced by well water and septic tanks.

The average home is about 2,000 square feet and costs in the high $200,000s to the low $300,000s. Vacant 2.5-acre parcels run about $130,000 to $175,000.

“The people who buy here are usually second-, third- and fourth-time home buyers because the price is up there,” says R. R. Gable realtor Linda Kirk, also a resident of Agua Dulce.

“It’s an absolutely unique area,” says Century 21 realtor Bernice Canutt, who is also a resident. “We have no curbs and gutters and no street lights so that the moon and stars are brilliant. And we’re higher, drier and cooler than the rest of the Antelope Valley.”

Every winter Agua Dulce gets a sprinkling of snow, with an occasional heavy snowstorm dumping a couple of feet every four or five years.

Agua Dulce, which is Spanish for “sweet water,” was named in 1772 by Spanish Explorer Pedro Fages, who was captain of the Presidio in San Diego. He discovered the water, which residents today still claim to be sweet, while refreshing himself during a long chase after six deserters of his army who ran away with Indian women. Fages never did find the soldiers.

In the 1860s, Agua Dulce Springs became a main water stop on the wagon supply route to gold miners in Acton. During that time it was also a haven for bank robbers and outlaws, including the infamous Tiburcio Vasquez, who for 20 years had a higher price on his head than Jesse James.

Vasquez, known for robbing whole towns, such as Kingston and Hollister in the San Joaquin Valley, would hide out in the rock formations of what is now his namesake: Vasquez Rocks County Park, the backdrop for many movies.

These days, those escaping to Agua Dulce are entrepreneurs, film industry executives, stuntmen and free-lancers of all kinds who have “high-stress, high-pressure jobs” and want no part of city life after hours, Canutt says.

And that’s exactly what they get in Agua Dulce. The town, which sandwiches Sierra Highway, has only one small frontier-style “business center” along Agua Dulce Canyon Road that’s home to several realty offices, a hay and grain shop, a small general store, a cafe and two restaurants. Another small general store can be found several miles away on Sierra Highway and another cafe is at the small Agua Dulce airport. Those wanting gasoline or a bank have to go outside town limits.

This rural flavor proved the attraction for Walt Disney animator Skip Morgan.

“I really like watching the sun come up and go down and the feeling of not being hemmed in,” says Morgan, who bought his 2,000 square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath home in 1988 for $250,000.

Morgan, a former Thousand Oaks resident, says his 80-mile, round-trip commute to his Burbank office takes about 50 minutes each way and is an improvement over his former commute along the Ventura Freeway.

A few acres away, within view of Morgan’s home, are neighbors Bruce and Debi Nahim, who in October, 1990, moved into their newly built 4,300-square-foot country-style home on five-acres.

The couple, with their 3- and 6-year-old sons, moved from Canyon Country.

“Canyon Country got too crowded for us,” says Bruce Nahim, a Beverly Hills business and real estate attorney, “so we moved out here for the open space and quiet.”

They paid $175,000 for the land and $450,000 to grade the property, put in a well and build their house and shelter for their extended family of six dogs and two horses.

“It’s a great place to raise kids,” says Debi Nahim. There’s a before and after school 4-H program for school-age children as well as a private preschool for the youngest residents that is equipped with computers for them.

Grammar-school-age children attend Agua Dulce School in town, while junior high students are bused to nearby High-Desert Junior High in Acton--both of which have been nominated “California Distinguished Schools” for excellence or improvement in educational programs. Students must travel to Palmdale, 20 miles east, for high school.

Still, it’s an improvement from days past. Longtime resident Doreetha Daniels, 75, remembers when her children traveled to Lancaster for high school.

Daniels moved to Agua Dulce in 1947 with her now-deceased husband and two sons, when the town was just “a spot in the road.” The family moved from Santa Monica because her youngest son, now 49, suffered asthma and needed the dry desert air. They bought the 25-acre parcel and built a three-bedroom home she still lives in for a sum she can no longer recall.

“There were maybe a couple hundred people here,” Daniels remembers, “and most of them commuted to Los Angeles to work.”

She and her husband were among them, together making the daily trek to Santa Monica, where both worked at McDonnell Douglas. Back then there was no Antelope Valley Freeway. “But it was nice,” she recalls. “My husband and I shared the driving. He drove in the mornings and I drove at night and we got time alone to talk over everything.”

Daniels says the biggest changes she’s witnessed are the number of new homes, which grows by about 17 houses a year.

“You can’t stop the progress,” she concedes. “But the thing I resent is many of the people move out here to get away from the city and then they want to move the city up here with them. They want the paved roads, street lights and all the amenities of town when they move to the country.”

Still, she says, she has no plans to move away from where the air is clean and crime is minimal.

L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy Doug Duncan lives in Agua Dulce and is the only deputy assigned to a 110-square-mile, mostly rural region that includes Agua Dulce. He says most of his calls involve property-line disputes, shootings, dumpings and occasional burglaries, “about one a month.”

“It’s a small town, everyone knows everybody and I think that helps keep crime down,” Duncan says. “People know if there’s a stranger in the area.”

And that appeals to older residents, like Kay Clawsen, who first bought property here in 1952--an $8,000, two-bedroom weekend getaway from Glendale.

Clawsen and her husband, John, both in their 80s, now live in a 1,300-square-foot mobile home on a quarter-acre lot in Casa Dulce Estates, Agua Dulce’s only mobile home park. And Kay says even with all its growth, there’s little to complain about. “Agua Dulce has not grown up junky and there are lots of wonderful people here.”

Tari Cook agrees: “It’s a true community where people know each other, chat with each other and are involved and you just don’t get that in the Valley.”

At a Glance Population

1991 estimate: 4,985

1980-91 change: +164%

Median age: 32.4 years

Annual income

Per capita: 19,311

Median household: 59,382

Household distribution

Less than $30,000: 15%

$30,000 - $50,000: 22.1%

$50,000 - $75,000: 34.6%

$75,000 - $100,000: 18%

$100,000 + 10.3%