Way Out There : An overnight stay in the boonies tests the undeniable fantasy of living 43 miles away from Los Angeles.

The house has been up for sale a year now. One potential buyer, on a drive “upcountry” from suburban Los Angeles a week after the riots, fell in love with it upon sight and offered $500,000 cash, on the spot.

No deal. Red Bennett, owner, builder and occupant of the house, is holding out for something closer to his asking price of $775,000.

“I just feel,” says Bennett, “that somebody’s going to come along and see it and really know that this is the right house for them, and then buy it for the right price. It’s not for everybody, but somebody’s out there for whom it’s perfect.”

OK. Consider the house: a rather ambitious, suburban-style neo-Georgian of 4,000 square feet, with ceramic-tiled gourmet kitchen, eat-in solarium, three-car garage, trash compactor, satellite-dish TV, and every other conceivable amenity, save a swimming pool or tennis court.

But the thing that makes it “not for everybody” has nothing to do with the house, which might just as well appear in subdivided Thousand Oaks or newer East Ventura.

It has to do with location. Red Bennett’s house is, he will plainly say, “in the boonies.”

It sits on 2.2 acres, smack in the center of a 102-year-old olive grove, in Piru Canyon, half a mile off the paved Piru Canyon Road. But these two meager acres, circled in barbed wire, form an island in a sea of empty land: 6,500 acres of surrounding basin and range owned by Texaco and leased to ranchers. For this reason, the dirt road to Bennett’s house passes through two cattle gates and one--bububububump--cattle grid. With a bridge over Piru Creek to cross, as well, you just can’t get in or out in much under five minutes.

The setting evokes Death Valley: chokingly dry terrain blotched, along the meandering creek, by lush green willow and framed, to the east and west, by treeless sulfureous mountains vaulting more than 1,000 feet from the sandy canyon floor.

Piru Canyon, as a result, is its own topographic world reflecting its own golden light, sprouting its own lost plants, echoing its own haunting sounds. It is, if stark is your taste, breathtakingly beautiful. It is also, if city ways are your habit, unrelentingly alien.

Bennett’s wife, Ann, notes that everyone who learns of her isolated residence asks: “ ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ ”

Neither she nor Red is. But then Ann Bennett understands how the unknown scares people and thus takes the long view on such matters.

“You know,” she says, “you have to really live in it before you can absorb it.”

*

The boonies. It’s the undeniable fantasy of so many who sit in steaming traffic, listen to ill-tempered neighbors and roaring streets, negotiate crowds at Ralphs checkout lanes. Who hasn’t said: Isn’t it time we pack it in and head for the country? Who, for that matter, hasn’t spied the “Country Properties” listings in the Sunday classifieds?

Bill Seavey understands this. He runs a Sierra Madre-based service called The Greener Pastures Institute, which, besides holding seminars in Los Angeles on relocation to remote areas, publishes a 2,000-circulation newspaper for those thinking about it.

“A lot of people have just reached threshold,” Seavey says. “The smog, the crime, a sense of not having control over their communities anymore--it tips the balance for many people. And many people just want to scale down to a simpler life in a smaller place.”

Sometimes, a smaller place means a smaller town--say, 25,000 people, with a hospital and neighborhoods free of urban pressures. In this sense Piru Canyon is not exactly the kind of place Seavey, in his $60 one-hour consultation, would advise an exhausted city-slicker to flee to. Piru Canyon claims a mere sprinkling of inhabitants, with greater Piru, three to five miles away, boasting about 1,100. Piru is thus not prime Greener Pastures territory.

But Red Bennett is self-reliant in the extreme and made his move to Piru Canyon 15 years ago--long before there was a Greener Pastures Institute to aid more citified clients. A former senior staff engineer with the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, Bennett desired to leave the suburbs and change his work: to find a life he could control better in a place without distraction. He and his wife run the highly successful Bennett’s Honey Farm, at the base of Lake Piru and two miles from their house. For all this, they are only 43 miles from Los Angeles.

But they could not be farther away: Practically, socially, psychologically. Their house is emblematic of this isolation. It is hardly visible from the road, appearing as a tiny white rooftop amid vividly green olive trees that clump up like so many heads of broccoli. Right behind the house is a steep mountain, and converging downward upon it are deep gashes, ravines that appear (falsely) to drain violently into the back yard.

It is precisely the severity of its situation that Red Bennett feels will sell the house. It’s what drew actors Paul Hogan and Linda Kozlowski here for five weeks during the nearby filming of “Crocodile Dundee.” “They wanted peace and quiet when they weren’t shooting,” says Bennett.

It’s also why the property has been so popular for wilderness film sets--for reasons both bucolic and eerie. The 1988 remake of the 1958 camp horror classic, “The Blob,” was filmed in front of the house, at the bridge over Piru Creek.

Bennett and his wife would in fact love to stay. But their two children are grown, and the house is just too large for two people who, as Bennett says, “really only live in three of the rooms.”

This reporter asked to move in, to “live in it to absorb it,” as Ann Bennett would say--if only for a quick overnight, alone in the house.

It would be a test, at once sublime, comic and frightening, of the fantasy--a reality check against freeway notions of the remote life.

Nothing gently rural, no greener pasture in sight: just brown earth, a vast empty canyon and a house.

Welcome to 1986 Piru Canyon Road, Piru.

*

Clambering over the barbed wire fence out back, Red Bennett turns to a visitor wishing to hike up the mountain.

“You know there are rattlesnakes,” he says.

Check.

Bennett assures the visitor that it’s OK to walk anywhere, even beyond the barbed wire--no need to fear man or animal out here. The barbed wire, in fact, is only there to keep ranchland cattle off the lawn and out of the garden.

By midafternoon, the Bennetts are off.

A 4 p.m. walk of “the neighborhood”--beyond the barbed wire, 300 yards down the dirt driveway to the creek and westward along the creek--reveals the startling fecundity of a place that, from afar, looks parched and lifeless. And yet, randomly thrusting up through the cracked earth are mint-green, rubber-skinned, broad-leafed plants that grow into 6- and 8-foot skeletal trees, exploding with canary yellow trumpet flowers; their wet surging life stands in such contrast to the dusty monochrome setting as to make them lurid apparitions, like so many lost Halloween party guests.

Dotting the fields and creek bed are smaller, delicate green bushes that sprout pods so laden, so outsized and heavy, that they hang downward, pouchlike, revealing at the seams vivid blackberry fruit.

And the creek itself, its alluvial banks pocked by the hoof marks of thirsty cattle, boils with minnows: What kind of fish will they become? And what, precisely, will they feed?

Up the stark brown mountain is yet another microworld of the living: flowering low brush that sinks merciless pin-sized spikes into the ankles; countless holes bored by rodents; broad clumps of chalky green cacti, some of it freshly broken and bleeding clear fluid and some of it scarred, brown and rotting; and extraterrestrial 2-foot-high globes of green spike-shaped petals, each a miniature Fourth of July explosion sprouting a 6-foot-tall skinny pole topped, hideously, with a pineapple-shaped lantern of white flowers. This last lost yucca goes by the name: Lord’s Prayer. With thanks, no rattlesnakes appear.

The house shrinks with the ascent.

And then the place is revealed, yet again: a tiny camp in the hollow of a vast cavern in the Earth’s crust. While the Bennett place is grand and secure by all suburban standards, out here it is just like all the desert’s individual things of discovery: a speck.

The problem, clearly, is one of scale. The closer the view, the more life-abundant, voracious, reckless-in evidence; the longer the view--and Piru Canyon presents a demanding quantity of space to comprehend--the more lifeless it all seems. For better and worse, this equation runs squarely at odds with the one-note aesthetic of a nicely trimmed back yard or a pampered neighborhood park or, even, a relatively manicured farm.

And so, though night hasn’t yet fallen, it is already clear: The Bennett house is no standard country home, no mannered retreat, no charming hideaway on which to shoot a Ralph Lauren Polo ad. Instead it is a station in the wilderness. As a result, the house becomes all the more opulent for its trappings--and, depending upon your tastes, either incongruous in its setting or daringly sublime for its unstinting devotion to comfort in a hard place.

Either way, eating will help. A large animal bone, cracked dry, its sockets still decipherable despite decades of dirt and water and sun and heat, is discovered on the way back down the mountain to dinner.

At 7 p.m., on the rear patio at the base of the mountain, the barbecue is fired up for grilled vegetables and tri-tip, off-the-bone.

Light softens. The sky begins its slow two-hour shift from peach to a chalky purple wash, crowded to the north by darkening, looming saw-tooth mountains. Wind stops. Sounds become sharp and individual, no longer masked by the constant tearing of hot afternoon air through brush and trees.

And then, suddenly--BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR--the sound of an airplane propeller, off to the side of the house somewhere. Did Bennett neglect to mention an airstrip?

Walking into the olive grove at the edge of the driveway reveals these things: POOF! Straight up overhead, dozens--could it be 100s?--of quail rise from the trees in a roiling cloud, blotting out the purple sky, and, in a deed that would hardly match the ostentation of their leave-taking, land on a tree but 50 feet away.

At 10:30 p.m., it’s time for a run into town--a beer with locals, perhaps, at the Blue Bird tavern--largely for the purpose of returning to the house at night. Of course, the Blue Bird’s shut, as is everything else at such a citified hour. The drive back up Piru Canyon Road at 11 sets the tone: The dome of light above Piru--ambient light from homes in town--soon drops off, followed, very quickly, by the disappearance of street lights. Only a mile out the car and its intensified headlight beams punch straight into what seems a black curtain of darkness.

Three miles in, the gate--a heavy, tubular steel cattle gate--appears on the right, and getting through it recalls so many B-movies. Park the car, fiddle with the lock in the headlights, and then EEEEEEEAAAAAAWWWW--unearthly creaking as the gate swings open. Pull forward, park again, get out, and discover that nothing is visible to the unadjusted eye unless it is in the headlights. Fetch a flashlight, relock the gate. You’re in.

Chained in.

Somewhere, idiotically, cows moo.

The half-mile drive in to the house is grainy black-and-white: gravel, ruts, clumps of grass in the headlights, sagebrush raking the bottom of the car, the low-grade anxiety of not knowing what, if anything, will appear beyond the next 5 m.p.h curve or, KA-PUMPH, over the bridge. The final gate: barbed wire, smack in front of the house, which stands tall and white and empty and curtainless in the headlights.

The view from the upstairs balcony is calming and astonishing: out across the entire canyon, the mountains a jagged black outline across a moonless sky increasingly lit by stars. Night progresses, and the Big Dipper will glide across most of the peaks, from west to east, barely nicking each of them.

At midnight, cows moo and screech with such vigor that the best of the squeals return in echo. It is time for a walk down to the river, to a place where the living drink, where vanilla sand sprouts lunar plants, where dust bowl stillness is mocked by gurgling water.

The flashlight will stay off--it’s only for those moments when the eye can’t decipher sure footing.

Within minutes, within 100 yards, at 12:10 a.m., from out of the dark, a fog-horn blast to the chest: UUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Standing, but 10 feet to the right, beneath a tree laden with clumps of hard fresh olives, is a confused cow. Frozen in the pathetic yellow beam of a flashlight, she repeats her cry. Heartbeats, again, are audible.

Onward, to the river.

Almost.

At 12:12 a.m., a paltry 20 yards past the cow, as eyes readjust to darkness, a new set of rapid-fire cries: YIP-YIP-YIP-YIP-YIP, AAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Where is it? At the river? This (gulp) side of the river? Or (please) farther out? It’s a high-pitched commotion, sounding like 20 beasts but no doubt a pack of three or five coyotes shopping for dinner. The cries echo. Then, new cries from behind, from the opposite direction: Another pack answers.

The keeper of the audible heartbeat, only steps from the river but between two coyote packs and who knows what else, retreats to the house.

The backyard patio is stunning at 1:24 a.m. as a half-moon rises over the mountain of unseen rattlesnakes. The canyon floods with moonlight; things are immeasurably brighter. Cows moo, coyotes yip and howl, and Heaven knows what else lurks.

It’s not the city, not the suburbs, not the country, not in any imagined dimension a “greener pasture.” It’s Piru Canyon, its own savage and beautiful world, and when 2 a.m. hits, sleep can hardly be more sound than this, behind barbed wire in a big locked house in front of the mountain with the weeping cacti and old bones.

*

Red Bennett, upon learning of his guest’s nighttime itinerary, would ask:

“See any bear?”

Bear? Thank you, no.

Black bears are on the comeback in Ventura County, Bennett says, and while he is not pestered at the house as he is with them up the road at his honey business, one will “roam on through” once in a great while. The last sighting was effortless: in the back yard, on the lawn.

Janice Bennett, one of Red and Ann’s two daughters, upon hearing of a visitor’s stay, would ask:

“Did you see the mountain lion?”

Ahem. Mountain lion? No.

Actually, neither has she--or any of the Bennetts, for that matter. But a few years back, a friend who was approaching the house, did sight a “she lion, just walking up the driveway.” How, well, rustic.

Janice Bennett then notes that two bobcats have been sighted and are considered to maintain residence within commuting distance to the house.

She makes these comments with the total calm of her father and is, after all, her own evidence of unscathed survival in these parts. So the strange suspension of logic finally emerges: that a city slicker living amid real crime and real statistical danger would feel, perhaps for the first time, real threat in the desolate, practical absence of it.

The question, finally, must be asked. Do people other than city slickers experience fear in remote places?

Janice Bennett cites the unknown and generously concedes: “Oh, sure. You hear things. Last summer, one night real late I heard a horrible scream from down by the river--it sounded human--and it just scared me so that I up and bolted the door, locked all the windows.

“Next day, though, we didn’t find anything down there.”