People of the Forest : Los Padres: In privately owned pockets within the territory, solitude seekers live on the land, far from the madding crowds.

The wilderness world of Mike Caylor begins anew every morning “at the crack of 9” in a remote corner of Ventura County.

Leaving the warmth of a creaky double bed, the 43-year-old former oil-field worker lumbers out of his dilapidated cabin and into a scene of pine-covered mountains and sublime solitude.

For the rest of the daylight hours, he has no trouble amusing himself in the absence of neighbors, telephones and cable TV.

His dog, however, is easily bored.

As Caylor stands under an ancient oak, a young pit bull named Rocky yelps for attention. Sending Rocky into canine delirium, Caylor grabs a .22 rifle and fires at a target several hundred yards across a meadow. Churning her stubby legs, Rocky chases happily after the slug, a futile game of fetch that nonetheless manages to entertain the dog for a few precious minutes.

Although Rocky appears to be going stir-crazy living literally in the middle of nowhere, Caylor is blissfully content staying put at his secluded mountain home for months at a stretch.

A bearlike man of simple tastes--Louis L’Amour novels, Malt-O Meal breakfasts--Caylor enjoys living alone in the wilderness.

“I can behave like an old hippie without offending anyone,” he said.

For the past seven years, Caylor has scraped by as the unpaid caretaker on a 326-acre private cattle ranch set among 50,000 acres of leased grazing land inside Los Padres National Forest. According to the U.S. Forest Service, he is one of several dozen modern mountain men and women living in pockets of private land throughout Ventura County’s 556,627 acres of national forest.

Their hard-scrabble lifestyle has provided a refuge from the stress of city living. But isolation, loneliness and an almost total lack of contemporary conveniences are the trade-offs for freedom, independence and individuality. It is, however, a price these forest people say they are willing to pay.

“Living out here is very much of a fulfilling experience,” said Steve Gore, who lives on a 40-acre ranch in Rose Valley, a recreation paradise off California 33, about 40 minutes north of Ojai. “It teaches you to be self-reliant, it builds self-esteem and puts you back in touch with your roots.”

People come to the mountains for many reasons. Gore and his brother Bill are former Texans who wanted to return to wide-open spaces. Their neighbors, Slim and Sally Collins, left Simi Valley to get away from suburban sprawl. Caylor said he moved to the backcountry to keep himself out of trouble.

“If I was living in town, I’d probably have two or three DUIs by now,” said Caylor, an admitted alcoholic. “I can’t hurt anybody out here. Except myself.”

Pintos and Wine

Caylor lives a primitive life straight out of the old West. Answerable only to himself, he can go days without showering, wear his hair in a long ponytail, prance around shirtless and manage to survive on the bare essentials, which Caylor defines as “pinto beans, dog food and wine.”

With an empty propane tank and no electricity for refrigeration--Caylor has a gasoline generator but doesn’t use it--he makes do on a diet that would torment a gourmet: pinto beans prepared a few dozen ways. If it weren’t for the kindness of friends, who drop by frequently with supplies, Caylor would forget what red meat tastes like.

An ex-Seabee, Caylor is used to Spartan conditions, but at least the Navy had running water and heat. To shower, Caylor has to warm water on a wood-burning stove and pour it over his head. He claimed he “can do real good on five gallons.”

Although Caylor hasn’t seen “Falling Down”--nor any movie released this year, for that matter--he can identify with the Michael Douglas character, who snaps under the pressures and frustrations of urban life. Cities and strangers make Caylor uncomfortable. He hasn’t ventured out of his mountain oasis since last October. Even Ojai, usually described in tourist brochures as charming and bucolic, makes him claustrophobic.

“When I go to town, I see people with no sense of humor who don’t smile and are always in a hurry,” said Caylor, recoiling at the prospect of driving an hour into Ojai. “I can’t wait to get back home.”

Caylor looked around at a seemingly infinite vista of mountain peaks and virgin forest land. He listened, picking up nothing but the squawk of a bird. “Have you heard a horn or a siren?” he asked.

Near the summit of Pine Mountain, 5,084 feet above sea level, Caylor’s cabin sits on a rise in a large rolling meadow four miles down a rutted dirt road from California 33. Below the cabin are a couple of small outbuildings and a weathered barn with corrugated roof. Beneath a flapping American flag, a red 1966 Ford truck collects dust. Old engine parts, various doodads and worn sofas clutter the yard. A tire hangs from the oak.

“If you throw something away,” Caylor said, “you make sure not to throw it too far because you might need it some day. You have to learn to improvise out here.”

Caylor was forced to improvise last November when his girlfriend and their baby daughter visited from Bakersfield. Unexpectedly trapped by inclement weather and running out of food, Caylor spotted eight quail heading for the barn in single file. Caylor doesn’t usually hunt, but the sitting ducks wound up over an open fire, feeding his family for four days.

Michener in a Storm

Although the interior of the cabin is never going to be featured in Better Homes & Gardens, it has a cozy, earthy ambience. A copy of the Declaration of Independence, rescued from a trash bin by Caylor, hangs on a wall. In an example of cowboy chic, flypaper dangles next to a spider web. An old wooden table serves as Caylor’s “entertainment center,” which includes a four-inch battery-operated TV and a radio tuned to KLOS.

When the weather turns cold, Caylor stays under the covers all day and reads. Most of the cabin is filled with piles of National Geographic and books of various genres. Caylor will read anything except “romance and hoodoo books--the ones where the guy goes outside to pee and a tree eats him.” The scary scenario hits too close to home, he said.

Reading and walking are his two major diversions. “I get antsy when I run out of something to read,” Caylor said. “Which is why I usually save (James) Michener for the first good storm of the winter.”

Caylor, who calls himself “basically lazy,” seldom has to do any work other than haul water from a spring and repack .22 cartridges. Not many cattle are being grazed these days, which is fine with Caylor because it cuts down on flies.

Caylor’s bedroom and kitchen were erected around an old adobe building, which is now the living room. Reading from a dogeared historical pamphlet, Caylor explained how Ramon Ortega built the original room in 1849, carving the beams himself.

“He ran cattle and captured bears,” Caylor said. “He was a big-time bear hunter.”

Caylor sees himself as a spiritual descendant of pioneers like Ortega, unwashed, resourceful nonconformists doing it their way. Working in the oil fields near Bakersfield in the mid-1980s, Caylor escaped from the city after he was fired for refusing to cut his long hair.

His reasoning: “If the girls can have ponytails, so can I. But I thank God they fired me because I wouldn’t be out here today if they hadn’t,” said Caylor, who was camping in the Los Padres in 1986 when he learned about the caretaker’s cabin.

Caylor seldom visits the city, but the city often visits him. Although closure of California 33 by rock slides has cut Caylor off from his family for the last four months “and pretty much messed up my sex life,” as many as half a dozen friends drop by on weekends from the Ojai area.

The friends come to party and fire guns, attracted by the opportunity to make as much noise as possible without worrying about the police or sensitive neighbors. They also bring food and spirits, the latter reflected in the beer cans overflowing a steel drum outside the cabin.

Asked how the beer stays cold without refrigeration, Caylor said, “We drink it quick.” With no trash collection, Caylor brings the empties in for recycling about once a year.

When the weekend ends and friends leave, it’s just Caylor and Rocky, along with Rocky’s flea-bitten 1-year-old daughter A.D. (a dog). Although he refers to the animals as “my very good friends,” Caylor sometimes misses human interaction.

“But if I do get lonely,” he said, “I look in my diary and see how many people were here during the month. It’s amazing how much company I do get. It must be a challenge for them to see if they can get up here.”

While Caylor chooses a troglodyte’s existence, other forest people manage to interface with civilization.

Water in the Hills

Organic vegetable farmers who have turned into entrepreneurs, Steve Gore and his brother Bill are literally tapping the resources of the forest. Although the winding, mountainous trip from Rose Valley to Ojai is a tough haul even for cars, the Gores drive tractor trailers several times a week, taking their Mountain Sweet Water to market.

A few years ago, so the story goes, the brothers noticed water bubbling up from shale on their property. Using a homemade boring machine with a two-inch coring bit, they drilled only six or seven feet before hitting a fissure. From 3,000 feet below the surface, a geyser of artesian spring water shot through the hole. Thirty thousand gallons a day issue “from the mountains of Ojai,” their label says.

In 1988, the Gores “became the smallest licensed bottling plant in the state,” Steve said. With six employees working by hand, they bottle, cap and label as many as 200 cases a day.

The Gores had problems starting their business because they have neither a phone--even cellular phones won’t work in the mountains--nor postal service, neighborhood gas station or bank. They have to travel to Ojai for almost everything but drinking water.

Unlike Caylor, the Gores enjoy such basic amenities as a septic tank for indoor plumbing, heat from propane, water out of a 5,000-gallon holding tank and electricity from twin gasoline generators. Crime, noise and air pollution are nonexistent.

“I feel a lot better living (in Rose Valley) than I would in Ojai,” said Steve, a 45-year-old bachelor. “It’s a quality-of-life thing.”

But the ride down the mountain can sometimes seem like an eternity. Bill, 41, and his wife, Janice, have nicknamed their camper “the maternity wagon” for its reliable role in getting them to the Ventura hospital for the births of their two children.

The Gores, who moved from Woodland Hills 22 years ago, own a corner of a pastoral, 160-acre private tract that was subdivided into quadrants more than 25 years ago. Like all the 200,000 acres held privately in the 1.95-million-acre national forest, the tract was in private hands before the U.S. government cobbled the Los Padres together in 1938, and as such, the Forest Service has no jurisdiction over how it is used, an agency spokesman said.

The Gores park their three trailers next to a small production facility at one end of their property. Bill’s ranch house and Steve’s trailer are about 300 yards across a gently rising meadow. The homes overlook a corral, a barn and their neighbor’s 40-acre spread--which is not exactly representative of “the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness” John Muir wrote about 100 years ago.

Basically, it’s a junkyard.

Neighbors Slim Collins, a 51-year-old construction foreman, and his wife Sally have collected scores of gutted autos and decomposing campers as well as a noisy flock of untethered chickens since arriving in Rose Valley in 1980. Monuments to an industrialized society, the rusting steel hulks glitter in the midday sun in an otherwise pristine setting.

Sally, 50, can’t quite understand how the collection got so large, other than saying, “It just grew and grew.”

Although neighbors aren’t on top of each other in the wilderness, conflicts arise. According to both sides, the Gores and the Collinses don’t exchange baked goods, throw dinner parties or sing carols together at Christmas.

“There have been some differences,” Bill said.

The junkyard, primarily.

“For a while it seemed like it was breeding and making more,” Steve said.

The brothers’ answer to the visual pollution: “We’re planting trees,” Bill said.

A perfect wilderness solution.