County Storm Drain Channel Has Flood of Activity : Arroyo Simi: The seemingly sleepy ditch teems with life. Homeowners, homeless and passersby--as well as wildlife--use it.

Under a bridge in the Arroyo Simi, a homeless ex-Marine stretches out in his sleeping bag at night. In the afternoons, young boys on bikes careen like daredevil stunt riders. Its waters attract rabbits, red-tailed hawks and lizards.

It is a seemingly sleepy channel, but it hosts a remarkable level of activity as it snakes through Simi Valley from the Santa Susana Pass on its way to the Pacific Ocean.

The arroyo is one of Ventura County’s largest drainage ditches, carrying rainfall from Simi Valley through Moorpark along Calleguas Creek and into Mugu Lagoon.

Edged with rock in 1955 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop it from devouring any more valuable Simi Valley real estate, the county-owned channel flows from a trickle in July to nearly 20,000 cubic feet per second in a hundred-year storm. Its flow moved so fast that in a heavy rainstorm last winter, a local teen-ager almost drowned while astride a boogie board.

The Arroyo Simi also gives year-round sanctuary to birds, a tranquil trail to bicyclists, a back-yard wilderness to dozens of homeowners, a canvas to taggers and a playground to hundreds of Simi Valley kids.

To the unemployed construction worker, the arroyo has been haven and highway for part of the 1 1/2 years he has been homeless.

It is a safe place to sleep and park his bike while job-hunting, where the cops let him be, where he can move across town with anonymity.

He drags on a bummed cigarette, admiring the arroyo’s ragged path through the county.

“You can follow it. It goes all over,” says the man, 46, clean clothes and duffel coat stacked atop his rattletrap 10-speed. “It splits here and there. . .I’ve been all the way to Ventura in it.”

But he won’t give his name. The neighborhood where he lived for 13 years--before the divorce and the economy and bad luck put him on the street--is too close by, he says, and it would mortify his ex.

Most days, he looks for work. Most nights, he and a handful of other homeless arroyo men hunker around a supper fire for a ballgame on the transistor radio.

“I’m just one of those people,” he says with a shrug. “We’ve been caught in the cracks.”

Farther west, city laborers pour a concrete drainage culvert in the arroyo’s bank, which needed repair after last winter’s heavy rains chewed out a 100-foot-deep, 30-foot-high gash. County workers will finish the heavy grading later, says public works inspector Phil Neiens, overseeing the work.

“This’ll take care of it for a while,” Neiens says. “It was eating into the Little League ball field, and it was headed toward Royal Avenue.”

More Polluted Now

For many, the Arroyo Simi is a living thing.

It shapes their land. It brings hawks, lizards and rabbits to their back yards. It carries cyclists past their fences.

While her boxer barks threateningly at passersby, as do many dogs whose owners live along the arroyo, one woman proclaims her love for what most folks call “the wash.”

“You don’t have any neighbors in the back yard; it’s wonderful,” says the woman, who identified herself only as Sue, a 22-year resident of the arroyo neighborhood.

Oh, the arroyo is more polluted now, she says, nodding at the channel that ran thick with 400,000 gallons of untreated sewage per day during flooding in February, 1992.

And sometimes the 6 a.m. whinnying of horses being saddled at the park district’s equestrian center on the arroyo’s other side can be annoying, she says.

But for the most part, she says, “it’s kind of fun.” She takes particular pleasure in seeing the red-tailed hawks and possums.

Then there’s the bicycle path. It disintegrates into a half-completed trail bed of three-inch rocks behind her house, where bikers shudder past in first gear or walk, complaining.

“People ride over this, and they’re always asking me, ‘When are they going to do something about the rocks?’ Sue says. “And I tell them, ‘How would I know?’ ”

In fact, most of the path--but for the washed-out segment between Sequoia Avenue and the ball field that may not be done until next winter--should be paved by September, said Don Hunt, assistant general manager of the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District.

The district began paving the existing county service road alongside the arroyo in 1977 for the bicycle path, Hunt said.

Now the path runs 6.5 miles through Simi Valley, from the Metrolink station on the east end past Madera Road to the west, and it may one day reach Moorpark, Hunt said.

“We get moms pushing baby strollers, joggers, and in the school year obviously we get a tremendous amount of kids going back and forth to school walking or bicycling,” Hunt said.

Bikers and Walkers

“There’s a lot of people going to the commercial centers (who) use the trail as an access way” he said. “The last count I recall was between 3,000 and 4,000 a month for the bike trail.”

One is Bland Larson, a retired machinist, out for his daily two-mile walk under doctor’s orders to exercise his arthritic knees.

“This little half-mile trek gets you away from the streets,” says Larson, strolling the arroyo path toward Erringer Road from Sycamore Drive, where bamboo leans creaking over the path. “You get a little tired of hearing cars drive by, and fire engines. It’s nice to get away from it.”

Others see the Arroyo Simi as the straightest line between two points, faster and safer than biking down Los Angeles or Royal avenues.

“This I use just for transportation,” says Ken Gutherie, 33, a Bugle Boy Industries worker straddling his old Schwinn midway between his home near Sycamore and a buddy’s house beyond 1st Street. “It’s almost easier than hopping in the car.”

Years back, the arroyo was just a ditch. No concrete culverts, no housing tracts, no Spandex-sheathed bicyclists whizzing back and forth.

Back when Simi Valley was a one-stoplight town, there was no pavement where Brent Fullmer now sweats through his midmorning four-mile run.

“It was mostly like a wild animal path,” said Fullmer, 62, a retired GTE worker who has lived in town for 30 years. “There were orange groves, all orange groves on either side. The wash didn’t have near as much trash in it. I used to see coyotes and a lot of rabbits.”

Today, the arroyo is hemmed in by houses from Sequoia Avenue to Erringer Road, and by vest-pocket ranches nearly to 1st Street, where the neighborhoods give way to stores, warehouses and auto body shops.

Graffiti markings coat the concrete culverts like a colorful, man-made lichen. An assortment of spent Krylon spray cans rests in the mud at various points along the arroyo.

Fullmer says he has never seen the vandals, but “If I did, I’d catch ‘em and choke ‘em, the little potlickers. Then again, if you approach one of ‘em, they might shoot your head off.”

Most Crime Down

Police say graffiti vandalism is the most prevalent crime along the Arroyo Simi.

Otherwise, the channel trails attract no more criminals than any other neighborhood in Simi Valley--the fourth-safest city of its size in the nation.

Burglary of arroyo homes was once a problem, but that has declined, said Roy Jones, a crime prevention specialist for the Simi Valley Police Department.

“While it used to be an area of high activity, it has not been that way in recent years,” he said. While police are not certain why the burglary rate dropped, Jones said, “We have a very active Neighborhood Watch program in Simi Valley.”

City workers are trying to keep ahead of the graffiti, often painting over the markings within 24 hours of a citizen’s complaint.

“We try to match the background,” said city Public Works Director Ron Coons. “With beige walls we use beige paint, and with gray concrete we use gray paint. Many locations are repeat locations, so we frequently go back to those same areas that have been vandalized.”

In June, the Rocky Peak Mountain Bike Club became the first group to “adopt” a portion of the arroyo, agreeing to groom the greenery and keep it clear of rubbish, graffiti and abandoned grocery carts for an entire year.

Despite Simi Valley’s insults to nature, life continues to thrive in the arroyo.

The marsh grass grows thick and green while treated waste water flows from three sewage treatment plants, trash rains from the hands of passersby and grit and rust drain with rainwater from a cluster of PVC pipes under mechanics’ parking lots.

Cottontail rabbits zip through the brush that bakes in the hot afternoon sun.

A black turkey vulture pecks meat from the skull of a squirrel that once darted among the rocks on the arroyo bank. A great blue heron stalks crawdads in the mud.

And dusky little lizards skitter across the rocks east of Erringer Road, evading the blue swimming pool net wielded by Elton John’s concert tour producer.

Between tours, Bobby Reid, 45, is out chasing the elusive reptiles for his sons.

“They’re really quick, those little things,” Reid chuckles in a thick Scottish accent that 16 years in America, three in Simi Valley, have failed to erase. “There’s too many places for them to hide, as well.”

An Avian Showplace

Farther east, a red-tailed hawk cruises past a roiling flock of exotic white pigeons that pirouette and tumble in the sky over their master’s house.

Eight months ago, brick mason Ted Svoboda picked up his boyhood hobby of pigeon-raising and added a twist--roller pigeons.

The mysterious breed looks like normal pigeons, but in flight they suddenly back flip and plummet earthward for a breathtaking second or two before flying again. The pigeons mimic each other, one roller following the next until the whole flock resembles an acrobatic rain cloud.

“It’s just something in ‘em,” says Svoboda, 47. “Nobody’s really been able to figure it out.”

As the roller pigeons flap down to the coop for dinner, Svoboda explains the dangers of imprudent breeding.

“Some are real deep rollers, and they’ll lock up and come down 300 feet, which is really a sight. Sometimes they’ll come all the way down and kill themselves,” he says. He lets the birds into their coop, where dozens of pecking beaks hit the feed tray in a hungry rattle.

“If you take two birds that are real deep rollers, you’ll get young ones that’ll roll real deep too,” he added. “Maybe too deep, and they’ll kill themselves.”

As westering sunlight begins to taint the brown hills red, three small boys root through the brush near their back yard.

“Come on, guys, we gotta find that lizard!” cries one.

“Why do we gotta?” asks another, before he shrugs and rejoins the hunt.

Three horses and a mule trot over to the old bathtub that John Maiberger is filling with water.

Maiberger and his wife, Belinda, own one of several tiny ranches between Patricia Avenue and the Arroyo Simi. The city allows them to keep horses, geese and a goat despite creeping development that threatens to strand them on an island of rural land in the sea of urbanization.

“We like it real well here,” says Maiberger, 59, a traffic signal electrician for the city of Los Angeles. “It’s kind of hidden away from the rest of the city, really. It’s kind of rural, plus they let us keep the horses.”

A Place for Horses

Belinda Maiberger, 57, is fond of all her animals--the piebald mustang, the tawny mule, the old standard-bred mare by the name of Viva. But she particularly likes Flicka, a young, formerly wild horse that she rescued in a U.S. Bureau of Land Management auction.

“She’s just about as sweet and good as can be; she’s just a love,” she said, stroking Flicka’s muscular chin.

She recalls the days before the concrete culverts, riprap boulders and steel erosion barriers were built into the wash, when she could drive her horse-drawn sulky along its sandy bottom clear to the east end of town.

“I used to ride it down there, my mare would take me through the cattails and sticker weeds,” said Belinda Maiberger, a retired equipment calibrator. “I don’t like our government here in Simi, but it is still a good place to live. This arroyo has always been so nice.”

Back out on the bicycle trail, Jim Furey pedals home from the bike shop where he works. He looks every inch the cycling fanatic, from his aerodynamic helmet and curved goggles to the high-tech shock absorbers and electronic speedometer on his Paramount mountain bike.

“I don’t have a car, but even if I had a car, it’s a lot more fun,” Furey, 21, says of his 4.5-mile commute.

The Arroyo Simi trail “gets used a lot,” he says. “People like it. They wish it was longer. . . . Most of the people that are on here are friendly. You can say ‘hi’ without worrying about them pulling a gun on you.”

Dinner hour is past, and the kids living around the base of Sequoia Avenue have come out to play in the sunset.

Some heave stones at a basketball in an algae-filled pool, while others jump their bikes out of gullies they have dug into a neighboring field.

They tell jokes, call each other names and swap rumors about who sparked the brush fire that charred several acres of grass last month.

Mostly they carom around the lip of the arroyo on their bikes and down into the jump chute, getting airborne for a sweet half-second before slamming to earth in a cloud of dust.

“Every morning and every night I come here,” said Stefan Lord, 11, hanging with his twin brother, Alex and four friends.

Added 11-year-old Robert Collings, “This is the place to go.”