Fast-Moving Flames Leave Trail of Charred Dreams : Victims: Some homeowners launch valiant fights against the fires. Others are forced into narrow escapes.

The call came at 6:15 a.m., and Shirley Buszynski believes it probably saved her life.

“My girlfriend said, ‘Are you all right?’ ” the Eaton Canyon resident said, remembering the words that pulled her and her husband, Richard, out of a deep sleep Wednesday morning. “I said, ‘Yes, why not?’ Then I looked outside.”

Already, Buszynski said, the sky was glowing orange over the ridge above the hillside house north of Pasadena where they had lived since 1969. The 61-year-old real estate agent dressed quickly and got ready to do battle, grabbing a ladder in the hopes of wetting down her roof. But she never got the chance.

“All of a sudden the hills were exploding and everything was on fire. . . . There was no warning. There wasn’t a police car. There wasn’t a fire engine. There wasn’t a siren,” she said, recalling how she and her husband barely had time to grab their dog and three cats and flee.

“I didn’t take anything except the animals. Not even my purse,” she said as she stood watching television at the home of a friend. “I just saw my birdbath and my fireplace on TV. That’s all that’s left. . . . We have good friends. We have nothing else in the world but a lot of good friends.”

Although relatively few serious injuries were reported in Southern California’s destructive fires Wednesday, the flames still took a horrible human toll. Dazed survivors told of barely escaping a blaze that moved with alarming speed. The fires traveled so quickly and with such force that many were unable to rescue even the most meager of belongings.

From Altadena to Laguna Beach and Riverside County to Thousand Oaks, the fire victims told stories of valiant fights. By the end of the day, some had won, others had lost and still others were unsure whether they or the fire would prevail.

“This has been devastating, absolutely devastating,” said Pasadena resident Susan Kirkpatrick, who stood outside her home on Pasadena Glen Road at midday, wondering aloud why only a few firetrucks had arrived to fight the flames. “It’s a little early, but I need a stiff drink.”

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In Sierra Madre, families that had remained vigilant all day were forced to abandon their homes as nightfall brought the fire too close for comfort.

About 400 yards from a wall of fire, Ali Safa and his family were loading china, crystal, portraits and other precious belongings into their Mercedes.

“It’s getting awful close. We’ve hung on all day, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop,” Safa said as strong northeast winds fanned the flames.

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In Orange County, Laguna Beach Mayor Lida Lenney was among scores of people who were hurriedly gathering belongings and preparing to evacuate.

It was the second time in a year that Lenney’s picturesque beach city had suffered a natural disaster, she said, recalling the massive landslides that were triggered by January’s storms.

“I was just saying to my husband, ‘If I were Job, I would begin to ask, “Why me?” ’ “ she said. “The city has just had a horrendous year, absolutely just a horrendous year. You just can’t say it any other way.”

By nightfall, flames threatened downtown Laguna Beach as firefighters battled flames within 30 yards of City Hall. Deer and rabbits fleeing from the fire ran through the streets, and boulders jarred loose by burned vegetation rolled down the canyons toward firefighters struggling to contain the blaze.

“The city is going up in flames,” Lenney said. “God, what next?”

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In Ventura County, a band of surfers came to the aid of Tony Award-winning set designer Tony Duquette, whose ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains was engulfed in flames.

Much of Duquette’s collection of art and architecture, including pieces of Chinese temples and Spanish churches, was destroyed. Half of the 175-acre ranch was either on fire or heavily damaged by the time the 79-year-old Duquette abandoned his property. But that did not deter the hardy watermen.

“We’re professional surfers,” said 25-year-old Brian Merrick of Point Dume, one of half a dozen young men who put up an earnest fight. “We don’t work. We only come out to work when there’s a fire or an earthquake or a mudslide. It’s the only time there’s any fun around here.”

“Hey, you guys! This place is toasted!” Merrick called out as wind chimes jangled and black smoke rose into the air. When wind foiled a helicopter’s attempt to dump fire retardant, Merrick added: “The wind is too gnarly. It’s kind of a bummer to see this all go down.”

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Earl and Janet Johnson stood in their pretty yard and tried to take in the ugliness in front of them.

Their three-bedroom Eaton Canyon house--the one that Earl had built 40 years before, the one that they had soon planned to sell so they could move nearer their children--was gone. In its place were blackened beams and ash. Suddenly, their cheerfully landscaped Japanese garden, complete with tangelo and mandarin orange trees, a tiny bridge and a carved wooden horse, looked out of place.

“All the good times, all the good memories, we had in this house,” Earl, a 65-year-old retired maintenance worker, said as he watched firefighters knock down the last of the flames. His unshaven face was smudged with soot and his voice was oddly calm.

Steve Burnside, a 25-year-old welder, and Dan Rose, a 28-year-old telephone salesman, stood nearby armed with garden hoses. Each man had seen the fire on television and decided to stop by on his way to work. Now, the two strangers were united against the fire.

Burnside said their first stop was the Johnsons’ home north of Pasadena.

“We went into the building, yelling, ‘What do you want us to save?’ We grabbed the piano and started to move it when somebody yelled, ‘Get out, the roof is on fire!’ ” he said. Moments later, the roof fell in. “We got out just in time.”

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It had been a few hours since she had seen it, but Laurel Magallanes was still haunted by her memory of the eerie scene. After being awakened by a friend, she said, she and her two children had fled Eaton Canyon with only the clothes on their backs and a few family photos that Magallanes had managed to toss into a trash bag.

As she maneuvered her car down the winding, smoke-choked streets, she suddenly stopped short. Horses were blocking her path--Magallanes’ neighbors were trying to save their animals, letting them run into the road. Some people were leading their horses, bridles in hand. One man had tied two horses to the door handles of his car, one on each side, and was slowly driving down the hill to safety.

“People were running down the street,” Magallanes, 46, said as she wandered around Pasadena’s Victory Park--the official command center for the firefighting effort--hoping to learn if her house had survived. “I was scared to death.”

About 2:30 p.m., as authorities allowed residents to return to their homes in the Kinneloa Mesa neighborhood of Altadena, Magallanes broke into tears as she pulled in front of her house and saw that it was still standing.

“Oh, thank God,” she said, tears streaming down her face. She and her husband, Steven, 46, ran across the yard to an area shaded by singed oak trees that was still smoldering.

“We’re very, very lucky,” he said. “I’ve been praying all day.”

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Patrice d’Entremont of Altadena woke up with a sore throat. Fire was raging in the hills north of the house she and a roommate rented on East Crary Street. The water pressure in the house was low and the lights were flickering on and off.

But D’Entremont had more to worry about than her own health and safety. As director of maternal child health services at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Pasadena, the nurse’s first thought was that she had work to do.

At 6:30 a.m., while her roommate and her roommate’s 10-year-old son were gathering their belongings, D’Entremont rushed to the hospital. Two hours later, she was helping evacuate patients, and by midafternoon, D’Entremont had yet to discover whether her own house was still standing. There were, she said, more important things to do.

“I took a few mementos,” she said, her no-nonsense voice suddenly cracking. “One of them is a locket with a picture of my brother who died years ago.” She took nothing else.

“Just what I could wear,” she said, her voice business-like once more. “I had to get to work.”

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In Box Canyon, on the Ventura-Los Angeles County line, residents were evacuated at 5:30 a.m. But June Matthews remained.

Matthews--who keeps more than 300 parrots, doves and other birds in an aviary at her home in the canyon--was hosing down her property and, with the help of friends, evacuating the birds and horse trailers.

“I’m not leaving until I know all my friends are safe,” Matthews said of her birds.

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Near Point Mugu, Richard Jensen estimated that all but about three acres of his 96-acre ranch were burned Wednesday morning as the Hidden Valley fire roared southwest toward the ocean. The three unscathed acres surround his house, but the flames scorched part of the structure.

Jensen, a 39-year-old real estate broker, was awakened about 5:30 a.m. by smoke wafting into the mountaintop home. He called the Ventura County Fire Department and was told there was no one available to help.

“We were really getting nervous. . . . We were 10 minutes away from leaving when we saw three or four yellow (fire)trucks pull up about 7:30 in the morning,” he said. “These guys saved the day.”

Jensen, an eight-year resident who had survived an earlier fire, got a record of the whole thing on videotape.

“It comes right at you. You panic. You don’t know what to do. So you videotape it,” he said, looking into the canyon. It looked, he said, like “a crater on the moon.”

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It was a day of uncertainty for Larry Winslow, 40, a bank executive who moved with his new wife, Clarissa, into Eaton Canyon two months ago.

Eager to discover the fate of their home, the Winslows were among several evacuees who gathered in Pasadena’s Victory Park. They said they knew of the fire danger when they bought their house, so they immediately spent $10,000 to clear the overgrown property of brush and trees. Armed with a fire retardant roof and a hydrant right out front, the couple had felt relatively safe.

Now they weren’t so sure.

“How can you stop something like this?” Winslow asked as his worried wife stood crying quietly beside him. “It was just like being in a fireplace. The flames. The winds around you, the smoke billowing. It was unbelievable.”