Survivors Return, Some Only to Memories : Aftermath: Evacuees comb sooty remains of their homes for valuables. The lucky ones find their houses still standing.

Their house was a charred ruin, but by sheer force of memory, Carole and Don Lorenzini were determined to see it one last time.

“That’s the den. It was all wood-paneled, including the ceiling. . . . There was the kitchen,” Carole told an insurance adjuster Thursday morning, her voice cracking as he scribbled notes on a legal pad.

Two chimneys were all that remained of the six-bedroom house in Eaton Canyon, where the Lorenzinis had lived for 11 years. The debris on which they stood was not yet cool. But Carole and Don could still see what they had lost, almost as if it were right in front of them.

Over there was Don’s collection of model ships, Carole said, pointing to a pile of cinders and twisted metal where a wall had once stood. There were two deck chairs that had once been aboard the Queen Mary. There was Carole’s exercise bicycle--an unrecognizable tangle of metal. “The place sounds as homey as heck,” the insurance man said sympathetically.

“It was,” Carole said.

On Thursday, survivors of Southern California’s firestorm returned to their homes to pick up the pieces of their lives. The luckiest had houses to return to. But even those whose walls were still standing found the fire had left its mark. There were ragged stumps where cautious homeowners had cut down trees. There were scorched fences, singed phone lines and the sour stench of smoke.

The unlucky came home to rubble. For them, the day’s sadness was often interrupted by memories of happier times as they took imaginary tours through the places they had once called home. A watch, a crystal Christmas ornament, a key--these were the artifacts that people pulled out of the ashes, odds and ends made suddenly precious by the memories they kept alive.

*

In Orange County, Patricia Powers combed the sooty remains of her Laguna Beach apartment, looking for valuables. Instead, she found a wok and a nail clipper.

“I think I’m in shock. I had pretty furniture and pretty things around. How do you replace that?” Powers asked her friend, Julie Jeffery.

“At least you can clip your nails now,” Jeffery offered.

Powers, who spent Wednesday night at a hotel, said several friends and relatives called her when they saw the frightful fire on television. When her voice mail picked up, many assumed they had reached an answering machine in her apartment. If it was still recording messages, they reasoned, her apartment had survived.

“I’m so glad you’re safe,” said the messages. “Your house made it.”

How she wished they were right.

*

“CONDEMNED,” read the red-and-white tag that firefighters left on the mailbox outside Jane Arvizu’s Mesaloa Lane home north of Pasadena. Arvizu, 47, didn’t seem to notice. Dressed in hiking boots, work clothes and rawhide gloves, she and her 27-year-old daughter, Janine Rath, were poking around, sifting through the tatters.

The family had lived 21 years in the three-bedroom ranch house. But fire had transformed the layout, making it oddly unfamiliar.

“I think I just found the remains of my curling iron, so I have a vague idea of where I am,” Arvizu called out, apparently from a bathroom. “There was a toilet here once. It obviously disintegrated.”

She paused. “You don’t realize what fire does to things,” she said.

Rath was thinking about what the fire would do to her mother.

“What hurts me is her. This is her house. This is everything she got,” Rath said, noting that since her stepfather died two years ago, her mother has lived alone.

“She always said, ‘Everything’s going to be fine. I got my house. I got my security blanket,’ ” Rath said. “She’s a very strong lady, but this is no way to find out how strong you are.”

*

Dressed in pink hospital scrubs and a surgical mask, Dr. Carlos Ruiz counted himself among the fortunate. But it didn’t come easy.

The 44-year-old cardiologist and his family had battled the fire all night, hosing down their home in Kinneola Ranch Estates, cutting down nine trees and doing regular patrols of the neighborhood, snuffing out spot fires with water from a neighbor’s pool.

“I’m exhausted,” he said Thursday morning, as his wife and son helped to clear yet another tree. “But my house is still here.”

Ruiz, the director of interventional cardiology at Loma Linda University, is no stranger to stress. When a baboon heart was transplanted into a child, he was part of the team. Still, the fire tested him.

He had stayed home from work Wednesday, using his hose to keep the house wet. At one point, the Pasadena police told him to evacuate. When he refused, an officer handcuffed Ruiz and took him to a police station.

“I said, ‘Don’t I have a right to stay in my house?’ ” recalled Ruiz. “He said, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”

The minute Ruiz was released from custody, however, he headed back up the hill on foot.

“I went back up to my house and I got my cars and I took them down the hill,” he said. “The Porsche, the BMW, the Range Rover, the Toyota Previa . . .”

“And the Volvo,” added his 15-year-old son, David.

In the end, the Ruiz family lost only their trees and the net on their tennis court. Their wooden garage, kept damp with twice-hourly waterings, survived. So did Ruiz’s outrage at the officers who had tried to keep him from his house.

Sure, he said, he understood that they were trying to keep him safe. But the house is where he wanted to be. “I should have had a right to burn up in it if I wanted to.”

*

Nearby, on Clarmeya Lane, Jan Hincker sat in the rubble of the home her late parents built 40 years ago, scraping through ruins with a shard of glass. She knew what she was looking for: a set of ceramic baby quail--a gift her sister had given her mother years before.

Suddenly, a tiny bird emerged from the black mess. Triumphant, her niece, Beth Robinson, held the figurine aloft. “Yes, yes!” she proclaimed, then added: “This is amazing. We’re rejoicing over a little quail!”

After four more little birds surfaced, they made the big find. “Wait, wait. Stop. Don’t move,” Robinson commanded. “We found a piece of Mom!”

They came across other things as well, an anvil, a vice, a fishing reel and a spatula--ordinary things suddenly imbued with great meaning. “The written history is gone, but there’s little stories in everything,” Hincker observed.

*

Camera in hand, airline captain John McDannel roamed his devastated neighborhood Thursday, a self-appointed chronicler of destruction. “A little bit of history is what it amounts to,” he said as he snapped photos.

By his own count, 22 of 63 homes on the mesa above Eaton Canyon had burned down. Another 28 were damaged. “This looks like Lebanon,” he said. “A war zone almost. It’s surreal.”

When the area was evacuated Wednesday, McDannel, 52, drove his wife and daughter to a Pasadena motel and then returned to save his home. Police stopped him when he got to the base of the hill. He simply parked and jogged up. “They weren’t going to stop me. They had bigger problems,” he said.

Armed with a hoe, shovel and hose, he stationed himself at the house he had lived in for 23 years, keeping the flames away. He helped firemen with their hoses, directed them to a swimming pool for water and let his barn burn when the fire crews informed him they only had 300 gallons left.

His house survived. He spent Wednesday night sleeping on the front porch while exhausted firemen dozed on his lawn.

He also answered a lot of phone calls from friends. “That’s a very nice thing to realize somebody has thought about you at a time like this,” he said gratefully. “It kind of brings a little water to your eyes when you say ‘thank you.’ ”

On another street in the area, a Buddha figurine sat cross-legged on a stonewall, a solitary door frame behind it. The house was gone, the owners nowhere in sight.

There were other strange scenes. In front of one gutted home, a rubber door mat was unscathed. “Welcome,” it said.

*

Clayton Howland, 66, and his wife, Pauline, lived on Brambling Lane for 17 years. On Thursday, despite the ruins that greeted them, they vowed to live there again.

There was something special about the hills north of Pasadena, they said. It was country living, with the city not too far away. The air smelled better, the night sounds were wild and beautiful. There was no place, they said, where they would rather start over.

Pauline blinked away tears as she recalled for a visitor the last Christmas dinner they had had, with their four children and six grandchildren.

“The Christmas tree was in the corner over there,” she said.

“This is the kitchen; that’s the refrigerator right there,” said Clayton, nodding toward an indistinguishable mess.

“We’ll do it again,” Pauline said. “I won’t have the pretty china or pretty silver. And I guess I’ll have to get a new turkey roaster before I come back.”

She thought for a moment, and then added: “I felt so sorry for people in the floods along the Mississippi last summer. But now I feel if they can make it, we can make it.”