Those Who Were Spared Thank Crews

The air was thick with smoke, and the rocky hillsides all around were charred gray and black, but the Lonesome Water Ranch in Carlisle Canyon was still standing Friday morning.

Owners Robert and Vera House, who have made their home there for 30 years, sat in their screened porch, reflecting on their good fortune. On a shelf nearby was a rock painted blue and white with the words Home Sweet Home .

“My father bought this land in 1915,” said Vera, 80, fighting back tears. “We’re so grateful. It’s a miracle we still have our home. There’s no way we can say enough about the firefighters.”

Throughout the morning, neighbors and friends dropped by to check on the couple, who are as much a fixture in the canyon as the large sycamores and oaks.

“It’s good to see you, Robert,” one woman visitor said as she came up the steps. “It’s good to see everything here.”

“Sometimes I’ve doubted my guardian angel,” Robert replied. “But he was on duty last night.”

“You had a few firemen, too,” his friend called back.

Robert, 82, said his spirits had been lifted by the efforts of the Orange County firefighters who battled the wildfires surrounding his Carlisle Road house late Thursday.

“We tend to judge harshly the general public sometimes because of the malcontents and violent ones,” he said. “But in situations like this, you realize the great majority of people are honorable and honest. They’re just wonderful. And we have them to thank that this house was not lost.”

The couple said they had evacuated Wednesday, but came back the next day to try to rescue more of their cherished belongings as the fast-moving fire began spreading to the canyon.

“I took jewelry and my diaries--I’ve kept a diary for 50 years,” Vera said. “You can’t take anything, except what’s meaningful.”

She said that by the time they left at 3 p.m. Thursday, they could see flames coming over the hill toward their home.

By late evening, the wind-whipped fire had swooped down the west end of Carlisle Canyon, incinerating two mobile homes, several cars and nearly everything else in its path.

“I think we’re safe now,” Robert said. “There’s no more fuel.”

Up the road from the Lonesome Water Ranch, Ron Cole stood in his driveway Friday morning, surveying the scorched earth around his hilltop house. Cole, 59, said he stayed throughout the night to help firefighters guard his house of 26 years.

“I’ve been up here through a dozen fires, and I’ve never see anything like this,” Cole said. “Fire was erupting all over. The smoke was so heavy. It was like breathing mud.”

He said the fire had made its way over nearby Table Mountain about 9 p.m. and quickly began working its way down toward the narrow roadway.

“Before I knew it, the whole hillside exploded,” he said. “It was like it had explosive charges, just like a couple of jet engines going up.”

His wife, Lily, and the couple’s 17-year-old daughter, Lisa, said they were shocked when the sun came up Friday and they saw the surrounding hillsides burned to a slate gray, like the surface of the moon.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw it,” said Lily, 55. “It looked like an area that has been bombed out.”

Ron Cole credited four Pasadena firefighters with saving his house. To mark their victory, the firefighters wrote in the dust on Cole’s garage windows “Pasadena-E-37.”

“When this is all over, I’m going to have to buy them a bottle of champagne or something,” he said.

Neighbors June and Ernest Siva also considered themselves lucky. Although the fire consumed a fence, a gazebo and a 25,000-gallon water tank, the couple’s house was spared.

“We were so happy to see our house standing this morning,” said June, 52, who along with her husband had taken advantage of the “$39 evacuee special” at the Holiday Inn in Newbury Park the night before.

“We were overjoyed,” she said. “We couldn’t believe it. It’s incredible.”

She said the couple, who have lived in the house for 16 years, were even more committed to staying after the fire.

“We thought if we could survive this, we could survive anything,” she said.

Robert and Vera House said they, too, have no plans of ever abandoning their home, whatever the risk.

“We would never go away,” Vera said. “It means everything to us.”

The couple said they named the ranch after “Lonesome Water,” a poem by Roy Helton, a framed copy of which hangs in their living room. One verse says:

I’d drunk lonesome water, I knowed in a minute: Never larnt nothing From then till today: Nothing worth larning Nothing worth knowing I’m bound to the hills And I can’t get away