Still-Life Portrait : Devastation: A once vibrant canyon is hushed and strewn with debris.

Save for the mumbling of Cold Creek as it winds lazily through the Santa Monica Mountains, the canyon is silent and gray. No rustling leaves. No chirping birds. No twigs cracking underfoot.

Just a forest of twisted black sticks shooting through a thick carpet of ash.

Three days ago this canyon near Stunt Road and Mulholland Highway was hidden under a canopy of oaks and sycamores. Muted sunlight dappled the leaves and a natural symphony of chirps, squeaks and gurgles bounced off the hillsides.

And in 20 minutes Tuesday, it was swept as clean and still and quiet as Flanders fields.

As it galloped through the mountains to the sea, the Calabasas/Malibu fire’s destructive swath was captured live by nearly every local television station. But life does not happen in 19 diagonal inches.

Life happens in winding canyons, along creek beds and on soaring peaks where visitors are eye level with circling hawks. On Thursday, those places were silent and gray, strewn with debris.

Compelling as they were, the television images told only part of the story. What looked like Dante’s Inferno through the lens may have broiled and churned fewer than 20 feet from an untouched piece of Paradise.

And just as the cameras could not capture the true scale of the flames, neither could they depict the true scale of the devastation left behind. From the charred skeleton of a house just west of Saddle Peak, it is painfully apparent.

All around are blackened hillsides crisscrossed here and there by hiking trails that look like gigantic zigzag stitches. The charred bodies of rabbits and squirrels litter roads, and flocks of winged scavengers circle over the larger prizes.

Everywhere is the smell of fire--sometimes almost pleasant like a cozy fireplace, sometimes sickening like cheap Fourth of July fireworks. The air is brown. It is thick and dirty, the wind carrying away the blackened bits of people’s dreams and memories.

What used to be homes are little more than junk heaps now, piles of melted glass and broken tiles. Nails are scattered everywhere, the wood beams they once fastened devoured by the flames. Books fall apart at the touch.

A sign outside this house warns: “Owners on premises. Looters will be SHOT on sight.” But there is nothing that the fire has not already looted. The stereo equipment is twisted and melted. The car is a smelly black hulk, make and model indistinguishable.

Kicking through the rubble, a two-man crew from the Los Angeles County Department of Building and Safety shake their heads as they assess the value of the damaged property. “They’ll never get another permit,” says one. “Hey, Jose,” he says to his partner, whose name is actually Raul. “Put this one down for a million.”

To a visitor standing before what was once a bay window, the fire’s path seems to have been willy-nilly. Patches of intense green--hyper-fertilized lawns, neatly clipped trees--remain like the before in before-and-after photos. Houses on Copacabana Street stand untouched next to blackened chaparral. On West Saddle Peak, intact houses shadow neighboring piles of rubble--testaments to the fire’s capriciousness.

In Monte Nido, largely spared by the blaze, life went on as normal Thursday. A man repaired a child’s bicycle in his garage. A cocker spaniel sprawled in the cool shade of an oak tree. A woman brought remaining firefighters boxes of croissants.

A return to normalcy will take awhile longer in other areas.

Along Stunt Road, a plastic-wrapped Los Angeles Times sat square in the middle of a driveway leading to a burned-out house. And along Piuma Road overlooking Malibu a lizard sunned itself on a black rock amid burned empties of Newcastle Brown Ale. On the wall of a charred metal shed, someone had scrawled “Home Sweet Home” in green spray-paint.

Back along Cold Creek, the silence was broken by two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies throwing rocks at the rusting hulk of an abandoned car. As they shuffled down the hillside, kicking up a cloud of soot and ash, one remarked: “Quite a scene, huh? Looks like they dropped the bomb on us.”