On the Road Back From Ruin : Laguna fire: Most residents of Buena Vista Way have lost their homes, but find human spirit intact.

Jo and Don Williamson stood in the shadow of their charred cork oak, near the ashes of the house Don designed 37 years ago, and exclaimed over a dramatic new sculpture: a piece of art forged from some of their most familiar belongings.

Born of the devastating fire that raced through their Laguna Beach neighborhood, incinerating their home and eight others on Buena Vista Way, the Williamsons’ newest find was made of their silverware, which had melted in the flames, fused and become encrusted with tiny bits of broken glass.

“It’s really an amazing sculpture, a new piece of beautiful art made from all of this horror,” said Don Williamson, 80, as he waved toward the twisted steel columns and mounds of rubble, all that remained of his elegant A-frame.

Last week, as they took the first tentative steps toward recovery from the fire that ravaged their block-long, hillside street, the Williamsons and other Buena Vista residents began to reclaim their neighborhood and, in varying degrees, their lives.

Those steps, the first in a rebuilding and recovery process that many expect to take years, were marked by shock and tremendous grief. But almost equally evident, as family after family returned to find their houses decimated, their possessions gone, was a resilient human spirit that found strength, beauty, joy and even humor in the ashes of destruction.

“We have our family, our friends and our lives,” said Jo Williamson, 78, as she stood before the burned oak, where a sign hung by her son jokingly informed onlookers that the tree had simply undergone an “aggressive” aphid abatement treatment.

“We’ll be back. We’re going to do it again.”

For the nine families and individuals who lost their homes on Buena Vista Way--from Jackie and Jim Allen at 631 to James Kelly and Rob Mangel at 675--the last nine days have been a dizzying whirl. Emotional visits to a once-familiar street. Meetings with insurance adjusters. And frustration at being reminded again and again that they are without even the most basic of belongings.

For those whose homes survived, the aftermath has meant reaching out to neighbors, including some they never knew, and offering the loan of a phone, a car or a shoulder.

It has meant coping with recurring fears of the flames that swallowed the homes nearby and came within yards of claiming their own. For several, it has meant a period of adjustment, as they find themselves examining long-forgotten possessions with sudden, thankful interest.

Today, Buena Vista Way, a quiet, winding street in Laguna’s Temple Hills neighborhood, still commands the same magnificent view of the Pacific that it always has.

Little appears changed toward its southern end, where Buena Vista breaks off from Canyon View Place to form the left arm of a spindly “Y”. But just past the second gentle curve, where the last seven houses on the left side and two on the right lie in ruins, it seems unlikely that much of anything will ever be exactly as it was.

In recent years, those who lived along Buena Vista have been a disparate group. Most were owners and full-time residents, but there were also a few renters and owners who used their places as second homes.

The majority of those who lived toward the now-blackened end of the street were professionals: lawyers, architects, professors, doctors, business people, builders, a former teacher, and at least two county employees. They ranged in age from 80-year-old Don Williamson to 4-month-old Christina, the daughter of George Cary and Marlene Wright.

As part of the psychological toll of the fire, the genteel emotional distance that some on Buena Vista had kept from their neighbors is likely gone forever.

As Christian Werner put it, there is nothing like disaster to establish a sudden commonality among people, even if none existed before.

“Suddenly, we are victims together, and victims of the same event,” said Werner, 57, who lost his lushly landscaped home four doors from the street’s end.

The acting dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, Werner had lived in his house for 22 years but knew almost none of his neighbors. Since the fire, though, he has met at least half a dozen and received phone calls from others.

“When you have significant experiences of this nature, they do not disappear into oblivion. You carry them with you,” he said. “All of this has changed.”

Werner may have been the last of his immediate neighbors to leave Buena Vista Way, late on the afternoon of Oct. 27 as the fire roared across the ridges of Skyline and Mystic Hills, then jumped to Temple Hills with terrifying speed.

Frantically packing two boxes of suits, compact discs and underwear, he suddenly noticed flames leaping from the house next door, 645. Battling showers of embers, intense heat and choking smoke, he threw one box in the car but abandoned the other, rushing to the door of his car, then racing away down the narrow street.

Next door, George Cary, 42, and Marlene Wright, 36, had escaped with their infant daughter. After hearing reports of a fire in Emerald Bay, Cary, an attorney, and Wright, a pediatrician, fought their way home through traffic, reaching Buena Vista Way about 3:30 p.m.

They helped their nanny and her own baby out, then quickly collected diapers, clothing and food for Christina--later realizing that the items they took were probably among the easiest to replace. Suddenly spotting the fire on the hillside below, they left, stopping only when they reached Marlene’s brother’s home in San Diego hours later.

At the Williamsons’ at 665, Don and son Doug, who work together in Laguna Hills, had rushed home after hearing of the fires. With Don’s wife, Jo, whose fragile appearance belies her emotional strength, they gathered clothes and photographs before hurrying out.

But Doug raced back to get Elizabeth, the antique china doll his grandmother had given his sister, Jennie, on her seventh birthday.

Across the street, at 650 Buena Vista, Thomas Homan had been having a leisurely day. Homan, 40, who heads an industrial distribution firm in Irvine, was home that morning; the Santa Ana winds had knocked the power out in his partly remodeled home. He had decided to wait for it to come back.

Later, he heard of fires in Laguna Canyon and Emerald Bay, but drove down the hill to run errands, sure his area was safe. He was at a supermarket when he was paged by his nephew, Mike Agnello, who had been staying with him. “He told me to get back home, it was coming over the top of Mystic Hills,” just across Park Avenue from Temple Hills.

“We threw some clothes together and could feel the heat,” Homan said. “It was unbelievable. It came shooting down over the hill, then hopped across and came roaring up our side. You could see the houses exploding in Mystic Hills. We got the hell out of there.”

His nearest neighbor, attorney Sheila Patterson and housemate Shannon Nally, who lived at 644, could not get home before the fire broke out. Patterson, who been running errands in jogging clothes that day, later joked that if she had known she’d be wearing her last outfit, she would have dressed up.

Others on the street were also away. Joseph Becker, 33, a Costa Mesa businessman who spent almost $300,000 in 1991 remodeling the stucco house he owned at 639, said his tenant, Eric Jensen, was not home. After the fire, Jensen’s burned-out Jaguar marked the spot where the house had stood.

James Kelly, director of the department of social work at Cal State Long Beach, and Rob Mangel, an emergency room physician--were out, planning to spend the night at a second residence they own in the Hollywood Hills.

Due to fly out the next morning on a long-planned trip to Hong Kong with Mangel’s mother, they decided to go despite the fire, in the almost certain knowledge that their home at 675 Buena Vista was gone. In fact, it was their house, an elegant Spanish-style dwelling with a tile roof, that was the last on the street to burn.

Orange County Fire Capt. David Thompson, commander of the task force that fought the Buena Vista Way inferno, said the house at 675, as well as those on the hill below and everything farther along the street, were burning furiously when firefighters arrived.

The reservoir that fed the two hydrants on the street already had been drained, preventing a foam truck from being effective, Thompson said. Without outside water, firefighters had only the 2,000 gallons they carried with them.

The 16 firefighters made their stand at Bonnie and Jonathan Wolin’s house at 685 Buena Vista, climbing on the flat, composition roof and battling to keep the flames at bay.

Kelly’s and Mangel’s house already was too far gone, Thompson said. “We had to direct our resources to saving what was possible and we succeeded in keeping (the Wolins’) house and the rest from catching fire.”

By late Thursday, residents had begun to return to the devastated street. Exhausted and disoriented, some said they had trouble even figuring out where their homes had been.

George Cary spotted the home across the street from his and for a moment was optimistic. The house, a one-story wood-sided structure at 668, was condemned after a landslide in March, but came through the fire unscathed, prompting neighbors to name it “the house that wouldn’t die.”

“I came around the corner but I couldn’t find our house,” Cary said. “Finally, I realized that the reason I couldn’t see our house was because there was no house.”

The Allens got as far as the corner of Skyline and Park, then turned to gaze up at the ridge where their home had stood at the end of the street. Jackie, a sweet-faced woman with vivid red hair, slumped to the curb, temporarily overcome.

Last Sunday, together with Jackie’s sister Bernice Miller and her children, they returned to their lot, joining others along the street in tedious searches for any evidence of their lives before the fire.

Some, like Patterson and the Williamsons’ children, held sifting parties over the weekend. Their friends helped them paw through debris, boosting spirits with discoveries like Shannon Nally’s Irish step-dancing medals and a ruby ring that had belonged to Jo Williamson’s grandmother.

Since then, the days have slid into each other, an endless blur of life on what Patterson called “the fire victims’ circuit.” Trips to Buena Vista with insurance adjusters. Meetings with architects and builders. Visits to the disaster relief center; to churches to search through donated clothing; to the Laguna Beach City Council meeting Tuesday night; to stores, for toothbrushes, jeans, work clothes, tennis shoes.

And finally, at the end of each exhausting, stressful day, to the borrowed condos, hotels or homes of friends and relatives where the residents of Buena Vista Way are staying.

Last week, some returned to work for the first time since the fire. Cary entered his Newport Center law office Monday to find it filled with baby clothes from his colleagues. There was also a baby bed.

Werner said his UCI colleagues and the university’s administration have been generous with moral and financial support. The university, he said, has offered him a place to live free of charge through the end of the year.

Within days of the fire, many of the Buena Vista victims also said they had received initial payments from their insurance companies. Werner was stunned to find his company seeking him out, handing him a check for more than he thought necessary in the early going.

Williamson, too, was surprised to find his insurance agent walking the family through the loss forms, urging them to make lists to help recall every item that had been destroyed.

“You’d think they’d want us to miss things, but they don’t,” Williamson said.

So far, there have been only kind words on Buena Vista Way for the insurance companies. Most residents said they expected to rebuild, and believed that insurance would cover virtually all their costs.

Two owners are not yet sure about rebuilding.

Loretta Edger, 53, a former teacher who lives in Illinois and rented her house at 661 Buena Vista to a tenant, said she is doubtful her policy will cover the cost of rebuilding. Becker, whose house at 639 already was for sale, said he is considering either rebuilding and selling the new house or just selling the land.

Meanwhile, those who lost homes and those who didn’t are struggling with the psychological impacts of the fire.

Jim Allen, a 63-year-old employee of the county’s Public Works department, said he and his wife keep getting lost in Laguna as they try to find places they both know well, like their insurance agent’s office. “We keep bumbling around and it takes both of us just to get there,” he said.

Patterson said it has been the feeling of displacement, of having no place of her own, anywhere, that is the most disconcerting. “My friends have been wonderful, but it has really been hitting me: There’s no place in the universe that’s home right now, no corner where I can feel completely comfortable,” she said.

One of the fortunate few on Buena Vista Way, Julie Ireland, whose home of 27 years was only two doors from destruction, has busied herself trying to help her neighbors. Seemingly tireless, she has set up a garbage can, paper towels, soap and a bucket of water on the street for any who need to wash sooty hands.

She has watered Patterson’s roses, which survived. She has offered meals, snacks and a bathroom to any in need. And she has kept an eye out for looters.

But Ireland said it finally caught up with her at 5 a.m. Monday, when she dreamed the flames had come again.

“We had to evacuate all over again. I was running around and for some reason, I grabbed some lace and nylon curtains,” she said, chuckling ruefully. “I ran out with my curtains and curtain rods and left everything else.”

Down the way, however, Don Williamson has already begun to play with ideas for his family’s new house. Maybe it should be the same, he mused. Or maybe it would be more exciting to do something different.

In any case, the family will rebuild, he said. “We’ve spent too much time here to just kiss it goodby. And we want to leave something to the kids. Not this mess.”

Homan seemed upbeat, almost buoyant, even as he mourned his remodeled home, newly completed Hawaiian-style back yard and all his belongings.

“You know, it’s just things,” he insisted. “Nobody was killed here. Nobody was hurt. It’s just things.”

This is the first of an occasional series that will follow the residents of Buena Vista Way in the fire’s aftermath.

Devastation on Buena Vista Way

Nine homes near the dead end of Buena Vista Way in Laguna Beach were destroyed by the Oct. 27 fire. Here is a look at the owners, the people who lived nearby and the status of their homes.

631: Owners Jim and Jackie Allen. Destroyed

639: Owner Joseph Becker. Rented to tenant. Destroyed

645: Owners George Cary and Marlene Wright. Destroyed

657: Owner Christian Werner. Destroyed

661: Owner Loretta Edger. Rented to tenant. Destroyed

665: Owners Don and Jo Williamson. Destroyed

675: Owners James Kelly and Robert Mangel. Destroyed

685: Owners Jonathan and Bonnie Wolin. Slight damage

711: Owners Frank and Julie Ireland. Undamaged

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644: Owner Sheila Patterson. Destroyed

650: Owner Thomas Homan. Destroyed

668: Owner Larry Zeman. Condemned after March landslide. No fire damage

700: Owners Tony and Patty Clark. Undamaged