Friendships Forged by Fire : Flames Break Down Barriers as Altadena Canyon Area Regroups

As Pat Greutert’s motherly voice echoed through the fire-ravaged canyon, everyone stopped to listen.

Across the street, in the rubble of her home, 74-year-old Margaret Barnard looked up from the chipped remains of her grandmother’s flowery Havilland china. Nearby, Kaye and Gerrie Kilburn paused from sweeping ashes from their burned-to-the-ground home.

“Telephone!” Greutert, 65, called out, cupping her hands so she could be heard from her driveway. “Kaye! Kaye!”

Kaye Kilburn dutifully came over to take the phone call--in Greutert’s house.

In the aftermath of the Altadena firestorm, Greutert’s intact place is the unofficial command central here on Mesaloa Lane. It is where misdirected mail is left, where telephone messages are picked up, and where the restroom is available for weary neighbors who are working outside with brooms and shovels.

It used to be that winding driveways and canopies of trees separated neighbors in the heart of Kinneloa Canyon, a place of woodsy one-acre properties with horse corrals, fish ponds and hillside decks.

Since the fire, homeowners with a frontier penchant for privacy are rediscovering the folks next door as the best defense against the vagaries of canyon living. Rugged individualism is giving way to warm and fuzzy neighborliness as quickly as the flames turned their bright, bougainvillea-entwined street into a dreary, ash-whipped place.

These days, there are impromptu street gatherings to note that a family of deer is nosing through back yards again, that the clamoring sounds of rebuilding are echoing through the canyon, or that mail, water and electricity are back. People who had waved at each other from their driveways, or had never met, are now sharing giant dumpsters and mulch, sandbags and tools, gossip and worries. They are also working together to reseed the denuded canyon hillsides with ryegrass and clear the ravines of charred undergrowth.

“I think people realize we are really dependent on each other,” said Greutert, a 25-year resident. “It does bring you closer together, so I guess good things come out of things like this.”

Four of Mesaloa Lane’s 14 houses burned to the ground and none entirely escaped the Altadena blaze, which burned 5,700 acres and destroyed 121 homes. But the flames also toppled the street’s towering olive trees and oaks--bringing down with them the barriers that had separated neighbors.

One recent morning, in what was left of her bathroom, Jane Arvizu stopped looking for rem-

nants of her jewelry to give directions to a friend who was helping even out her precarious hillside, but who needed tools.

“Go ask any of the neighbors,” suggested Arvizu, a 47-year-old widow who helps run her family’s Pasadena restaurant, Beadle’s Cafeteria. “What do you want, a pick? Go over and ask the Greuterts. (And) Pat said anybody could come over and use the bathroom anytime.”

Next door to Greutert’s place, Gerrie Kilburn was sifting through the remains of her house when Mark Dokter stopped by to chat. They had met only a couple of times before, but now they hugged.

Kilburn, an administrator for the American Lung Assn. of Los Angeles County, lamented the steady stream of traffic--the looky-loos who bring cameras, entrepreneurs who staple business cards to their trees, news crews who wait for them on their driveways.

Dokter, a 33-year-old contractor, suggested traffic cones to block off the street. Good idea, Kilburn said. The next day, the cones were in place.

One morning, Laura Entwistle, 44, wandered down her hidden driveway to check on Margaret Barnard next door, who lost the home that her late husband built in 1958.

“You’re coming back, right?” Entwistle asked worriedly.

The neighborly concerns warm her, Barnard said later.

“The Entwistles?” she said. “I’ll bet I haven’t exchanged 10 words with her. They’ve been there four years. And I had probably exchanged 50 words with her husband. . . . I didn’t know her at all.. . . . So it’s really brought people together.”

That’s the way it was in the old days, said Danny Brownell, 44, who grew up in the house his parents built and now raises his own family there. Brownell, a junior high schoolteacher, has known a few of his neighbors forever--three lived on the street when he was a boy.

Back then, most of the homes had kids in them. They threw freshly plucked lemons at each other and rode their bikes all through the canyons, at least until landowners started erecting fences to keep out intruders. Neighbors then got used to keeping their distance as baby trees and shrubs grew into impenetrable coverings. The children grew up and left.

The privately owned street developed in the 1950s and ‘60s, with young families fleeing the burgeoning suburbs. Mesaloa Lane is three-tenths of a mile long, with no sidewalks or street lamps and marked by a handmade wooden sign. Homes sell in the $475,000 to $700,000 range.

“If somebody needs something, you help them--that’s the way it used to be, and that’s the way it should be,” said Brownell, who lost his garage, which held his family mementos, though his house was spared.

The toll is wearing for everyone, but signs of hope abound: The Dokters stuck a folksy wooden sign on their front lawn that says: “Believe!” The Brownells brightened their blackened front lawn with potted yellow chrysanthemums. And Jane Arvizu found her cat, Ashley, quivering in the still-standing poolroom of her destroyed home.

Neighbors are proud that the entire street is rebuilding.

Dentist Loren Lutz, 73, said his wife refuses to walk away from the rubble of their home and retire to the icy winds of Jackson Hole, Wyo., where they have a 100-acre ranch.

“Start a new life over at our age?” Lutz said incredulously. “C’mon. What life? That isn’t going to work.”

Besides, Lutz, a 35-year resident of the neighborhood, adores his hilltop view that shows off Catalina Island on clear days, and the 50-foot oak that he planted as an acorn, and the nine-level waterfall he built from Bouquet Canyon flagstone.

Some of those whose houses survived suffer unexpected bouts of tears for their less fortunate neighbors.

At the Entwistles’ place, the empty barn started to burn but an errant ember miraculously saved it, along with their white two-bedroom house and guest house. The ember melted a plastic water sprinkler pipe. Water gushed out, and the fire died.

“It’s ‘Why me?’ ” said Laura Entwistle, a bookkeeper. “Why did I survive?”

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The pain is shared on the big losses, such as homes and trees. But some small keepsakes had meaning only to the people who lost them: Jane Arvizu’s wedding handkerchief--one that her mother had carried as a young bride, and which was to be passed on for her daughter’s walk down the aisle in May; an 1898 Springfield Armory rifle that belonged to Dr. Kaye H. Kilburn’s grandfather; penny postcards that old suitors had sent to Danny Brownell’s grandmother in Hornell, N.Y.

Danna Brownell, 16, cannot stop thinking about the fire, which destroyed her family’s keepsake-filled garage.

“It just made everything in life seem so stupid,” said Danna, an aspiring actress. “Like going to school, I don’t care (about gossip). I don’t want to talk about this. You don’t know what I’ve lived through. . . . Let me talk about what I felt, let me talk about what my neighbor’s house looked like, you know? It made reality seem a lot different.”

Perhaps the most painful loss for her was the fuzzy Christmas stocking her mother made for her. After the fires, Danna wept when she spotted a stocking display at Fedco, where she and her mother were shopping for brooms and mops. When her mother offered to buy her a new stocking, Danna said no. “These aren’t soft like mine is,” she said.

Her mother, 42-year-old Karen Brownell, hugged her.

“We’ll make new memories,” she promised.