Refugees Seek Safe Future in an Earthship : Environment: L.A. fire and quake victims Jonathan and Alison Traister plan to build a home made of recycled tires and cans near Taos, N.M.

There are no mini-malls here. No drive-by shootings, no graffiti, no obvious social unrest. More importantly, brush fires are unheard of, seismic activity appears dormant, and any disasters in this trendy artists’ haven are the exception, not the rule.

Just the place for Jonathan and Alison Traister, a young Topanga Canyon couple left homeless by the Malibu brush fire. They sought refuge in a Santa Monica apartment house, only to have it shift off its foundation during the Northridge earthquake.

Homeless again and badly frightened, the Traisters fled Los Angeles four days later. With their baby, Monty, and Labrador, Dexter, their herbal tinctures and artists’ brushes, they set out on a journey east in search of shelter.

They lived in their van, on a Sikh ashram in Phoenix, and on an organic farm far up a treacherous mountain road.

Finally, it came to them during weeks of wandering: construct an Earthship. With walls of recycled tires and a thick stucco skin, reliance on solar energy and foundation sunk deep within the ground, the bunker-like Earthship seemed impervious to fire and quake. It cried out to both their post-1960s environmentalism and post-Los Angeles survivalism.

And so the Traisters made their way to Taos, the remote village at the tail of the Rocky Mountains where a hippie architect invented the Earthship 25 years ago and where, today, a whole tract of them is being planned on a sagebrush plain just west of the Rio Grande Gorge.

Said Alison: “We are rectified pioneers.”

The Traisters were among the brush fire victims profiled in The Times in December who had lost their homes and belongings in the Nov. 2 Topanga-Malibu blaze.

But none, it seems, were as buffeted by disaster as the Traisters.

After the deadly, $375-million brush fire razed their rented cabin off Old Topanga Road, they drifted from one friend’s house to another, boxes of secondhand clothes and housewares in tow.

Jonathan, 25, was waiting tables while he studied to become a teacher. Alison, 30, hand-paints T-shirts and wall hangings. Between their modest income, their big dog and their baby, now 8 1/2 months old, they could not find a place to live that approached the rustic beauty they had enjoyed before.

One plan after another fell through, including pitching a yurt--a large, animal-skin tent--on their former Topanga landlord’s property.

“I felt like I was trapped in a place not meant for me,” said Alison, a native of England with long, dark-brown hair and a poetic sense of language.

“And nothing was opening for us,” added Jonathan, an affectionate young father with a sandy blond ponytail and lively blue eyes.

On Jan. 16, the day before the earthquake, they moved to a friend’s apartment in Santa Monica. When the 6.8-magnitude temblor struck, glass windows shattered on one side of them and a brick wall crumbled on the other as they clung to each other in bed.

The lights were out. Sirens wailed. They smelled gas, and the building was making cracking sounds like crushed paper or glass. As they made their way by flashlight down sagging stairs, a nearby building exploded. “It felt like a war,” Alison recalled.

It took them four days to pack what few belongings they had left--or had bought with Red Cross vouchers after the fire--and shove them into their Jeep and van. Then, without saying goodby to friends and co-workers, they embarked on the adventure of their lives.

“Jonathan and I didn’t have a clue what we were going to do, but we had to leave California,” Alison said.

Their first night on the road, in the border town of Blythe, the big rigs rumbling past their motel sent them leaping out of bed.

In Phoenix, where Alison had two art shows coming up, they persuaded a community of Sikhs to let them stay on their ashram, where they soon became known as “the earthquake victims from Los Angeles.”

They traded their Jeep and van for a camper van and pressed deeper into the Southwest. They went to an Indian sweat. They spent two days at a place called Reevis Mountain Farm, a community of organic gardeners connected to the world by a steep, 17-mile dirt road.

They reached Snowflake, Ariz., where some people they know are building an Earthship. By then, the Traisters knew that they wanted the same kind of home although not in Arizona. “Too close to California,” Jonathan said.

Devised by Taos architect Michael Reynolds and inspired by the region’s native adobes, Earthships are designed to recycle non-biodegradable materials such as used tires and aluminum cans, and to work as self-sufficient, solar-powered units.

The tires are packed with plain dirt from the excavated building site--no water, no concrete. Then they are stacked into mega-insulated walls with tin cans as filler, and slathered in thick coats of adobe mud.

All Earthships face south, their long walls of solar panels flooding cave-like interiors with bright light. Huge cisterns collect rain and snow, and the “gray water” byproduct of bathing and cooking irrigates lush planters at the solar windows’ base.

Even human waste is recycled into a spreadable, ashen fertilizer.

The net effect is like living in a greenhouse whose smooth, sandcastle curves--often decorated with colorful bits of tile and glass--are reminiscent of Antonio Gaudi, the fanciful, early 20th-Century Spanish architect.

Though Reynolds’ clients include actors Dennis Weaver and Keith Carradine, his populist vision calls for providing pleasant, affordable housing to anyone willing to buy his generic Earthship blueprints, find their own tires and build their homes themselves.

It is an idea tailor-made for the Traisters, hardly the first urban refugees to be charmed by Taos, whose dramatic landscape, rich Native American culture and alleged spiritual hum similarly drew D.H. Lawrence and Georgia O’Keeffe.

This month, barely two weeks after arriving, the Traisters joined the first dozen or so homesteaders to buy into The Greater World, the 680-acre site 10 miles outside Taos where Reynolds has planned 100 Earthships of varying size--a sort of New Age Levittown.

For about $6,500 down (Jonathan’s mother has lent them some money), the Traisters are the proud owners of plans for “Generic A,” the smallest Earthship available with 1,000 square feet of livable space and 50-foot setbacks.

They also get a plot of land with a million-dollar view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and set among acres of silver-green sagebrush that scents the air with spice after it rains. If construction goes smoothly, the total cost should be about $30,000.

“We had a calling to come to Taos,” said Jonathan, grinning as he and Alison measured out their lot.

He misses the Waldorf School in Santa Monica where he interned, and his friends at the health-food restaurant where he waited tables. She misses the beach. But so far, neither regrets leaving L.A.

“This is our survival thing, our hyper-vigilant thing,” Alison said.

He plans to build most of the Earthship himself. She plans to support them with T-shirts and wall hangings. They’ll take turns watching Monty, splurge occasionally at the Wild and Natural Cafe, and sleep in a recently bought camper that they’ll park on their land.

Jonathan figures they’ll need 500 tires. So far, he’s collected about a dozen, their meager pile not fazing him in the least.

“I only need 488 more.”