WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : True to Its Nature : Communities: The rugged terrain of Malibu and Topanga makes the area picturesque, serene--and prone to disaster. Still, residents persevere despite frequent calamities.

The running joke in Malibu and Topanga these days is this: When are the locusts coming? The two coastal communities, etched into the steep hillsides of the Santa Monica Mountains, have known all manner of disaster. A wildfire in 1970. Landslides in 1984. Horrible flooding in 1992. Then the firestorm of Nov. 2, 1993, which burned 350 structures and bared hillsides--helping to set the stage for severe mudslides and rockslides last year.

And now the punishing first winter storms of 1995, which unleashed seven inches of rain last week and 12 inches for January.

The resulting mudslides and flooding in the Westside’s coastal canyons took no lives and destroyed only one house in Malibu. But they raised a question that returns with each new disaster:

Why do people persist in living in these calamity-prone places?

After last week’s rains let up, that question was put to a Las Flores Canyon couple, the owner of a Pacific Coast Highway apartment building and a Topanga nursery owner.

Their answer, in short, was that ordeals like last week’s deluge can cause wrenching disruption but not disillusionment. In some ways, they consider theirs a frontier life and they’re loath to abandon it--even if that means enduring more than one disaster.

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Gary and Diana Silverston bought their three-bedroom Las Flores Canyon home for $450,000 in 1989. The November, 1993, fire cost them $70,000 in repairs, mostly to replace the roof and parts of the exterior walls. Three months later, mudslides nearly leveled the house, which was covered by private flood insurance.

A huge boulder that crashed through the couple’s bedroom window during the slide would have hit Gary, 43, had he not left the bedroom for the living room minutes before. The boulder fell through the floor of the bedroom and into the garage below.

The couple, now living in a rented house in Pacific Palisades, where Diana, 35, grew up, is rebuilding. And last week Gary trekked up to Las Flores to check on his still-unfinished house, which is surrounded by a massive wall that was recently built higher to block boulders the size of a stove.

The downpour itself had caused no damage.

“We did great in this storm,” said Silverston, owner of Silmor, a custom-home contracting and design firm, as he inspected his house beneath a slate-gray sky. “We built this wall for maximum (flood) runoff from the 28 acres (uphill from the house). It’s designed for boulders that will hit. We are seismically safe. . . . But we can’t do anything about the locusts.”

The Silverstons have coped with the hassles of dislocation and rebuilding with similar good humor.

After last year’s mudslide, the couple held a “Mudsuckers Ball” at what remained of their house. There, Gary and a friend dressed up as female mud wrestlers, complete with bawdy names inappropriate for a family newspaper. And last December, Diana sent out a wryly worded Christmas letter to friends that recounted the family’s travails and said, “Thank God I married a builder!”

But the Silverstons are deeply serious about their pledge to return with their two children--Katherine Rose, 7, and Elizabeth, 4--to their canyon home. Enchanted with the canyon’s bucolic character, they say they never considered living anywhere else.

“It’s a great place to raise kids,” Diana said. “It is one of the most beautiful places in the world. The creek is, most of the time, gorgeous, sunny and green. You have raccoon families that come and visit you at night. There is all the wildlife at the creek. And I can walk (my children) to Carden Malibu School.”

And Gary takes pride in having survived Mother Nature’s one-two punch.

“You know, people came across this country in covered wagons,” scolded Gary, a native of Dayton, Ohio, who came to Los Angeles in the 1980s. “We all used to live in caves. . . . We live such lives now that we are isolated from the elements. I ski, run and hike. I am used to it.”

Nor have disasters dampened Barry McManus’ enthusiasm for life in canyon country.

McManus, who lives in Topanga Canyon and owns a four-unit apartment building on Pacific Coast Highway across from Big Rock Drive, has been put to the test.

A professional drummer since the 1950s, McManus lost major portions of his apartment building in last February’s mudslides, which filled the building with about four feet of sludge. The black ooze ripped through the apartment house from front to back, carrying tenants’ couches, books, paintings and other belongings into the Pacific Ocean, where they bobbed like bathtub toys.

Last week’s storm caused considerably less damage: Mud and water punched a hole in the building’s foundation and crept into the single-story apartment house, rising to about two inches in the kitchens of some of the units.

“This was no big thing,” McManus said last week as he pulled plastic over the 3-by-4-foot hole in the foundation. “Last year was a big thing.”

He says his Pacific Coast Highway property has sustained damage in numerous disasters over the years, but at no point has he felt compelled to leave. Nor, apparently, have his tenants, none of whom moved out after last year’s mudslides.

Sharon Sandler, whose entire bedroom was swept out to sea in the February mudslide, says she is addicted to life in the seaside building, which stands on pilings on the water’s edge. From her newly reconstructed bedroom, featuring a bay window with a 180-degree vista of the Pacific Ocean, one feels suspended in space.

“A slow obsession evolves from living out here close to the elements,” said Sandler, who works as a domestic law attorney in Century City. “This is a very romantic place to live . . . even when the earth is erupting. It’s a strange and wonderful experience to awake every day of life with the sun over the ocean. It’s absolutely been the most sensual experience of my life. I don’t know that I can ever leave Malibu.”

McManus, who Sandler calls “an authentic Topanga man,” agrees.

A Malibu property owner since the mid-1970s, he has lived in Topanga or on the beach in Malibu since 1968. The canyon-and-beach lifestyle, he says, allows him to avoid urban tensions while staying close to Los Angeles’ music industry.

“It’s just so easygoing in Topanga and Malibu,” said McManus, who moved from his Pacific Coast Highway beach apartment to Topanga 10 years ago so he could enroll his daughter, now 16, in the canyon community’s schools.

“Topanga Elementary School is wonderful,” said McManus, who added that his only complaint about Topanga is that there is no place where he can get a “fix” of Mexican food. “There is a music vibe there. And the canyon has a lot of spirit and a lot of positive spirited people up there. Those are the people I like to hang with. All 365 days a year I thank God that I live here.”

McManus acted defensively after the February mudslides. He built a 10-foot fence around his Pacific Coast Highway building and installed a larger storm drain on the eastern edge of the property.

The barricade worked, keeping out the brunt of the mud during last week’s storm. But there was still cleanup to do.

“I hate days like this, you know?” McManus said as he and Francisco Martinez, a day laborer, finished mopping up the mess in the apartment kitchens. “The thing is to make sure this doesn’t happen again. But those hills, let’s face it, the fire stripped them. It will be another five years of this.”

Few can offer the long view like Pamela Ingram, 73, a Topanga resident and owner of Sassafras Nursery on Topanga Boulevard. A native of England, Ingram has endured seasonal flooding for 40 years and has lost two homes to fires, one of which occurred when some Christmas presents caught fire.

Last week’s storm turned the tiny, rather charming creek that runs across the front of Ingram’s nursery into a wild river the width of a football field. The swollen waters dragged uncounted potted trees, flowers and other property into its maw, said Ingram, who has yet to total up damages for an aid application with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Just look at that,” Ingram gasped last week, stepping down the hillside to examine the raging creek, where the nursery dog, Samantha, was taking a drink from the murky water. “It’s funny how you use the word creek when it’s dry and river when it’s wet. This is the worst.”

Ingram has flood, fire and earthquake insurance and has said that the “government has been very good” about helping out in the past. The only time she ever considered leaving Topanga Canyon was during flooding a couple of years ago in which she feared for her life.

“I no longer care about possessions because I have lost so many of them,” said Ingram, who started her nursery in 1979, offering English roses, delphiniums, peonies and wisteria, among other plants.

Ingram came to Los Angeles with her husband and two small children from Chicago in the 1950s. But she found her new urban surroundings grating.

“I looked, appalled, at these cement sidewalks and hills with palm trees, and sun bathing down on the whole awful mess,” she said. “I was used to the English woods. The soft and muted colors. So we took a drive out to Topanga.”

Ingram and her husband, from whom she is divorced, considered themselves pioneers of Topanga Canyon, then populated by just a handful of people. For a time she bred and sold silver poodles and Siamese cats.

Later she opened the nursery, sold organic seeds and also became a beekeeper. Through the decades, she says, the canyon has been the only constant in her life. Leaving it now, she adds, would be unthinkable.

“You buy a piece of property and you don’t know what is going to happen,” she said. “It is like with a child. They fall down and hurt themselves and you fix it. You don’t give the child up. And once you’ve been somewhere so long, you become a part of it. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Something Else

A few of the disasters from the past 25 years:

1970: Firestorm scorches the hills above Pacific Coast Highway.

1980: Mudslides buckle PCH, leaving a ridge almost 5 feet high.

1992: Low tide reveals debris swept to beach by a severe storm.

1993: Flames engulf the hillside along PCH near Las Tunas Beach.