Life on the Santa Clara Called Peaceful : Oxnard: Floods threatened the people living along the river bottom, but the danger passed with little notice.

Sheltered in a handmade cabin of plywood and tarp, Alan Rice spends his days collecting cans, smoking cigarettes and listening to talk radio.

In the afternoons, he hikes to a recycling center and trades in the cans for cash, returning home with his mixed-breed dog, Freeway.

“It’s 80 cents a pound, but they usually give me 90,” he said. “I’m a good customer.”

For six years, Rice has huddled inside his makeshift hut, one of 15 to 20 people camped along the Santa Clara River, overlooked and invisible though just yards from the traffic humming by on Ventura Road.

While those who lived in the Ventura River bottom have gotten the headlines and thousands of dollars of emergency aid since fierce winter rains wiped out their encampments, residents of the Santa Clara River have not been so fortunate.

There was no city ordinance passed to prevent them from returning to their homes on the Oxnard side of the river after the Jan. 10 flood, no bulldozers scraping away the campsites carved from thick, overgrown brush.

No relief workers showed up with blankets or housing vouchers, no social service crews came around offering medical care or long-term assistance.

“They haven’t been as noticeable as the people at the Ventura River bottom,” said county Supervisor John K. Flynn, who represents the Oxnard area. “They haven’t bothered anyone. They seem to have selected that area themselves, and they seem happy to be there.”

The Santa Clara River bottom has traditionally attracted far fewer squatters than its counterpart to the north, in part because it is not as close to agencies that provide services to the homeless.

Since officials banned camping along the Ventura riverbed, few transients have relocated to the Santa Clara River. Here, among a handful of campsites propped up by endurance and sweat, the exercise of daily life trudges on.

Most subsist by collecting aluminum cans. They have staked out their own turf, being careful not to trespass on their neighbors’. Others stand on roadsides, soliciting work or spare change from passing motorists.

“The rain was kind of hairy,” said Craig, a 31-year-old former roofer who lives in a two-room camp with his pregnant wife.

Craig, who would not give his last name, said he stayed up all night Jan. 10, watching the river inch closer to his home.

“My wife was scared,” he said. “I was kind of scared too.”

Floodwaters climbed as close as 10 yards from his camp, threatening to invade the living quarters that Craig spent weeks equipping with a propane grill, king-size bed and black-and-white television.

“Everything we’ve got here, my wife and I found,” he said, resting in a faded armchair outside his shanty. “We won’t beg.”

Like most of the people who live in the Santa Clara River bottom, Craig and his wife once had a nice home, a small apartment in Ventura that had room enough for themselves and their two children.

But the hunt for work ran dry after he was laid off last year, and the married couple of 10 years were forced to move into their car and leave the children with grandparents.

Later, when the car broke down and they had to abandon it in Oxnard, they sought help from the usual sources--government agencies, churches and nonprofit groups--but nothing panned out.

“I gave up on all that after I went down there with my wife,” he said, an overgrown brown mustache tickling the gap where his two front teeth used to be.

“They wanted to put us in a nuthouse, but we’re better off here,” he said. “I like doing things for myself and not using the government.”

Officials say plenty of help is available to the Santa Clara River bottom homeless. They can spend cold winter nights at the National Guard Armory and get fed at the Union Mission.

Only one person from the Santa Clara River bottom registered for help at the Ventura assessment center, a one-stop service office set up for flood victims last January, said Oxnard Housing Director Sal Gonzalez.

That person has yet to apply at the Oxnard housing office, he said.

“If the person shows up and otherwise qualifies, we will assist him with housing,” which would be subsidized, said Gonzalez, who noted that he has tried to steer homeless people to his office for years.

“Time and time again, I have given them my business card and invited them to submit applications for assistance,” he said. “I can recall only one person took me up on that offer.”

But many of the river bottom residents are distrustful of government programs, and pride also keeps some of them away.

The strain of living with nothing breeds a sensitivity for others in the same predicament, Craig said. A month ago he found a man sleeping under a bush a quarter of a mile from his campsite.

Craig invited the 38-year-old former machinist, also out of work with no place to go, to sleep in the second room of his shack, a bamboo-wall enclave covered in plastic.

“The rains a few weeks ago pushed me under the bridge,” said the transient, who declined to give his name. “I came back to Ventura after the work ran out in Utah, and I just couldn’t get a foothold.”

The man said he keeps in touch with a jobs agency in Oxnard, but there is not much demand for a laborer without clean clothes or an address. “Throwing out resumes doesn’t really do any good unless they interview you on the spot.”

Down river about 50 yards, John Cardinal wakes up with the sun, shakes himself off and once again heads for Ventura Road to “sign”; that is, hold up a hand-scrawled sign asking for help.

“Never once has anyone stopped and asked me to go to work,” said Cardinal, a 55-year-old former carpenter with a drinking habit.

The recent rains washed away most of Cardinal’s home, sweeping away six years of work.

“I damn near drowned, but we ended up sleeping over there,” behind a shopping center, he said. “The property manager said it was OK.”

Since then, he has scavenged another tent, a camping stove and a couple of skillets. He cooks chicken or beef with his friends, Ed Dean and John, when he can, but often they settle for less, feasting on leftovers rummaged from dumpsters.

“I’ve had to be a vegetarian for a few days in a row,” said John, a 36-year-old former millworker whose most valuable possession is the rusty bicycle he uses to collect cans. “But I’ve never really gone hungry.”

Eight years after a work-related injury ended his oil-field job, Dean is still fishing for aluminum, asking strangers for odd jobs and waiting for something better.

“Some help would be real nice,” he said. “Because there’s nothing for us here--not even a place to get some day labor.”

Still, Dean said, the past two years at the Santa Clara River have been more comfortable than the time he spent roughing it about 10 miles north, in the more crowded Ventura River bottom.

“It was too violent over there, too much stuff going on,” Dean said, breaking from a morning of looking for cans. “You leave your camp for 15 minutes and they steal whatever it is you got.

“It’s different down here,” he said. “People take care of each other.”