Ripples of Change on Still Waters : Lake Piru welcomed 750,000 visitors last year. With a master plan under review, officials must balance public needs with preserving the area’s rustic character.

Art Caldara runs out of the marina office and down the dock where the rental boats come in. He’s seen it a hundred times before: an older couple who, upon returning, can’t seem to get out of their boat.

The man and the woman, shielded against sun exposure by puffy blue Windbreakers, large-brim straw hats and giant dark glasses, clamber about the 12-foot skiff, stepping over coolers and duffles and a frightened dachshund, rocking the boat back and forth, until finally the man makes it up onto the dock--on all fours.

He waves off Caldara’s outreached hand, crawling a few feet to a wider portion of the dock before getting up. He brushes himself off, reaches down toward the boat for the dog, and briskly proceeds as if no threat ever existed.

None had, actually. A smiling Ewayne Gulbrandson, 82, and his wife, Margaret, 83, have, like Caldara, confidently done this many times before, though it was a first for their pooch, Sachi.

Gulbrandson, a retired Camarillo dentist, leads Margaret to the parking lot, where she turns to a visitor and quips: “You wanna see our $72 fish?”

And there it is: a tiny 12-inch trout, barely a pound and a quarter, the sole yield on a day’s boat rental and fishing license fees--though no less striking and beautiful for its iridescent green and yellow and orange speckles.

“Oh, I got nothing,” says Dr. Gulbrandson, loading gear into the car. “But Margaret’s got some Cherokee in her, and she got this one here. It’ll be enough for dinner for the two of us tonight. She’ll cook it in white wine--no cholesterol or anything. We’ve got to watch that at our age.”

Indeed.

Welcome to Lake Piru, where any and everybody is a True Sportsman or True Sportswoman, where people who might be finicky at the dinner table are gladiators by day.

*

People come here for the fishing, certainly--the lake is stocked with more than 45,000 hatchery-raised trout annually--but increasingly they come for car-access camping in groomed, treed sites; picnicking and horseshoeing in a new grassy grove, and swimming.

Yes, swimming. Unlike Lake Casitas or other reservoir lakes that supply drinking water, Lake Piru mainly supplies irrigation water to the agricultural Oxnard Plain. Swimming poses no health threats, and a large beach established in 1980 has been supplemented with the construction, in 1993, of a smaller sand beach adjacent to picnic grounds on the northwest shore.

Now, however, Lake Piru is poised for change as it seeks to define its own limits of development. The lake’s master plan is under review to consider such things as expanded, connecting hiking trails; water slides (none now); jet skiing (prohibited); and other amenities that would serve a customer base that, since 1980, doubled to 750,000 visitors in ’94. Hearings on possible changes may start later this month, says lake Manager Doug West.

In any event, Lake Piru in its current incarnation presents a rugged inland alternative to day trippers seeking searing sun and midnight blue water and a place to hike or just kick back and relax. Weekends are sometimes busy--people have been turned away on jammed holidays--but midweek, even in summer, is D-E-A-D and arguably the better for appreciating Lake Piru’s very specific character.

It is a highly individual character marked by extreme terrain. Lake Piru is, plainly, a topographic wonder at once indigenous and lunar--a great mystery of a setting brought about by steep-sided mountain ranges and this arid region’s dam-building rapacity for water. It makes not only for good recreation but, even for the once-only visitor, a history lesson in California land management.

Nobody dug a hole for it.

Instead, in 1955, the Unified Water Conservation District, created to supply agriculture’s need for water and also to recharge natural ground-water supplies, put up a 200-foot-tall dam at an elevation of 1,000 feet between two mountains divided by Piru Creek. The creek carried not only spring waters but rainwater runoff from far higher elevations near Pyramid Lake and the surrounding Los Padres National Forest. The idea was to get water southward into the Santa Clara River and westward to farms that fan out to the sea.

But a creek is a creek, and so it took 14 years for Lake Piru to fill up and become itself. The dam was designed to enclose an area that would hold 100,000 acre feet of water. [An acre foot is a pool of water 12 inches deep covering one acre.] But as the water rose, portions of the steep mountainsides slid down to the bottom. This, coupled with silt flowing downstream, has displaced more than 10,000 acre feet.

Still, Lake Piru is a stout body of water--four miles long, a mile wide and extra-deep because of the steepness of the mountains it engulfs.

Therein lies Lake Piru’s oddly specific form. On southeast portions of the lake, only tops of mountains protrude from the water, lending a dramatic but eerie incompleteness to the landscape. On other sides, particularly at the narrow northern portions of the lake at Piru Creek’s mouth, apparent whole mountains vault nearly straight up from the water, dominating everything with striated cliffs and serrated canyons, lending awe and power to what seems an ancient, immutable meeting of rock and water.

In the middle of the lake, at depths of 140 feet, the clear water becomes a sky sponge, absorbing hues and hillside reflections and changing color hourly: from pale blue to cobalt to navy, from gray-green to silver to brooding charcoal. It is possible, on the narrow winding road that enters the lake area, to pull over, look down upon the lake, and for a moment draw comparison to alpine postcard settings such as Lucerne, Switzerland.

But it is Southern California, through and through. Against this backdrop, people in neon colors fly by on water skis, buzz along in small fishing boats, and otherwise drop anchor to throw a line or simply gawk. Some do more than one thing at a time.

*

Joe Koch and Michael Drengson are seated at a picnic table at campsite No. 238 in the Oaks Camp campground. It is midafternoon, they are playing cards, listening to the radio and cheerfully anticipating nightfall. That’s when they’ll really get into gear.

The campsite is a rare treasure: It abuts the lake on a calm western cove. A duck and her brood waddle in shallow waters near the table. A large turtle, which Koch has named “Petey,” creeps toward a rock. While the table and their large tan tent are in blazing sunlight, a ring of giant old oaks appears 30 feet in from shore, throwing what seems an acre of cool shade.

“This is just perfect here,” says Drengson, a Cal State Northridge student and Northridge resident. “We’ll forgo a shady site for this one. Come nightfall, we don’t need a boat. We just throw the line out from here, at the table. Trout just hang out right here, in the shallows.” Koch, a self-employed cartographer from Sherman Oaks, nods in agreement.

The pair is not unlike other Lake Piru devotees. They come here, to the same site, annually, for a brief vacation. To ensure they get their site, they arrive on Monday, when the entire place is virtually cleared out.

Asked what it is that keeps them coming back, their faces go slack.

“Oh, man,” says Drengson. “ Look at this place.”

That’s precisely what Beverly Hills-based Oscar Brodney, writer of “The Glenn Miller Story” among other films, does. His 26-foot sailboat “Desert Storm” is docked at the marina, where, says Caldara, Brodney shows up, sits on deck for a few hours without launching, and has a drink. “He just relaxes and looks around, then goes home,” says Caldara. “It’s all he needs.”

And it’s certainly one of the things that has kept Margaret and Ewayne Gulbrandson coming here through the years. Indeed, Dr. Gulbrandson fondly recalls trips to Lake Piru 40 years ago when fish were more plentiful.

“Oh,” he says, shaking his head ruefully over his wife’s lone catch, “my nephew and I would go out on the lake and it would simply be murder: fill the boat with bass till we were ready to sink.”

*

Nothing’s forever, of course, and Lake Piru--off-the-beaten-path charmer that it is--couldn’t be a clearer example.

Not only will the water district soon unveil plans for improvements, but Texaco this year put up for sale nearly 6,000 acres of the very mountains that frame the lake.

The Texaco holdings eclipse much of what is known as Lake Piru Recreation Area, which measures 2,000 acres. Currently, the Unified Water Conservation District seeks to work with Texaco and the neighboring U.S. Forest Service in developing access points for horseback riding and a connecting trail system running through portions of those lands surrounding the lake. To do so would unify huge tracts of now-inaccessible land to day-use visitors.

“No matter what we do,” says Dan Pinkerton, president of the water district’s board of trustees, “we want to maintain the character of the place. We’re not in the theme park business. At the same time, we have to serve our constituents. This place runs entirely on its own revenues, without tax subsidy, and we have to be responsive to the needs of our customers.”

If Lake Piru is at a crossroads, it approaches it with caution.

That couldn’t be better, as this evolving lake--seemingly ancient yet barely embryonic in geologic time--transforms into its next blue self.