A Quiet Melody in a Tame, Wild Place

It was 10:30 a.m. in the lush and wooded southern rim of the San Fernando Valley, and the eight happiest ducks in the city were looking mighty hungry.

Arrayed in a floating chow line on a pond shaded by towering cedars, the fat, tawny mallards ignored stale offerings of Trader Joe’s honey-wheat bread, and one after another dipped under water for the real thing: fresh bluegill.

“How long can they stay under there?” asked my own 3-year-old waterfowl, Joseph, worried that the ducks might not resurface in time to discover his generosity.

“About as long as--”

Just then, the birds rebounded from the pond in a silvery flash to glide again along their circle of cool, giving a cold wing to our attempt to bring them into the late 20th century with a handout.

And that, in a gesture, is the charm of Franklin Canyon Park, one of the least visited but most beautiful gems of the Santa Monica Mountains-- and one due for restoration after years of benign neglect on the part of federal park officials.

Despite its location smack between Beverly Hills and Studio City, the slender fold of hills and two lakes owned by the National Park Service remains an almost forgotten throwback to a time in Southern California when ducks ate fish, chaparral climbed to the sky and sycamore trees arched over curbless, narrow blacktop roads unmarked with graffiti or stoplights.

“It’s one of the main reasons I’ve decided not to flee the city,” said one visitor, a Hollywood sound engineer, strolling through with his 5-year-old daughter and her friend.

Indeed, the former Department of Water and Power reservoir is a sanctuary not just for rare wood ducks and several hundred small animals, but for the human spirit.

It is just as much a crease in time as a crease in the mountains, a drowsy dot on the map where oil painters set up easels along a reed-lined lake as if they had just escaped from 19th century Paris. Film location scouts find a home there for scenes purportedly occurring in rural Colorado, Minnesota or Maine.

On a recent morning, even Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy ecologist Paul Edelman walked through the park with wide-eyed wonder. The conservancy, a state parkland-acquisition agency, recently moved its operational headquarters there from Solstice Canyon near Malibu in a complicated swap of land and duties with the federal government.

Weighed down by his work writing environmental documents for government bureaucracies, Edelman admitted that he seldom has a chance to saunter out of his new office and study Franklin, which the conservancy is now managing for the feds. So I encouraged him to play hooky from his responsibility to state taxpayers for half an hour, and joined him on a quick tour.

I had myself only discovered Franklin Canyon Park a year ago, despite having lived in the Valley most of my life. It’s not a favorite of joggers and baby-stroller pushers, like wooded Lake Hollywood in the Cahuenga Pass. It’s not a major favorite of hikers, dog walkers and view seekers, like rugged Wilacre Park in Fryman Canyon. It’s not a favorite of mountain bikers, like the sprawling, remote Topanga State Park to the west.

It is certainly no Mecca for homeowners, like Coldwater Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Beverly Glen or Benedict Canyon.

It has a far slower pace, just right for kids, tadpoles and ducks. And a different climate. As Edelman and I walked its country lanes, the 100-degree heat of the Valley a mile or two away quickly melted into a memory. Cool sea breezes wafted up from the Pacific, peacefully turning the tall coyote bush, Toyon shrub, arborescent sumac and luminous, yellow mustard weeds into a brilliant motion picture.

We stopped and listened. What a difference a couple of miles make. Not more than 10 minutes away, there were millions of dollars changing hands on Rodeo Drive and a thousand screenwriters howling at their agents. But just off Mulholland Drive, down a hidden road near the crest of Coldwater Canyon, all you can hear is the leaves changing color.

It is not in man’s nature to leave nature alone, however, so the conservancy has ambitious plans for Franklin. Already, almost 300 Los Angeles schoolchildren a week visit the park’s William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom and Sooky Goldman Nature Center, where stuffed bobcats, snakes and birds rustle up interest in the environment. And hikers can scout the Franklin wilderness on miles of hillside pathways, some of which are known as the Blinderman Trail in honor of Barbara Blinderman, an attorney and mountain activist.

Now the conservancy wants to rebuild and gussy up a Braille trail that surrounds the park’s duck pond; it fell into disrepair under the National Park Service’s reign, and all the displays are missing.

Edelman also wants to yank out the unsightly metal fences that are left from the park’s previous role as a Westside reservoir. And most important, officials will attempt to restore a lodge used by the Doheny family as a summer retreat in the 1920s.

The cottage of the early Los Angeles oil barons, which tops a vast lawn shaded by giant jacarandas at the canyon’s southern edge, was used as a records archive by federal park officials who oversee the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Impeded by a $1-billion backlog of maintenance work throughout the national park system, the former tenants admitted that they used cheap materials to inadequately repair a leaky roof, broken walls, rotted floor and splintered window frames, according to conservancy construction deputy Sky Atchison.

“This was a remote outpost for them, and they were in poverty,” Atchison said.

Park Service spokeswoman Jean Bray said the agency is normally sensitive to the needs of historic buildings but acknowledged that upkeep of the Franklin Canyon buildings was not a priority.

As funds become available, Atchison said, the conservancy plans to restore the cottage based on photographs in the Beverly Hills Public Library’s Doheny collection and create a small museum to illustrate the canyon’s past. The cottage will also continue to serve as a ranger residence.

Much of the money will come from film production revenues. This week, for example, the makers of the “Leave It to Beaver” movie will pay $5,000 to $10,000 to shoot a few pastoral scenes.

In time, Atchison and Edelman said, the conservancy intends to promote Franklin as a cornerstone of the agency’s successful effort to create, through acquisition and donations, an unbroken path of cross-mountain wilderness north from the Los Angeles Basin to the San Fernando Valley.

Those grand aims make sense for planners but matter little to neighbors like Marlon Brando--and Jaycie Ingersoll.

Viewed across the lake one misty morning, Ingersoll’s red Windbreaker made her look like a shimmering point in an Impressionist painting. Encountered face-to-face amid the reeds a few minutes later, Ingersoll revealed that she is an artist who for 30 years has strolled the lake’s edge to draw inspiration for her paintings and to commune with the ducks.

“Where else can you live in a major city and still feel like you’re in the country?” she asked. “This is a wonderful place, where you can see the seasons change day by day. It’s different all the time here.

“And even better, it’s the same.”