A LAND DIVIDED

On the edge of Orange County, out in the stillness and beauty of the half-hidden wilderness, Dana Judd stands in the middle of a disappearing dream.

As a girl growing up in Orange, Judd imagined herself owning a ranch and living in Silverado, all of which came true. But now she hears of a subdivision and a strip mall hurtling toward her own piece of heaven, and she wonders when and where it will end.

“When I was a kid, I absolutely loved this place,” said Judd, 35, who owns the Carbondale Ranch in Silverado Canyon, a few miles east of Tustin, over the Loma Ridge. “But I’m very much afraid that the area will change . . . is changing. Let’s face it, development is coming this way with a vengeance.”

A few miles south of here, behind the counter of Cook’s Corner bar, is a man who believes in jobs, opportunity and growth--and that includes the county’s traditionally untouchable “outback,” its isolated, eastern, rural fringe, the place Judd calls home.

“As long as people are making babies, you’re going to need development,” insists Frank de Luna, 58, who came to California from Maryland and eight years ago bought the Cook’s Corner bar, which has a nationwide reputation as a gathering place for motorcyclists.

A self-described builder, De Luna assails the “slow-growth, no-growth crowd, who want nothing but a park around them for at least 70 square miles.”

De Luna, brash, confident and pulling no punches, like a football coach guaranteeing a win, is vocally backing a 42,000-square-foot strip mall across the road from Cook’s Corner and a 222-acre, 318-unit subdivision called Saddleback Meadows a mere stone’s throw beyond that. He also hopes to build his own 19,000-square-foot retail mall directly behind the bar.

But scores of folks believe De Luna has picked the wrong place to be talking like that. After all, Cook’s is on the rural edge of the dividing line between modern Orange County and its vanishing wilderness.

The gulf between Judd and De Luna can’t be reconciled. More bitter clashes than ever before are being waged between the fiercely independent guardians of the county’s last frontier and the forces of “progress,” who critics say have long had the backing of the Board of Supervisors, the final arbiter of development issues.

Novelist Larry McMurtry once defined the tragedy of the American West as being rooted in “the rush from wilderness to pavement.”

Nowhere is that more evident than in Orange County.

Strip malls occupy places the Juanenos and Gabrielinos once held as sacred burial grounds. Seemingly endless miles of orange groves and meadows gave way long ago to freeways and car exhaust and the stucco of tract homes.

Until just the last few years, Orange County’s remote canyons and tiny rural hamlets had remained largely unspoiled by urban development. But although the movement has taken decades, the progression these days is real and--to the inhabitants here--relentless.

Suburban sprawl is inching its way toward Modjeska Canyon, Silverado Canyon, Trabuco Canyon, the steep hill country of Ortega Highway and even to the crossroads of Cook’s.

“Those people are threatened,” said Tom Mathews, director of planning for the Environmental Management Agency of Orange County. “They have always been threatened, and they always will be threatened. They live at the edge of our unincorporated territory.”

Outback residents feel desperate to maintain a way of life found nowhere else in a crowded, ever-more-urban county. They talk dreamily of the stars they see at night, of sharing the land with mountain lions, rattlesnakes, bobcats, mule deer and owls.

Living in Orange County’s rural oasis is, many say, a priceless experience. But, the locals contend, it won’t last for long if allowed to evolve unprotected, and the most vocal among them accuse state and local government of being their worst enemies.

In Silverado, residents recently battled a powerful legislative leader in Sacramento over control of the canyon’s independent water district. Less than five miles away, the sound of bulldozers grading and leveling has drawn nearer.

“We’ll fight development to the very end,” said Sherry Meddick, 42, one of Silverado’s longtime activists. “We’ll take on each and every adversary. But the truth is, we spend too much of our time fighting, and it shouldn’t have to be that way. They should leave us the hell alone.”

Even so, there appears to be more at work in these areas than suburban sprawl searching for new land. Sociologically, the dynamic is far more complicated, as Modjeska Canyon and a new influx of urban immigrants illustrates.

There, a clash of lifestyles is changing the area in ways never before seen. New arrivals from the South County coastline and other venues are seeking a fresh vision of paradise, building two- and three-story estates near funky rural cabins.

“This is becoming more and more of a rich person’s neighborhood,” said one woman, who asked not to be quoted by name. “I look around and say, ‘They’re pricing me out. I’m not going to be able to live here anymore.’ And I love it here. I don’t care to live anywhere else.”

County planner Mathews has a different take.

“I don’t understand it,” he said. “It’s not my cup of tea to put a $500,000 home next to a trapper’s cabin, but that’s the way it’s evolving. So far, though, these people appear to be living in harmony. The common thread between the rural yuppie and the old-time cabin dweller is that both want to be separate and detached from the rest of Orange County. It’s a strong bond to have in common.”

The phenomenon of gentrification reaching Orange County’s outback is already well known in the peninsula areas of the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Topanga Canyon and parts of Los Angeles County.

“You’re now seeing in Orange County what you saw developing in those places quite some time ago,” said Michael Dear, director of the Southern California Studies Center at USC. “You have people tired of dense urban planning who want to move out into the canyons. So, you sometimes see million-dollar homes cheek by jowl with tear-down shacks.”

With coastal areas becoming scarcer and more costly, “people are opting for mountainside vistas rather than coastal vistas,” he said. “But in outback areas, they often encroach upon properties that have been there forever. In some respects, though, the bigger problem is the impact on wildlife and native [plants], which are rapidly disappearing in ways that are really quite tragic.”

Along Ortega Highway, which has remained largely untouched since its opening in 1934, the look and feel of the place is beginning to change. Connecting roads and even the highway itself are being widened, extended or otherwise reshaped and reconfigured.

Full of “dead-man’s curves,” California 74 has become a scenic but heavily traversed thoroughfare between a burgeoning South County and booming western Riverside County. The crunch of commuters and 40-minute traffic delays have spawned a concept dubbed “Ortega gridlock” by one frustrated local.

All along the outback, locals worry far less about their usual nemeses--wildfires and rampaging floods--and more about weekend gang activity, crime and, of course, development, which heads the list of the new concerns.

“All I really worried about in the old days,” said Modjeska Canyon cliff dweller Cliff Larson, 56, “was fallin’ off this damn hillside.”

More than 200,000 new residents have moved to the county since 1990, and Mathews, the county planner, predicts a 19% growth countywide between 1990 and 2000. Despite long-held limitations on development, newcomers by the thousands are making their way inland, even to the hidden pockets of the inner canyons.

Throughout the county’s unincorporated areas, the current estimated population is 179,600, according to the California Department of Finance. But a document called Orange County Projections, released annually by the county’s administrative office, predicts a population of 5,493 in Silverado and Modjeska canyons by 2010, more than double the current population in those communities.

The same agency predicts a population of 73,982 in all “South County canyon areas” by 2010. The current population hovers slightly below 40,000, it says.

Economic factors have fed the growth. Ever since Proposition 13 clamped a lid on property tax increases in 1978, local cities and county government have increasingly relied on new commercial and residential development to fortify and expand their shrinking revenue and reserves of cash.

“You’ll see a rush to develop whatever land is left to develop,” said Mark Baldassare, chairman of the Department of Urban Planning at UC Irvine. “The county will have to do that, out of necessity, to bring in fresh supplies of property- and sales tax revenue. . . . What’s left beside the canyon areas?”

But Mathews disputes the fatalistic vision of the outback’s future.

“I don’t think you’ll ever see the Disneylandification of Silverado Canyon or Modjeska Canyon or Trabuco Canyon,” he said. “That may be what they think will happen, but they’re wrong. It just won’t.”

Because of the Cleveland National Forest, which offers a curtain of federal protection, Mathews believes Silverado and Modjeska canyons will never see the kind of transformation that befell Anaheim, Buena Park and other Orange County cities, where “barley fields became tract homes almost overnight.”

But he won’t persuade his detractors in the outback, where Trabuco Canyon activist Ray Chandos, 47, who has lived there 13 years, accuses county planners and the Board of Supervisors of “being nothing more than a tool” for the building industry.

Country residents say they have grown wary of promises and guarantees, noting that much of the county surrendered wilderness to urbanization.

The thought of having to share her home with a subdivision, said Judy Myers, 63, a 27-year resident of Silverado, keeps her up nights.

Myers said she and her neighbors decided long ago that efforts to save Silverado would have to come from the people with the most to lose. It would not be supplied by elected officials or “anyone on the outside, who doesn’t understand what it is we care about.”

Supervisor Don Saltarelli, who represents the residents of Trabuco, Modjeska and Silverado canyons, doesn’t believe Myers or her neighbors have anything to worry about.

“I don’t see any real demand for large-scale [commercial] development in those areas,” he said. “What you’ll see at most is low-density residential development, which isn’t going to solve the county’s [revenue] problems.”

The canyons are peopled by physicists and other scientists, academics, military contractors, doctors, ranchers, real-estate salesmen, lawyers, restaurateurs and a host of blue-collar workers, such as plumbers, electricians and mechanics. Silverado Canyon also is home to two prominent political activists, including one woman who works for Greenpeace. Myers’ husband, like a number of his neighbors, is retired from Rockwell International.

Because they pay taxes and work in the county, many feel entitled to the same level of services as other parts of Orange County, though they prefer to live largely apart from the county at large. Many have complained for years of a decline in policing, public works and code enforcement. Most blame the bankruptcy for the change.

Saltarelli is not particularly moved by such complaints.

“For the most part,” Saltarelli said, “people in those areas are modern-day American pioneers who want to be left alone. They have their town hall meetings. They like to resolve their own problems.”

“But that’s what we worry about,” Myers said. “We do solve our own problems. We do want to be left alone. It’s whether they’ll let us do that that has us worried.”

Like other skeptics in Orange County’s outback, Judd, the rancher, sees “dark clouds gathering up ahead,” contending that political and economic forces have already altered the delicate equilibrium of life.

While outback residents are skeptical of county government, they are equally wary of efforts in such planned communities as Rancho Santa Margarita to transform themselves into self-sufficient cities.

“We’re vulnerable as it is,” Myers said. “But to pack us in with an Irvine or a Rancho Santa Margarita would cause us to lose our voice entirely. We’re just too small for that.”

Myers and her neighbors cite a litany of events that they contend proves the outback is under attack:

* In Silverado, residents rallied to save the local water district from being consolidated with a larger, outside district. A bill by Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove)--recently defeated in the state Senate--sought to merge the water district that serves both Silverado and Modjeska canyons with a larger, westerly district, such as Irvine or Rancho Santa Margarita. The water issue was crucial to residents of both canyons as a symbol of political autonomy and control, in a district with only 1,023 registered voters.

* Some residents say Modjeska Canyon has never been busier, noisier or more crowded, especially on weekends, with motorists, hikers and mountain bikers seeking refuge at the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary or the Cleveland National Forest.

“This place is changing more now than in the 13 years I’ve been here,” said Karen Buller, 45, a registered nurse who moved to Modjeska to leave city life behind. “If it isn’t the threat of new roads or shopping malls, it’s more and more people moving in. It’s far more congested than it’s ever been.”

* In Trabuco Canyon, St. Michael’s Abbey and the Ramakrishna Monastery are fighting the proposed Saddleback Meadows development.

Lawyers for the abbey argue that grading would undermine the stability of the Catholic facility, which includes several buildings and a school. Officials for the monastery say county approval for developing the area also violates a 1974 agreement. Under those provisions, the monastery gave Orange County 240 acres of open land that constitute the northern portion of the 3,100-acre O’Neill Regional Park.

Officials for the monastery have threatened to file suit to reclaim the land should the project go forward.

* Along Ortega Highway, residents ponder the effects of road construction, such as the $45-million extension of Antonio Parkway from Oso Parkway to California 74.

The new byway will help relieve the gridlock of Interstate 5 through South County, primarily the city of San Juan Capistrano, which begged the supervisors for help.

Eventually, the Foothill Transportation Corridor (California 241) will also cut through the region, crossing Ortega en route to I-5 from points farther north in inland Orange County. The new toll road, already open in some areas, is being hailed as a boon to transportation.

For Silverado’s Judy Myers, the potential for encroachment is an ever-present reminder of what she and her friends stand to lose. The image lingering in her memory is the nights. She doesn’t know what she’d do without the nights.

“The nights are so quiet,” she said. “The frogs are all you hear, at night in the stream. And we can see the stars; I mean, really see them. It’s just so . . . quiet. It feels like you drive across Irvine Ranch and come to another place, this place . . . a place of peace.”

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ORANGE’S COUNTY’S OUTBACK / A SIX-DAY SERIES

Monday: TRABUCO CANYON

Rancho Santa Margarita, Coto de Caza, Hidden Ridge...all were part of this remote canyon before development changed its face.

Tuesday: COOK’S CORNER

What may be a biker heaven to some is a developer’s dream to others, as the gateway to the country’s “outback” wrestles with its future.

Wednesday: ORTEGA HIGHWAY

A long and winding road famous for its “dead-man curves” comes to grips with its popularity as a fast-moving commuters’ route.

Thursday: MODJESKA CANYON

A clash of cultures is occurring in the land of Madame Helena Modjeska, where old-timers in cabins are finding a new breed of neighbor.

Friday: SILVERADO CANYON

A hamlet at the base of steep mountains, this community has long prided itself on independence, individualism and autonomy.

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Country in the County

Orange County has its own big sky country, a sweeping rural outback with rolling hills, stands of trees and a distinctive history. This traditionally neglected area is changing, and many of its fiercely independent inhabitants are resisting the approach of more development and more people. Five of those colorful areas:

1) SILVERADO CANYON

2) MODJESKA CANYON

3) COOK’S CANYON

4) TRABUCO CANYON

5) ORTEGA CANYON