A Campfire Crackles on Compton Ave.

The campfire is alight, embers wheeling into the dusk. The counselor leads the kids in song, waiting for coals to glow, marshmallows to roast. A burly dad with a thick arm around his 8-year-old son struggles with the lyrics.

My bow-nee lies over the o-shin. My Bonnie lies over the sea.

After a long day of painting houses, Jorge Rivas booms the English words he knows and mumbles the rest, while his teenage daughter and her friend giggle.

Ah, yes, the great outdoors, wind sifting through the cottonwoods, children and parents goofing around on a smoky summer evening. And no one seems to notice the trucks rattling over the train tracks nearby and the Blue Line screeching along the viaduct.

John Muir might wince, but in a part of town where people learn to make do with what’s there, this bit of nature in South-Central Los Angeles offers unexpected serenity. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has transformed an old city pipe yard at Compton Avenue and Slauson Boulevard into the 8 1/2-acre Augustus Hawkins Natural Park, which opened in December.

“I really like that the rangers teach the kids about nature,” said Rivas, who grew up in Central America. “This is really special for my son. In El Salvador, this is part of life. This is how you grow up.”

Luke McJimpson is the ranger in these parts. The former tow truck driver joined the conservancy to get out into the mountain wilds, which he did for some time. But now he lives at the only ranger station located next to a major truck corridor, King’s Welding and an auto parts store. The main route to his park--through a rutted swath of asphalt and aluminum--is lined with more tequila billboards than trees.

“I’ve already been out where there’s a lot of wilderness,” he said. “These kids here don’t even know about that wilderness. Many have never even been to the beach. So they get so excited to learn.”

The park itself isn’t exactly natural. It’s covered with lawn and man-made hills sculpted out of dirt trucked in from landslides along Pacific Coast Highway.

But a stream and a windmill; a community garden with sunflowers and cornstalks and scarecrows; a meadow of native grass, coastal sage scrub and shade trees--a giant old avocado, as well as young sycamores, oaks and willows; all create a pastoral atmosphere absent from most city parks. There are no playgrounds or basketball courts, and gang members have kept their distance.

The only frenetic movement within the iron fences comes after school, when kids on scooters whip around a serpentine sidewalk that makes for a great racetrack.

Elsewhere in the park, families picnic; women in jumpsuits speed walk; a beefy, heavily tattooed man stands on the lawn alone, flying a kite; old men sit on the benches, clutching canes.

One afternoon last week, Dante Powell came to the park for the first time with his wife, Valerie, and their 2-year-old son. They ate Pringles, listened to music and relaxed as they would at the beach, where they normally go on their days off.

“This is really different,” Powell said. “It doesn’t look like a park. It’s like a meadow.

“There’s so many buildings around here they need to tear down. This whole area needs a make-over--with more places like this.”

McJimpson, who is a law enforcement officer, makes sure graffiti is quickly painted over and keeps a watchful eye for crime.

The ranger recently moved into the upstairs of the wood-beamed Craftsman bungalow built as the park headquarters. His Suzuki 750 motorcycle sits in the garage. His collection of reptiles--female repellent, he calls the menagerie with a booming laugh--occupies his living room. He lives with his 6-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter.

McJimpson grew up in the area, at 69th Street and Broadway, owned an auto shop and served in the National Guard here during the 1992 riots.

He knows the neighborhood’s material needs and isn’t one to talk much about endangered species or nonnative plants.

“Wassup, Luke!” a neighbor in a stucco bungalow yells from his fenced frontyard.

Augustin Gomez, 46, has been living across the street from the property for 20 years and says the park has injected a sense of pride into neighborhood life. People are painting their homes, cutting their lawns more often. And, Gomez said, McJimpson’s supervision has ensured a peaceful environment.

So after a tiring day of work, Gomez strolls across the street and takes a nap under a tree.

“You know what’s really good about the park is there’s no gang members,” he said. “You can really relax.”

The park staff, all of whom grew up in the neighborhood, say they try to treat the park as they would any other in the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

They teach classes on coyotes and bobcats and hawks. They take local kids camping and to the beach. They offer campfire sing-alongs, a junior ranger program and a travel club in which students learn about a new country every week.

Last Saturday, they took a busload of 41 children from the neighborhood to camp at Leo Carrillo State Park along the beach in the Santa Monica Mountains. They set up dome tents, cooked eggs on camp stoves and hiked under stars they can’t usually see under the halo of city lights.

Coyotes yelped and the ever-present whir of the freeway nearby gave way to the rhythm of cicadas and the tumbling of small summer waves onto the beach.

“A lot of the kids are actually afraid,” McJimpson said. “They’ve never been outside without buildings. You had some of ‘em going along the trail, saying, ‘What is that squeaking noise?’

“ ‘They’re crickets,’ I said.”

Amy Lethbridge, an executive officer at the conservancy, accompanied the campers. “A lot of them had never bodysurfed,” she said. “It’s the most fun and amazing feeling to introduce people to things like that.”

Lethbridge started the campfire program at the park after she roused an enthusiastic chorus on a recent bus ride home from a camping trip. “They were laughing so hard as I sang ‘I know a weenie man.’ ”

Wanting to share the fun for those who couldn’t go to Leo Carrillo, she found herself leading dozens of kids and some parents in singing around a campfire just yards from Compton Avenue.

And on Sundays, she volunteers to teach the travel club.

The lessons are mostly environmentally based but the main goal is to take the children, and their minds, beyond the narrow streets they know.

“If you get the kids to learn about the natural world,” McJimpson said, “it really expands their lives.”