A Hermit’s Life at the Top of Santiago Dam

No mail reaches Ron Staub’s little cottage up in the canyon--no bills, no postcards, nothing. The house has no street address and not even much of a street. It sits by itself on a rocky, wind-swept hillside populated by deer, rattlesnakes and mountain lions, four miles from the nearest neighbor.

To buy milk, or rent a movie, Staub points his battered pickup across a rocky creek bed and down a private one-lane road, stopping twice to let himself through locked gates. Or he lets his wife, Virginia, go instead.

“You can’t order a pizza,” the longtime dam keeper laments. “You can’t have a newspaper delivered. When the lake fills up, you can’t get in and out, except by boat.”

The silvery waters of Irvine Lake end just below Staub’s long wooden porch. The mile-wide lake, shaped by the rugged fingers of the canyons, is both a fishing spot for trout and catfish and one of Orange County’s primary reservoirs. It contains 8 billion gallons of water that exert a formidable pressure on Santiago Dam.

The dam is considered sound but it is old, built in 1931. An arc of earth and concrete, it extends a quarter-mile from the end of Staub’s steep driveway. From his porch, Staub can look right along the top of it, to the sculpted hills on the opposite side. It is a tranquil, rustic scene, but tremendous natural forces are concealed within it.

A spillway at the dam’s far end released a deluge of overflow during the storms of 1969; two nearby homes and four bridges were washed away. Should this dam ever fail, the disaster would be orders of magnitude greater, destroying scores or even hundreds of homes in Villa Park, Orange and Santa Ana.

Although the prospects of that may be infinitesimal, Staub is a conscientious man who hails from Youngstown, Ohio, and still bears a trace of the accent. He makes it a point to be here, just in case. He is on the job morning, noon and night, charting water levels, adjusting flow valves, taking readings from the strange, dipstick-like devices that measure seepage deep in the dam’s base.

He watches the dam seven days a week, pretty much every holiday, every waking hour. He strolls the dirt path across the toe of the dam, where it slopes into a rocky wash, scanning for signs of leaks. He keeps cattle from grazing on the earthen berm, lest they make hoof prints that hold the rain and loosen the soil. He chases away intruders.

On nights of the full moon, when fishing boats are allowed on the lake until 2 a.m., Staub watches from the dark of the cottage, making sure that they stay outside the buoys and that no one fishes from the dam. He’s done all that for eight years.

“I never go to town,” Staub says. “My wife gets mad--she can never get me out of here. I’m always afraid something will happen.”

The last time he went to a movie theater was three years ago, when he saw “Saving Private Ryan.” Virginia is good-natured about the lifestyle, but she gets away, going to the store, meeting friends for lunch. “I can get him out of here every two months,” she says, laughing. “We have friends who have waited two years for us to go out again. They keep calling.”

“It’s our turn to buy,” Staub quips. “Actually, it’s their turn. I don’t want to say I’m a hermit, but I guess I am.”

Staub is certainly a rare breed. There may be no more than 50 dam keepers in all of California, a state dappled with nearly 1,500 significant dams and reservoirs. Most dams are carefully monitored even without full-time keepers. Inspections are made, water levels tracked, repairs done periodically. The success of the maintenance programs is reflected in the relatively small number of dam disasters in the past half-century, despite the fact that so many dams are getting old.

California’s last fatal collapse happened 38 years ago in Baldwin Hills: Four people were killed when the dam washed out. Homes and business were flooded. Ground subsidence caused by oil extraction was blamed for weakening the dam.

One of the state’s worst disasters occurred more than a generation before that--on March 12, 1928, when St. Francis Dam toppled in Santa Clarita. More than 400 people died because of the accident, attributed at the time to engineering errors by William Mulholland, the famed water impresario of Los Angeles. Although research in recent years has shifted the blame to an undetected underground landslide, the catastrophe was said to have ruined the final years of Mulholland’s life.

“He died soon after that,” notes Ron Delparte, an official with the state’s Division of Safety of Dams. “That [accident] started the law that created this division.”

Dam keepers tend to work at places where inspecting and operating the dam can be combined with other duties. At Irvine Lake, where private ranchland borders a busy regional park, Staub also serves as a security guard. Trespassers who start campfires at night are no real danger to the dam itself, but Staub chases them out to prevent brush fires.

The Irvine Ranch and Serrano water districts co-own and operate the dam, and Staub, a former water-quality inspector, works for both agencies. One or the other owns the two-bedroom house he is provided, or maybe both do--he isn’t sure. He also gets a $20,000 salary, which doesn’t sound like much, but he is a grandfather who could be retired if he wanted, and he savors the chance to live on one of the last slices of urban wilderness.

And stories, oh man, he has stories. Right after he took over the job, in 1993, torrential rains caused the dam to overflow, wiping out the road below it. For two days, Staub had to record the lake level every hour, a vigil that made it impossible to sleep. It was 3 in the morning, black, raining, and he was out on the the dam when a detector for mountain lions began beeping.

“I’m thinking, ‘What else can go wrong?’ ” he says. “Then the dam started vibrating. I’m thinking it’s an earthquake. I forgot about the horses.”

Horses grazed on the property then. They stampeded and nearly trampled him in the dark.

Ron Jr. got married that same year. “We had to go to the wedding by boat,” Staub recalls.

During cooler months, fierce winds rake the canyons. Staub swears the gusts reach 80 mph. He has tried to clock them by rigging a gauge on the roof. “It blew away,” he says.

Milder summer weather means he can reinstall the big screens that enclose the porch--or he could, if not for the five pairs of birds that have used the porch for their nests. So the screens sit and the bugs invade every night, when the Staubs’ porch light is the only light for miles.

Snakes lurk under the cottage steps and slither in the brush outside. Virginia was washing a window not long ago and thought she heard the hose running. It was a rattler, only feet from her ladder. A bloodstain on the deck marks where Staub shot it to death.

Maybe he gripes, but it’s usually with a laugh. The truth is, he loves it here--they both do--seeing the stars, listening to crickets, watching the dam. One tip-off is that Staub never bothers to fish.

“I used to fish to get away from everything,” he says. “Now I’m away from everything.”