Some Neighbors in the Dumps Over Enhancement

“Ninety in the shade,” the teenage waitress at the Silverado Cafe says in the early afternoon Wednesday. “It’s going to be a hot summer.”

Out of the mouths of babes . . .

Come what may, things historically have stayed cool for the folks in neighboring Silverado and Modjeska canyons. Why? Because they insist on it.

As an unwritten code of conduct, people up here mind their own business and expect their neighbors to mind theirs. If that means your next-door neighbor wants a few junk cars in his frontyard, so be it. If you throw up an 8-foot-high storage container that’s an eyesore, you expect your neighbor to grin and bear it.

Thus has it been for years. The price people pay for living beyond the geographic fringe of “civilized” Orange County is the solace they find among the sycamores and oaks and, in an odd way, the bobcats and rattlesnakes.

In another era, it would be called country living. We would romanticize it.

Now, this summer, the canyon folks’ cool is ebbing. Things are heating up.

Complaints have been filtering in to the county. Residents who once used their properties as graveyards for dead Ford pickups now are getting visits from the Sheriff’s Department. People who built home additions without worrying about the niceties of getting a permit now are being asked why.

The Sheriff’s Department has formed a “Neighborhood Enhancement Team,” a term that has many longtime residents gagging and sputtering. It’s a surprise to them that their neighborhoods need enhancing.

“They’re trying to look at us in the same way they look at Rancho Santa Margarita or Portola Hills,” says longtime resident Dick Ertman. “We are not them. This place historically has been ‘live and let live.’ ”

This is the kind of place where a sign on Modjeska Canyon Road advises: “Drive Slowly: Peacock and Chicken Crossing.” Or, when you step outside from the Modjeska Country Store, you may have to sidestep a lamb waiting for its owner to conduct her business inside.

It may sound like canyon residents think they’re above the law. That’s not what it sounds like, to my ears, while talking to them.

“That’s a rural area out there,” says Dan Benson, a general building contractor who lives there. “Old cars are part of the rural ambience. What’s happened is a lot of people with money--whom I’ll label as yuppies--want to get out of the suburbs, so they move into the canyons, build really nice homes and then want to change the rural atmosphere into more of the yuppie neighborhoods that they moved from.”

To a large extent, that’s true. These trucks and stripped-down cars and discarded furniture have adorned some of these properties for years. Like the bobcats, you learn to live with them.

It may be hard for city folk to believe, but to country people the sight of a rusted, gutted shed or a long-dead Chevy Vega in someone’s yard isn’t something to get riled about.

“A lot of rules that might make sense downtown need to make a 180-degree turn up here,” says local political activist Sherry Meddick. She and other longtime residents hope the complainants--whom they generally suspect to be recent arrivals or developers--eventually will feel out of place and leave.

Into the middle of this clash--and not entirely willingly, I suspect--comes the Sheriff’s Department. It acknowledges that, for years, the kind of complaints now being heeded went unheeded. It concedes it is trying to make peace, but says it’s not true that only newcomers are complaining.

“We are working both sides of the fence, so to speak,” says Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Clark, in a nod to the factions. “We’re trying to clean up the canyon and improve the quality of life.”

He knows that makes some long-timers bristle. “I understand where they’re coming from because it has been an area that hasn’t had this attention in quite a while,” Clark says. “So I understand they’re not used to it and they’re feeling infringed upon. But in the long run, it’s going to benefit them by improving property values and the aesthetic value of the area. . . .”

Thanks, but no thanks, says Ertman.

“If people wanted nice shiny yards and manicured lawns, they’d be living in Coto de Caza,” he says, before adding, “or some other dump.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.