Living in peace -- and peril

On Christmas Day a light rain fell. Alone in his creek-side cottage in Waterman Canyon, David Richardson was on the phone with his mother when he heard a change in the tone of the wind. Then snap, snap, snap, as the branches of the swamp alder trees splintered like matchsticks.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he told his mother.

He hung up, yelled to his backyard tenant to get to the street, then grabbed his keys, cellphone and address book and ran.

Not two minutes later a towering wall of water, uprooted trees and boulders thundered down the mountain, ripping out the footbridge that linked his home to the road. His tenant was trapped on the other side of the swollen, roaring creek with no way out. He would remain there through the night.

“He could stick his hand out of that upstairs window and touch the water,” Richardson said several days later, as he mopped mud and branches from his living room floor, sawed up 30-foot trees still protruding through his windows and tried to salvage his family home before the next winter storm hit. “The water was up to my roof.”

But as he spoke of nearly losing his life and home, Richardson never questioned his decision to live on the rugged 16 acres his family has owned for generations. Because the way he and his neighbors see things, it will be at least another few decades before disaster strikes again.

“This year is going to be tough,” said Richardson’s brother-in-law, Quentin Lake, who stood in the creek bed with a shovel, trying to reroute the current to its original path. “But if he can survive this, he won’t have to worry about fires or floods for the next 20 years. It’s a cycle.”

Drawn to the canyons

As long as there have been settlers in California, certain kinds of people have been drawn to the canyons. To the wildness, the isolation. There are the famous canyons, such as Topanga and the secluded back canyons of Malibu. And there are the less famous, like Lytle Creek and Waterman Canyon in San Bernardino, thrust into the headlines in recent weeks as the mountains slid and claimed their victims.

There are the magnificent, ocean-view canyons studded with cliff-clutching summer and second homes, and the scruffy shallow canyons overrun with chaparral and coyotes, crisscrossed with unpaved roads and cluttered with trailer homes. And increasingly, from San Diego County to Ventura, there are the endless housing developments that push dangerously up the edges of Southern California’s mountains, always searching for more, for cheaper land.

To some, the lure of the canyons is irresistible. Longtime canyon dwellers know the risks they take by living in ravines that can turn deadly. Danger is the price, they say, for living on the fringe, away from the city, away from the box stores, the freeways, the endless chatter of civilization.

These people have the hardy spirit of homesteaders. They are not of a world that wants warnings on its cigarettes, its roller-coaster rides, its alcohol, its cars. They are throwbacks to another era, anomalies in a risk-averse society that increasingly views safety from natural disasters as a God-given right.

Richardson is one of these hardy canyon people. His love for his land keeps him coming back to these roughhewn slopes.

Tragedy strikes again

Old Waterman Canyon is a deep, lush canyon whose main allure is that the world passes it by at 60 miles an hour, high above on the four-lane switchbacks of Highway 18. It was nearly off the map until tragedy struck -- twice -- within several months. In October, the arson-caused Old Fire began here. It which would later merge with the Grand Prix fire, burning more than 150,000 acres and destroying 1,056 homes, commercial structures and outbuildings. Then, on Christmas Day, a mudslide roared down the canyon, killing at least 13 at St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Camp. Two of the bodies washed up on Richardson’s property.

As long as it has been populated, Waterman Canyon has been dangerous.

Nearly four miles long, Old Waterman Canyon Road cuts straight up the mountain between a couple of switchbacks on Highway 18, which leads to the resorts of Lake Arrowhead, Big Bear and Crestline. The first road here was completed in 1852, built by Mormon settlers to bring lumber down from the mountaintops. It was “incredibly steep and dangerous,” according to an account of the area’s history on the Lake Arrowhead News website.

At the base of the canyon, the majestic old Arrowhead Springs Hotel looks out over the San Bernardino Valley. It has burned to the ground three times since it opened in 1907 and is closed for renovation. At the top of the road is a U.S. Forest Service Ranger Station.

Deep in the canyon, the roar from Highway 18 is mostly drowned out by the babble of Twin Creek. Only the corrugated retaining wall is visible from below. This is a canyon of cottages and church camps, a wild place with packs of coyotes, the occasional bear and sometimes even a mountain lion sighting.

It seems idyllic.

That’s what Richardson’s grandparents thought when they moved to the canyon in the ‘30s. Richardson’s grandfather and great-grandfather built the first house on the property. It was nestled in a blissful bend in the creek, sheltered by a wall of rock behind. A flood destroyed that house in 1938. “My father was in the house when he heard that same roar,” recalled Richardson’s mother, Eddie Mefford, 62, who lived in Waterman Canyon from her birth until 1999. “He saw the water coming, grabbed a pot of beans off the table and ran uphill, and climbed into the chicken coop.” From there he watched as first the walls and then the roof fell, Mefford said.

They rebuilt the house, and within a year, a fire burned the second house to the ground. Mefford’s grandmother said the only thing left of the house after the fire was the mattress springs. Even the ashes blew away. Mefford’s mother found out she was pregnant soon afterward.

“All my life I was told I was the third disaster in a row,” Mefford said. “If I was a boy they were going to call me Floodfire Ferguson. They thought it would be a great name for a football player.”

But Richardson’s grandfather loved the place and returned on weekends and holidays and rebuilt a house out of spare change.

“He was a tall, skinny, hard-working guy like me, who worked his butt off to keep this place decent,” said Richardson, 42. “I don’t know if it’s a family curse or not, but I love this place.”

The house is a small one, with a porch overlooking the creek. Richardson was 9 years old when he moved here for good. Until last week he lived here with his 18-year-old son, Derek.

It’s hard to imagine what the land looked like before the fire, before the flood. Steep, scorched hillsides stretch up to the highway above. Trees with blackened trunks stand alongside the road. The Old Fire burned to within 10 feet of Richardson’s home, but miraculously it was spared. Richardson and his neighbors estimate there were about 40 homes here before the fire; now there are about 10.

The creek bed looks like glacial moraine, cluttered with stones, boulders, branches and entire trees.

To get to the house, without the footbridge, one scrambles down the embankment from the road, leaps across the creek and climbs up the other side. Boards are nailed over windows. The frames of porch screens dangle unconnected in the air. The floor is gone. Sandbags block the door.

Only one spot is unravaged: A swing set stands on the other side of the creek in the dappled shade of a tree that still has leaves. Even now, the water sings as it runs over the rocks.

But when Richardson describes what it once looked like the picture fills in. A grassy meadow sloped up the hill. There was a horseshoe pit next to the creek, and a barbecue pit. His grandfather used to catch trout for breakfast. Richardson and a friend have spent the last 10 years bringing trout up to replenish the population. Last year, trout 10, 12, 14 inches long leapt in the creek, and the family dug out a little swimming hole for children to play in under the footbridge.

Across the creek, along the road, there is a cluster of bungalows, their porches all crammed to the ceiling with carefree remnants of summer: coolers, canoes, lawn chairs. The night of the slide, Richardson took refuge with his neighbors here.

“That was the scariest night of my whole life,” said Rebecca Kiel, 18, whose father owns the creek-side properties. “We watched [Richardson’s] bridge get taken out by like 10 trees. We were stuck here. We thought we were going to have to climb up to the highway. We had no electricity, no water, and our cellphones don’t even work that well [in the canyon]. We got to call 911 a few times before all batteries died on the cellphone. There were boulders hitting up against the house. At night it was really scary because we couldn’t even see what was going on.”

Kiel and her family stayed through the fires, and they stayed the night of the flood. The family hiked out Dec. 26, with Richardson. Her father had to be airlifted out because of heart problems.

Days later, the Kiels came back to sandbag their front gate, stuff photo albums and still-unopened Christmas presents in their two mud-spattered cars, and head back down the mountain to the hotel room the Red Cross found for them.

Like Richardson, the family is unwavering in its intention to return after the rains. Kiel’s father bought the property 26 years ago, and they’ve lived there ever since.

“This is my whole life right here,” she said. “I couldn’t leave it. I couldn’t imagine being down in the city with neighbors everywhere. Here it is quiet and peaceful.”

‘I was in heaven’

After the fires, Richardson took a hike up the charred hillside behind his home, took a look around, and called up and got himself some flood insurance. There was a 30-day grace period. It kicks in Jan. 20.

Last Monday, he just stared at the cavity where the footbridge used to stand.

“This is my little bit of heaven right here,” Richardson said. “Or where it used to be.... I’d come home and cross my bridge. I called it the Bridge of Tranquillity. I’d stop and pause in the middle and I’d try to leave work and all my troubles behind me. I got into that mode. I was in heaven.”

For now he sleeps where he can. He stayed with a friend for a few days, and the Red Cross is putting him up through Wednesday. After that, he doesn’t know. The mud is out of the house, but he still has no electricity and no water.

Richardson’s mother said the only reason she thinks the house survived is because of the wonderful walls her father built by hand, out of concrete and creek stones.

“Who knows if I’ll be able to rebuild?” said Richardson, who works for a flooring company. “This is pretty much my life’s savings. I will have to work on it forever, but that’s the way the mountains are. The environment is always eating away at it. Or the critters are in your basement eating it away.”

In the midst of his reminiscences, a TV satellite truck pulled up and a reporter thrust a microphone in Richardson’s face. The cameras rolled. The reporters finished their interview and wished him luck.

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Richardson said with the fatalism of a canyon dweller. “As you can see, I have bad luck.”

Then he scampered across the creek with his son and a friend, and got to work shoring up his home before the next storm.