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*** The 2007 Santiago Fire was not Lisa Alvarez’s first. Fifteen years earlier, she and her husband, Andrew Tonkovich, fled their Laguna Beach home with flames at their heels. The Laguna Fire, as it was called, burned a black blotch into the little remaining open space in Orange County’s low coastal mountains, the San Joaquin Hills. But that didn’t deter Lisa and Andrew from choosing the home they live in today. It sits high up on the canyon wall in Modjeska Canyon’s Olive Hill neighborhood, a group of forty or so homes perched on the steep terrain. Historically regarded as one of the most picturesque examples of canyon living, the Olive Hill neighborhood lies directly above Arden, the fabled home of Polish Shakespearean actress Madame Helena Modjeska. Modjeska came to the canyons in search of a summer retreat. In 1888, she commissioned famed New York architect Stanford White to build the archetypal canyon dwelling in a serene canyon near Silverado. Named Arden after the setting of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” the home and its grounds embody a vision of canyon life as a getaway, a retreat from the stresses of life. The grounds are planted with olive trees, and chosen carefully for the sweeping views offered by their location deep in the canyon. The hill itself rises out of a blanket of thick-trunked old trees planted by the actress over a century ago. The trees fill the bottom of the canyon, feeding off of the dusty creek bed. Across the creek from Arden is the historic Modjeska firehouse, decorated with flowers and a banner honoring the local volunteers. I head up to Lisa and Andrew’s house, turning right at the firehouse and crossing a bridge over the creek. A dirt road rises steeply in front of me, and I glimpse Arden’s storybook presence through the olive branches. The house is sprawling and empty with dark windows. It must have looked confectionary and bright in its early years, but now, like many canyon homes that came after it, it sits brooding and mossy in the twilight. At the top of the dirt road, the asymmetrical houses of the Olive Hill neighborhood are indistinguishable, devoid to suburban eyes of addresses, driveways or other identifying marks. The houses are scattered irregularly on a bed of twigs and leaves. As I look around, glancing blankly at the directions I’d printed from Mapquest, I spot a hand-written sign, STOP THE IRAQ WAR, at the base of a stately concrete staircase. Suddenly, I spot Lisa Alvarez waving at me from the bottom of the stairs. She is wearing a white paper face mask and holding a large rake. The ornate stairs rise fifty or so steps up the hill from where I park my car. They are disconnected from the actual house, which is even further up the hill. The house itself gets newer as we climb some stairs on the left side of it, up the side of the hill, since each level was built at a different time in the house’s history. Lisa explains that it is very old. The original, almost century-old cottage forms the bottom level, a little above the imposing concrete stairs. It looks like it was a simple structure originally—probably a single room with a fireplace. The second story was built later, and forms the middle portion of the house. The third and final level includes a spacious contemporary living room with panoramic, illuminating windows, a kitchen and nook, and a long deck that sits on top of the second story. “And we were the only ones to put an offer on it,” says Lisa. Inside, I examine the view while Lisa searches for Andrew downhill in the bowels of the house. The deck seems to float on a fluffy sea of green and brown treetops, with a clear view of the sky and mountains that encircle the community. A hot, dry breeze blows thinly down through the canyon, a sign that the dangerous Santa Ana Wind conditions are back. The mountains, beautiful and golden only a week ago, are burned black from the fire, in sharp contrast with the green that surrounds the house. The winds that drove the flames across the hills, burning the hillside just yards away from Olive Hill, now carry harmful soot down into the valleys of suburban South Orange County. Lisa Alvarez is a writer and a professor of English at Irvine Valley College, a twenty-minute drive or so into the suburbs. Every Thursday night, writers of all kinds from throughout Orange County crowd around a circle of tables for her short fiction workshop. She also directs the annual Squaw Valley Community of Writers at Lake Tahoe. Andrew is a radio host, English professor at UC Irvine, and the editor of the Santa Monica Review, a popular Southern California literary journal. “Lisa is a good fosterer of writers,” Andrew says, looking over at her. She is helping their five-year-old burn a CD on the computer. “We’re still settling in here, as you can tell,” she says, glancing around the cluttered room. They had returned with the other evacuees just two days earlier. “I think this coffee table was originally a piano bench. I bought it for five dollars.” She had said on the way in that their living room was sparsely decorated and messy from the fires. They’d gotten rid of their old couches. The one they’re now sitting on was put out by the side of Modjeska’s winding main road with a “for free” sign, so they brought it up to the house a couple of days ago. “It’s actually a pretty nice couch,” Andrew says. I ask them about the many troubles of living in the canyons. “Well, it’s true, bad things do happen sometimes,” Lisa answers. In 2004, a young girl was killed when a boulder crashed through her bedroom as she slept in her room in Silverado Canyon, in the upper floor of the general store where her family lived and worked. In 2000, two couples on a date wandered out into Black Star Canyon at night. Followed by several men, they were all beaten, and the women were gang-raped. Just in the past few months, an as-yet unidentified body was found near the entrance to Modjeska, and the investigation is ongoing. People still wander up into the canyons, looking for escape, seclusion, and communion with nature. When Andrew and Lisa first moved into their house, they noticed cars full of suburban teenagers making their way up Modjeska with their beer and weed to hike and look at the stars. Mountain-bikers faithfully wear in the many trails that cross the landscape, some of which are paths that date back to the days of the Indians. Cook’s Corner, the famous biker bar at the oak-forested corner of Live Oak Canyon and Santiago Canyon Road, still attracts a surly, bearded crowd from all over Southern California. On weekend afternoons, they sit on hand-built wooden benches in their leather and tattoos, eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer alongside families from the nearby Saddleback megachurch. As is the case in other areas of the canyons, Cook’s is a place where remnants of old Orange County collide with the new. Although Modjeska remains rural today, many of its residents drive expensive cars, and when people come home from work they can be seen lining up outside the canyon, finishing up their cell phone conversations before they lose service. Many of what Andrew Tonkovich calls “McMansions,” suburban tract homes tragically similar to those in neighboring suburbia, are being built in Modjeska these days. Lisa explains that the canyons are in some ways a place of contradictions and opposites. She describes the different people that live there as “granolas and militias”—Libertarians and Socialists, writers and hermits—those who look for the close-knit community of the area, and those who flee more developed areas in search of seclusion—opposite extremes. Lisa and Andrew had barely two weeks to settle in after the fires before Modjeska was evacuated again, this time for the landslides and flash floods that inevitably follow the loss of vegetation caused by the fires. *** A year has passed since the fires of 2007 forced the evacuation of Orange County’s canyon communities. The Santa Ana winds have parched the hills to a golden brown and plants crackle when they are walked on. It feels as though at any moment, the slightest spark could ignite another disaster. And finally, it does. Again we all watch the smoke on our TV screens. The fires seem even hotter, faster than last year, burning through larger swaths of suburban property. But this time the fires burn elsewhere—Yorba Linda, Brea, Camp Pendleton, Sylmar, Santa Paula, Santa Barbara, San Diego...but the canyons of Orange County are spared. I leave suburban Irvine and Tustin behind me and make my way through the foothills along Santiago Canyon road. I pass Irvine Lake, the man-made reservoir that sucks water from the canyons’ expansive watersheds. From the road, I can see the shapes of fire watchmen, brave locals silhouetted in the sunset, manning their posts on ridges and peaks and in mouths of canyons, scanning the eastern horizon with their binoculars for any sign of smoke or danger. I turn left into Silverado Canyon as the sun sinks behind the hills in my rearview mirror. Driving the winding five miles or so of Silverado Canyon Road, I soon leave behind me the church, the market, and the library. Sprawling ranches with well-kept pastures give way to low, earth-and-stone cottages and wooden cabins that seem to grow out of the rock canyon walls. Through the trees, some of their windows glow with soft light from within. Finally, I come to a gate, a new gate, kept shut to cars because of the fire danger. The gate leads into the Cleveland National Forest. Mossy cottages cluster up against it, and darkness grows in the long shadows beyond it. I leave my car and walk across a dusty turnout. I crawl between the metal bars of the gate and keep walking. Twilight sets in, and the boughs of old oaks turn the soft orange sky to black. Beyond the gate I am enveloped in a tangle of forest. I could keep walking, into the wild night and the dark shapes of the mountains, but I don’t. I stand there in the dark. All around me are the weathered slopes of the Santa Anas rising further into the night.
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| UCI | School of Humanities | Literary Journalism |