Palmer Canyon Eulogy

By Rick Holmes '75
MetroWest Daily News

The road from Pitzer is flat and arrow-straight. When I lived there back in the '70s, the road had orange groves on both sides. Since then, they've extended the freeway and the orange groves north of Foothills Boulevard have given way to subdivisions brimming with million-dollar homes.

The new homes are California modern. They have white stucco walls, red tile roofs, a pool in every backyard and more room than any family really needs. Their yards are impeccably landscaped in ways nature never intended: trophy cactus plants stand cheek-to-jowl with lush Kentucky bluegrass. The imported water that irrigated the orange groves now fills the pools and waters the lawns of people who like their corner of the desert green.

Near the end of the road, the remaining undeveloped lots support sand, scrub and sage. In its natural state, the brush is dusty and dry, a tinderbox waiting for a match.

The road rises quickly out of the flats. It hooks right and runs along a low ridge for a stretch, a spot where I once almost ran over a tarantula the size of a Frisbee. After 100 yards or so, the road dips down, and takes you to a different California: Palmer Canyon.

Suddenly you're in the shadows, the sun blocked by steep walls and the leaves of ancient live oak trees. There's lush, green ground cover. Wisps of moss hang from the trees and a hundred varieties of wildflower vie for your attention.

The source of this abundance is the thin trickle of a creek that runs down from the San Gabriel Mountains. The road crosses the creekbed, then crosses it again. In the wet seasons, the creek might get your tires wet, but much of the time, what there is of a creek runs below the surface.

The canyon welcomes wildlife as well as vegetation. Coyotes howl at night; deer and black bear wander among the trees. Strange insects find their way through the cracks and into the sagging wood houses.

There are no tract mansions in Palmer Canyon. Here the homes are small and funky, some of them a hundred years old. Constructed before building codes could stop them, the houses cling to the cliffs and hug the side of the creek, stilts holding up the corners the land can't accommodate.

It's a neighborhood of artists and craftspeople, writers and an occasional professor, one of who rented his house to me during my senior year. The homes -- and some of the homeowners -- are eccentric, and most of them more than a little rundown. Windchimes and tire swings hang from the trees. Whimsical sculptures and half-finished projects litter the yards. Our yard, as I recall, was messier than most.

There are no swimming pools here. There's not enough flat land for them, and not enough water. City water doesn't make it up to Palmer Canyon, and what you can pump out of the ground is too precious for swimming pools. You're more likely to find a potting wheel in these homes than a dishwasher.

There were several potting wheels in our house, the last house at the head of the canyon. We rented it from Guy and Candie Carawan. Candie's pots filled walls of shelves. Guy was a folksinger and musicologist who taught at Pitzer but spent most of his time in Appalachia. With its creekbed road and its steep sides, Palmer Canyon was a lot like a Kentucky holler, and you could see why Guy felt at home there.

We got our water from a plastic pipe that floated on the surface of a little, creek-fed pool. The system worked OK except when something stopped up the end of the pipe, or when the pump acted up or when there just wasn't enough water in the creek. I spent a lot of time, I recall, fiddling with pool, pump and pipe. When I couldn't fix it, we took showers on campus and at the houses of friends.

I left Palmer Canyon a lifetime ago, but I returned a couple of years back, to show it to my wife and kids and to see if it really was as magical as I remembered. We found the canyon just fine, but the road ended abruptly. Some years before, a landslide had cut off the dirt road that led to my old house. But there was a path, and we walked gingerly along the creek.

The house was still there, funkier than ever. The Carawans sold it long ago but it was still intact, and people were living there. They weren't home, but from the general condition of the place, I'd guess they were students. I looked at the dirt yard – no Kentucky bluegrass here – and remembered a picnic table, and a keg of beer and a party we threw on the day the last American troops evacuated Saigon. How many parties, how many young lives, had that yard seen in the years before and the many years since?

We walked up the dirt road beyond the house, uphill and into the Angeles National Forest, leaving the dusty, dappled light of the canyon behind. Back in the sunshine, in the sage and scrub, we could look behind us to the mountains, with snow-capped Mount Baldy looming above. In front, we looked down at the subdivisions where the orange trees used to grow, and at a vista that stretched as far into Los Angeles as the smog would allow.

The Grand Prix fire came down the mountains behind my old house, leaping from tree to tree, pushed by the hot Santa Ana winds. It tore through Palmer Canyon on a Saturday night. The people of the canyon knew the fire was coming, but they thought it would be another day or so. Firefighters gave them 45 minutes to get out. All escaped, with whatever possessions they could carry.

My old house, at the top of the canyon, miles from the nearest hydrant, in a spot no firetruck could reach, may have been the first to go. But it wasn't the last. By Sunday morning, 46 out of 49 homes in Palmer Canyon had been destroyed.

For 115 years this sylvan niche in the San Gabriel foothills had escaped fires, floods, earthquakes, mudslides and mini-mansions, one resident told the Long Beach Press-Telegram. There had been high water from time to time, and one former resident remembers when the canyon filled with sand, but the neighborhood – no, the community – survived. On Oct. 28, 2003, Palmer Canyon's luck ran out.

In the subdivisions down below, the tract mansions destroyed by the Grand Prix fire will no doubt be rebuilt, with more rooms and fancy extras to help their owners forget the ones reduced to ash. But building codes and fire fears will make it tough to rebuild in Palmer Canyon. The few whose homes survived mourn not the loss of their possessions, but the loss of their neighbors, most of whom will likely never come back.

Californians live on the edge: the edge of the continent, the edge of the latest trends, the edge of precipices in places like Palmer Canyon and the edge of natural disaster. They live in a place nature didn't design to hold all those people. They survive by piping water from the Colorado River to the Pacific Ocean, by irrigating the desert, by blasting roads through the mountains, by throwing money and engineers at every natural obstacle.

But the engineers and developers haven't yet figured out how to stop the shifting of tectonic plates cooking up earthquakes deep beneath California. They can't stop the droughts endemic to a scrub desert or the Santa Ana winds that have scorched the Los Angeles basin for millennia. So nature, inevitably, took the homes of Palmer Canyon.

Wildfires, we've come to learn, are an ecological cleansing force, as valuable as they are inevitable. The houses of Palmer Canyon might not come back, but as long as that creek trickles down the mountain, the bushes, the trees, the bears and deer will come back. I'll come back too, if only for a visit.

Rick Holmes, '75, is a columnist and editorial page editor for the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham, Mass. He can be reached by e-mail at rholmes@cnc.com.