UP FROM THE ASHES : Five Months After Decker Canyon Fire, Residents Struggle to Rebuild, While Nature Slowly Heals Itself

The day after the flames swept through Decker Canyon, Bill Farrand decided to visit 160 acres of National Park Service property there. He arrived expecting to mourn.

Indeed, the land smoked still. Feathery, filmy vapors rose from bare gray soil, from the scorched 10-foot limbs of once-leafy brush, from the singed trunks of what had been healthy oaks before the fire raced over a knoll from Mulholland Highway in the middle of the morning of Oct. 14.

The piles of ash were powdery white, but they left dark smears on Farrand’s ranger uniform. The air smelled like the inside of a chimney.

Soon enough, though, Farrand spied signs of life. In the bed of a withered creek, a spring still bubbled, undisturbed by the previous day’s 1,000-degree heat. By the water’s edge, a few cat-tail reeds stood intact, their green stems a bright contrast to the blackened firescape.

As he moved closer to the reeds, Farrand started hearing loud chirps and trills. The canyon birds had converged there. They had found the only source of moisture for miles.

“I counted about 10 species all together there,” Farrand, a park service planner, said later. “Black-headed grosbeaks, quail, all sorts of warblers and sparrows.”

Just as the survivors were adapting, so was the rest of the canyon. In fact, inches below the ground’s surface, unseen, the renewal was already under way.

The Decker fire, in rugged, sparsely populated western Malibu, was the largest of five blazes that raged through the Santa Monica Mountains in 1985. The 100-foot flames roaring out of control through the brush made newspaper headlines and filled television screens across the United States.

Hundreds of firefighters spent three days struggling to contain the conflagration. By the time they succeeded, 6,526 acres in and around Decker Canyon had been consumed.

For the canyon’s plants and wildlife, however, the fire was a start, not a finish. In a cycle as old as Southern California’s coastal ranges, the burnt brush fertilized the soil and made room for the growth of new plants, which are food for the deer, which in turn are fodder for coyotes and bobcats.

Not quite five months after the fire, the charred hillsides are crisscrossed by faint lines of green: young plants, grasses, vines and sprouting shrubs.

So far, the patchy network has held the slopes in place despite the winter rains. No flash floods have washed down the canyon; no significant slides have washed out its winding roads.

The transformation is not nearly as dramatic as the flames that set it off. And so few outsiders pay attention.

But a handful of rangers, foresters and naturalists have been watching closely. They snap weekly sets of photographs, fly overhead in helicopters, ride horseback through the hills.

What they have witnessed is a quiet healing that is all the more wondrous when measured against the slow pace of the canyon’s residents, who must repair the creations of man.

There are only 50 dwellings in Decker Canyon, clustered along three paved and one dirt road, amid preserves owned by the park service, the city of Los Angeles and the state.

There has been a boom of sorts; about a dozen of the houses were built in the past year. But even the new ones, for the most part, have little in common with the Malibu of popular perception, the Malibu of million-dollar mansions with panoramic ocean views.

That Malibu exists to the south, on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway, across from the canyon’s mouth. It exists further east, where the distance to Santa Monica is shorter than the distance to Oxnard.

But in Decker Canyon, the residents are quick to declare that they are different. “We’re not all rich,” said Darlene Livingston. “People ought to know that.”

October’s fire was not the canyon’s first. Since the Fire Department started keeping records in 1919, blazes have ripped through at least 100 acres in Decker Canyon four times before: in 1935, 1956, 1958 and 1978.

This time, most of the homes were spared by the flames. But four were not. Other casualties included cars, trucks, water pumps, garages, guest quarters and sheds. Even a fire engine, parked outside Station 72 near the top of the canyon, was ruined.

“I’m starting from scratch,” said Darlene’s husband Bill, a house painter who has lived in the canyon for 10 years. He did not carry insurance and he estimates the family’s fire loss at $30,000.

His plans for the future were dealt a huge blow by October’s fire.

Bill Farrand’s were not.

When the blaze broke out, Farrand had been working for a year on a proposal to build a campground for the severely disabled on 10 acres in a corner of the Park Service land. He hoped that within a year or two, trails wide enough for wheelchairs would wend through the remaining 150 acres--a varied terrain of brushy slopes, stands of oak and sycamore, craggy boulders and the meandering headwaters of Trancas Creek.

From his previous park service assignments in the Midwest, Farrand was used to wildfires in timberlands that left a lasting impression. “If you were planning a recreation site in Michigan or Montana and you had a fire, you’d be out of business for the next century or so,” he said. “It just wouldn’t be attractive for camping.”

But he soon saw for himself that the chaparral country is different.

The very day of the fire, the intense heat cracked the hard cases of seeds that had lain dormant for years underground.

Finally, some moisture could penetrate so the seeds could sprout. Before spring, the tiny, translucent shoots would become an impressive display of wildflowers such as hadn’t been seen in the canyon since the last Decker fire.

Within a week, the blackened spars that had been mountain brush also showed their will to live.

The bare limbs looked like sticks someone had jabbed in the earth in circular patterns. But in the middle of each circle, green stubble had appeared. “Crown sprouting,” Farrand murmured when he saw it.

The roots of the burned-out brush would completely rot away in four years. But they seemed to know their injuries were fatal. They had sent the new growth out to take their place.

At that point, the offshoots were still so small that even experts could not tell what type of brush they were inspecting. The tiny spots of green might have been destined to become the thick, flat leaves of ceanothus; they might as easily have been forerunners of greasewood’s short, stiff needles.

In those first few weeks, while the crown sprouts were little, the secrets of the canyon animals were revealed.

The routes the deer walked along the canyon’s hills and ridges had been suddenly made clear. Where years of deer travel had worn away the plants, there had been no fuel for the flames. When the fire raced past and took the nearby brush, the trails became faint white lines etched on the landscape, standing out against the dull gray of the surrounding, burnt-dark soil.

But no deer trod the newly visible paths. Most had been fast enough to run from the fire to safety in other canyons. The exodus was undoubtedly traumatic, for deer are creatures of habit, returning to their favorite spots at regular intervals.

At least those that fled had survived.

Canyon residents reported sightings of more than half a dozen deer carcasses to Bob McKay, vice president of the California Wildlife Federation. McKay is the author of a recent magazine article about hunting in burn areas and he is a frequent visitor to Decker Canyon.

He was concerned about the unofficial count. He had expected some deaths. The deer “get their feet burned in the fire and then they slow down, that’s how you lose them,” McKay said. Still, “that’s more carcasses seen than usual,” he said.

The corpses’ fate was easy to predict. “The coyotes and bobcats are having a heyday,” Farrand said.

Andy Ysorda had the proof. “We found a deer that burned,” he said one sunny morning soon after the blaze. He and a friend had been distracted from tinkering with a couple of old cars outside the Quonset hut where he was living, about a quarter-mile from the Park Service land.

“I kept the head,” said Ysorda, a sturdy, compact 19-year-old. “Want to see it?”

He disappeared inside the hut and emerged with a deer skull.

With one hand on each antler, he held it out to be examined. Dark scorch marks slashed the dull white bone. The flesh had been completely cleaned away by the sharp teeth of something hungry.

“There were coyote tracks all around it when we found it,” Ysorda said.

Many of the canyon’s smaller, slower creatures had gone underground to wait out the fire. The heat penetrated just a few inches into the earth; the rabbits, mice and lizards stayed safe in their burrows underneath.

When they emerged, the world was different. The dense brush that had hidden the deer trails also had concealed their movements. And it was gone.

Bill Farrand pointed to a brown squirrel scampering up a slope, dodging the burnt stalks. “I never knew there were ground squirrels on this property,” he said. “I could never see them before.”

The new openness meant trouble for the rodents and good hunting for the canyon’s birds of prey. No longer was it difficult to spot a potential meal from the air.

Farrand surprised a Cooper’s hawk on the ground one day. The hawk, he said, was feasting on “a pretty good-sized wood rat.” It had been easy pickings.

The denuded hillsides posed a different threat to the canyon’s human population.

Bill Livingston lost his 55-foot mobile home and three old cars in the fire. All had been parked on his father-in-law’s 10 acres in the canyon.

A month later, Livingston, his wife and three children were staying in a 13-foot trailer. They had few clothes left; the electric guitar he’d had since he was 15 was gone, as was his daughter’s family-heirloom violin.

He had torn the ligaments in his left knee fighting the fire. He would not be returning to his painting job for a while.

The fire had bypassed Ford Neale’s house, but a cement slab was the only remnant of his one-car garage. His wife, Diane, grieved for the studio where she once hand-painted glassware for sale. Just before the fire, she had laid in a fresh supply of pots to decorate. “I was getting ready for Christmas,” she said. “That was income.”

Their burned pump was still out of commission. The Neales were hauling water in five-gallon jars from their neighbors’ supply.

Jimmy Decker had set up an emergency water system after a week. He had fixed the cable on top of the hill, so the television was working again.

But there was more damage he could not correct so easily. About 60 of Decker’s beehives, filled with nearly 5,000 pounds of honey, had been burned. Six cars and trucks were burned.

Decker, a dynamiter by trade, is a self-described “hillbilly.” His relatives settled the canyon and gave it their name more than a century ago. He moved there from Texas 58 years ago, at age 10, and he knows the ways of the mountains and their fires. October’s, he said, was “the nastiest” he’d seen.

That first month, his friends’ pickups filled the long, dirt driveway nearly every day. Inside, the drivers, men with ash-smudged faces and sweat-stained flannel shirts, sat awhile around Decker’s kitchen table, comparing the progress of their clean-up efforts.

The last thing any of them needed was a major flood or slide.

When a fire removes the leafy brush canopy that slows the hard-hitting rain along with the stubborn brush roots that keep the soil in place, erosion increases 20 to 100 times the normal rate.

That information is contained in a county forestry department study dated February, 1985. The study also notes that almost all of the 45 “damaging floods” in the county since 1811 “were preceded by a major wildfire.” The water rushes unchecked down the slopes; parts of the soggy slopes themselves may follow.

Within two or three years, the chaparral growing in Decker Canyon will be established enough to provide about 80% of the protection against erosion that the mature brush offered before the fire.

But in November, the ravines were filling up like the bottom half of an hourglass with pebble-like pieces of earth that had rolled down off the slopes, the stuff known throughout the canyon as “dry creep.”

And the rainy season was approaching. “The risk of damage to property and resources by flooding and mud flows is at its highest during this transition period,” the study says.

The locals put it another way. “Malibu has three seasons: Fire, flood and slide.”

The forestry department of Los Angeles County has been trying to hold the burned hills together by helping nature along. The department’s tools are the Aleppo pine and annual rye grass. Neither is native to the Santa Monicas.

For years before the fire, Aleppo pines were planted alongside the canyon’s roads for two reasons: beautification and erosion control.

Aleppos were chosen because they don’t need as much moisture as some other types of pine. Unfortunately, they are also highly flammable.

Nearly every one died in the Decker fire. If left to rot, the pines would have become havens for bugs, which might spread to the native oaks that had survived.

So for weeks after the fire, the county sent crews of prisoners from a nearby woman’s detention camp to cut down the very pines the department had planted.

Fourteen women in jeans, work shirts and hard hats would hike down the slopes. Two would step forward, one brandishing a chain saw, the other keeping the tree steady. Within 15 minutes, a pine would be down and the whole group would be piling the logs in neat piles and clearing the branches away.

The introduction of rye grass is more important to county officials. And it is also more controversial.

On Nov. 5, the Board of Supervisors authorized the forestry department to spread rye grass seed over county and private property that had burned in Decker Canyon.

The theory was that rye grass would put roots four to six inches into the ground within two weeks, which just might be enough to prevent floods and slides while the slopes were at their most vulnerable.

On Nov. 20, the county sowed rye grass in Decker Canyon. A work crew opened eight 50-pound sacks of seed and dumped the contents into a hopper dangling from a hovering helicopter. It was dusty, noisy work and there was less than a minute to load the seed.

The copter lifted up and flew over predetermined plots of land, dropping its cargo onto the ground below. Then it returned for more.

The procedure was repeated 57 times. In the end, 2,753 acres were seeded, at a cost of $9,172 or $4.94 per acre. Half the money came from the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, 25% from the county and 25% from the state.

Then James (Russ) Stallings stepped in.

Stallings is the deputy forester who wrote the county’s fire aftermath report. He is a big, soft-voiced, silver-haired man who started with the county in 1964, operating a nursery just one canyon to the east.

He wears forestry department Badge No. 7, with a green pine tree logo in the center. But for Stallings, a blade of rye grass would be more appropriate.

Russ Stallings is obsessed with rye grass. He is its champion at a time when an increasing number of critics argue that the county’s seeding practices do little good--and indeed may someday cause great harm.

After the fire, Stallings picked 26 spots in Decker Canyon and marked each one with a yard-long metal stake, around which he tied a brightly colored plastic streamer. Once a week, he has visited each one.

Every time, at every stop, he has photographed the surrounding hillsides. He has taken his penknife from his pocket and stooped to dig up a blade of grass, looking for the tell-tale purplish color at the bottom of the stalk that brands it rye.

One of his rewards has been the view from Stake 16, on a ridge off Decker Road just above the fire station. On a clear January day, about 10 a.m., he stood beside the stake and pointed toward a southwest toward a slope covered by a layer of green so thin it seemed to float inches above the soil.

“One of the things I like in the mornings when it’s sunny. . . ,” he said and paused and smiled, letting his words trail off so he could take in the scene.

Then, “See that sheen? That’s rye grass. That stuff just shines in the sun.”

Though the county has seeded rye grass since the 1950s, Stallings has only measured and recorded its growth since 1982. “I never really felt it was important to document before,” he said. “I started because we got so much criticism. And it wasn’t from crackpots. It was from experts and from universities.”

This year, the criticism continued.

For example: The National Park Service, in keeping with its policy, asked the county to keep its rye grass away from the federal property in Decker Canyon. The park service is not convinced the introduction of rye grass significantly affects erosion, and therefore does not want to introduce a species where it doesn’t normally grow.

Another example: “You’ve got long-term consequences that are potentially horrid,” said Richard Minnich, a fire ecology specialist at University of California-Riverside.

Rye grass, Minnich said, competes for nutrients with the crown sprouts and seedlings of species that have lived in the Santa Monicas since the Ice Age. The original rye grass may die out after three years. But by then, Minnich said, the passage of time will have eliminated the priming effects of the fire. The hard cases of the seeds will not crack; the burned roots will not send out crown sprouts.

As a result, “you’re going to replace deep-rooted shrubs with shallow-rooted grasses,” he said. “Then you’re priming for slope failure down the road in 10 or 20 years. You’re going to have whole slopes fall down in heavy rains.”

County forestry officials say they’ve seen no evidence that rye grass crowds out the native plants.

On the other hand, they also say they cannot prove the rye grass significantly reduces erosion.

But they don’t want to stop seeding to see what happens.

“We cannot take that chance,” said Robert Johnson, the county’s head deputy forester.

A flood or slide, Johnson noted, could damage far more than just Decker Canyon’s homes. The water and mud could wash down Decker Road and flow south across Pacific Coast Highway to the multimillion-dollar houses on the beach.

But this year is not the time and Decker Canyon is not the place that will settle the debate.

The winter has not been typical, those on both sides of the argument agree. “The rains have been kind to us,” said Farrand.

The amount of rainfall has been about normal, 13.2 inches since the fire, providing needed moisture for the native plants. But the rains have been gentle drizzles for the most part and the downpours have been spaced days apart, allowing the water to soak in rather than flood.

“If every year was like this year, we wouldn’t ever seed,” said Stallings. “But we didn’t know. . . . “

Once, on Jan. 31, the mud did flow into the street. An inch of rain fell in 10 minutes, according to Jimmy Decker’s rain gauge. The loose layers of the canyon’s banks moved onto Decker Road.

A drain was blocked at one curve below Jimmy Decker’s place. An off-duty Los Angeles police officer’s pickup got stuck there in two feet of mud.

The man walked away from his truck. Clean-up crews from the state Department of Transportation plowed away the muck. And everyone in the canyon shrugged off the incident, unimpressed.

“That wasn’t much,” Decker said. “I’ve seen lots worse.”

Nothing even that exciting happened during the next set of heavy rains in mid-February.

By then, the native vegetation was flourishing.

The wild cucumber vines that had burst across the hillsides in December had a new width and substance. The stems had just sent forth masses of white blooms and nickel-sized, seven-sided seeds.

The live oaks, which normally are evergreens, had dropped the pastel orange leaves on the lower branches, the ones that had been dried completely by the heat of flames passing briefly underneath.

Most of the oaks’ bottom branches were still bare. But here and there, a light brown twig had pierced the bark. Each twig ended in a pair of pale green buds.

The crown sprouts and seedlings had grown big enough to be identified. Stallings walked along the ridges, calling out the different names: ceanothus, black sage, fillaree.

“Here,” he said, kneeling to inspect a cluster of furry leaves, each with 10 rough edges. “Mountain mahogany. It’s an ice cream plant for deer. They love it when it’s young.”

Such food is plentiful. Consequently, the deer are back in Decker Canyon.

On a horseback ride through the canyon, Bob McKay was cheered by the number of does he saw accompanied by fawns. “There aren’t a lot of lost fawns,” he said. “They’ll all grow up.” Over the past month, Jimmy Decker has spotted scores of deer from his front yard. “We’ve seen as high as 40 and 50 deer in one day,” he said.

Decker’s old friend, Larry Houston, was visiting. He lives nearby in Yerba Buena Canyon, just across the Ventura County line.

Houston nodded solemnly when Decker mentioned deer.

“They all left our canyon,” Houston said, “and come over to this one.”

March was the time that Jimmy Decker’s friends could usually expect to receive their annual gift of honey from his hives.

But the bees in the three hives that made it through the fire have not produced this year. Bees can’t make honey from the young growth.

“Friends this year are saying, ‘Where’s mine at?”’ Decker said. “I just tell them it burned. It’ll be two years before that comes back.”

The rise overlooking his ramshackle house was the resting place for his nine burned vehicles. The windshield glass was melted, buckled in on itself. The tires had disappeared. The metal springs were exposed where upholstery had been seared away.

“That’s what really hurts,” Decker said. “These are the things you use in your business.”

They will be costly to replace. “Insurance is such a hassle, we never carry it up here,” Decker said.

Bill Livingston’s lot had improved slightly. His sister-in-law had loaned him a 16-foot trailer to use in addition to the 13-footer. But no one had responded to the December ad he placed, offering to trade his labor for a 55-foot mobile home like the one he’d had before the fire.

He was pressing ahead with plans that predated the fire. He wanted to build a house--”just myself and few friends, no contractors”--on two acres up the road from his father-in-law’s place.

It was going to be difficult.

Since the fire, there had been no income. Livingston’s injury is far from healed; he has lost half the ligaments in his left knee. House painting is impossible. His wife is in the painting business, too, “but she can’t go without me,” Livingston said. “The customers expect me to show up on the job.”

He should have his knee reconstructed, “but it puts you out of work for about a year,” Livingston said. He was hoping to get a brace instead so he can paint again by the end of the month.

Bill Farrand wheeled his Jeep onto the park service property. He had spotted something new the week before and he wanted to find it again.

He marveled at the emerald-covered hills and the lush fields, filled with an exhibit in miniature of what the next few years would bring. “After each rain, you can almost see an incremental difference,” he said.

He stepped out of the car and walked purposefully down a trail, past a clump of greening oaks, past yucca plants eight inches high. He crossed the flowing creek.

In a meadow on the other side, he discovered what he’d come for.

It was the fire’s version of a rainbow, the first of the wildflowers that grow only from heat-cracked seeds.

The plant’s thin stem split into seven parts and three were topped by tightly furled blooms-to-be.

But four had already blossomed into cones of lavender petals, each ending in a dark pointed tip crossed by a single band of yellow.

Said Farrand: “These are called shooting stars.”