Each time I drive back to Sierra Madre I half expect the town to be gone. I figure it must have been a movie set or existed only in a dream, but there it is each time. Postcard perfect.
You settle in at a sidewalk table with a cup of joe from the homey Bean Town cafe and feel like you're in a remote mountain hamlet, the San Gabriels towering overhead and well-scrubbed villagers strolling by without a care, perhaps on their way to the Huck Finn Fishing Derby or Wistaria Festival.
Or so it always seemed.
But it turns out that looks can be deceiving. Beneath its charming veneer, the town of 10,000 is in a dither over two development proposals: a 72-unit residential and commercial project and a 55-unit residential deal.
Old friends cross the street to avoid each other, the city manager fled town, bloggers are waging war with words and images that might be called homophobic and racist. Some people have reported mysteriously punctured tires. And a dead mole turned up splayed on the doorstep of a local newspaper publisher.
"It was right here," Katina Dunn, who runs the Mt. Wilson Observer, told me as we stood in the driveway of her home.
Dunn, the wife of actor Kevin Dunn, said she froze the evidence.
I don't think she was kidding.
"It all sounds kind of creepy," I said in the company of Dunn, two City Council members and assorted other supporters of an April 17 ballot measure that could kill both development proposals. "It's like the TV show 'Twin Peaks.' "
Measure V -- which would give citizens approval power on large developments -- is supported by, among others, Susan Henderson, a columnist for the Observer. In an apparent attempt at humor, an anonymous blogger who's adopted a pen name that can't run in a family newspaper, likened Henderson, who is black, to Aunt Jemima.
Another blogger, known as the Sierra Madre Cumquat, reported -- in one of the lamest stabs at satire I've seen in a while -- that Councilman Kurt Zimmerman had opened a bathhouse for young men, superimposing his photo over what looked like a gay orgy. The same website made up a story that pornographic images of V supporter Faye Angus had been released on YouTube.
"It's so vile," said Angus, an author who has lived in Sierra Madre for nearly 50 years and speaks with a very proper Aussie accent. "I don't look at [the blogging], but there are people around town who monitor it and let me know."
