October in Twin Lakes is the season Anna Cox backs her car into the driveway so she can escape quickly.
Santa Anas come out of the passes hard there, and in the 23 years she's lived in the canyon, fire has strafed her community too many times to remember. She accepted the risk.
She loved the canyon too much to do anything else -- her little redwood shingle house with the stained-glass windows, the old oaks with their great wrinkled arms, the musicians and ranchers and businesspeople who found refuge from the physical sameness of the suburban grid.
It was almost fitting that, if the place had to go, it would do so in spectacular, artistic fashion. At noon Monday, as two fires raced on opposite ends of the San Fernando Valley, she saw that vision of the end on the ridge.
The sky was dark as night. The wind drove lines of the fire into her canyon like the dogs from hell, the roar so loud, so strange that it was otherworldly.
She started to pack when a helicopter's rotors chopped overhead, with a voice on the loudspeaker. It did not say the bureaucratic "mandatory evacuation"; it screamed, "Run! Just run!"
She jumped into her car -- already pointed downhill -- and bolted. When she came back that afternoon, her 90-year-old home lay in a heap of lath, stucco and timbers charred to the texture of an alligator's back. She lost everything, as did at least seven neighbors. (The week's fires have taken two lives, destroyed 49 structures and burned more than 18,000 acres.)
Cox plans to rebuild on the same spot. Twin Lakes, like so many fire-prone folds in the region's mountainous terrain, seems to breed an endemic canyon species of Southern Californian unlikely to heed an actuary's advice.
"It's just a wonderful, eclectic group of people who love to be individuals and live like this, in the canyon and nature," Cox said Tuesday morning while picking through the debris and soot.
Twin Lakes was built as a resort around two man-made lakes about 1920, in a canyon just above Chatsworth -- out in the wilds at the time. As it grew to about 750 small lots along narrow, rutted roads, the place drew a mishmash of characters angling to get away from city life while remaining near it.
In the 1960s, residents say, Tex Watson lived there while the rest of the Manson family holed up at the Spahn Ranch up the road. Since then, all types of artists and workaday families have moved up for the ambience and sweeping Valley views.
