by Jake Halpern
As dinner drew to a close, Millie broached the subject that I had been forestalling for some time. “Where are you staying tonight?” she asked.
“Well,” I replied, “I was kind of hoping to pitch a tent . . .”
“Why don’t you just sleep in the trailer,” interjected Millie. “We got a nice feather bed in there.”
Later that night, as I nestled down to sleep in Millie’s trailer, I listened to a cacophony of howls. The ranch’s dogs were having their nightly standoff with the coyotes over in the orchard. It was a slightly unnerving chorus, but also comforting in a way, for I knew that all in Decker was not yet tame.
For the next two weeks my mornings on the ranch began with my knocking on Millie’s bedroom door and asking permission to take a shower. “Come on in, honey!” she would yell. That was my cue to hustle past her bed and into the only real bathroom on the second tier. Afterward, I would sit in the parlor with the deer and read while Millie showered and got dressed. When she finally emerged I would marvel at her clothing, which became increasingly showy: bright floral shirts, silver string ties, saucer-size belt buckles, red cowboy boots, and quite often a skin-tight pair of riding pants. “I like your outfit,” I’d tell her. She would smile bashfully and shrug her shoulders, as if to say, What, this old thing? Then it was time for breakfast. That first morning Millie made me an omelet with jalapeno cheese and bacon. She fussed over her creation even as I ate it. Millie was also very proud that she could eat as much as I could. One morning she made herself four large pieces of french toast. “Are you going to eat all of that?” I asked skeptically. Sure enough, she cleaned her plate and then needled me for doubting her. In the evenings I tried to reciprocate by making her dinner, but this was never easy. “If you bang that can of pasta sauce on my table again I’ll have to hang you!” she would holler playfully.
Millie led a decidedly upbeat life, though occasionally she did worry, and on that first morning, as the jalapeno omelets sizzled in the skillet, Millie voiced some concerns about the future of her ranch. “It costs so much just to keep this place up,” she told me. Millie shook her head as she related two of her most recent expenses: four thousand dollars for brush clearance and five thousand to fix the pump on the well. “And I already owe the bank tens of thousands of dollars,” she added, “mostly from Jimmy’s medical bills.” Jimmy had died of cancer, and the debt that his illness had created now sadly seemed to be imperiling his ranch as well.
As bad as all of this was, Millie was not without options. Every few months the postman delivered a form letter that proposed a simple, one-step solution: Sell the ranch. The letters came from a variety of local realtors who wanted to broker the deal. Sometimes they even offered a free appraisal. Millie already knew that her five-tier ranch was worth a total of about $2 million, but she had no interest in cashing it in. “I won’t sell,” she vowed. Still, the letters came. During my stay she received one from Coldwell Banker. “It seems like I’ve gotten a lot more of these since Jimmy died,” she told me as she threw the offer into the trash. “Maybe they figure it’s too much for me to handle.” And it was a lot to handle, but the Decker family had been turning down offers like these for more than a century. Ever since the mid-1890s, the Rindge family had been trying to buy out the old homesteaders. May Rindge, the ambitious widow of Frederick Rindge, was especially determined to clear out her neighbors. For the most part she was successful. Survey maps from the teens and twenties show the Rindge estate steadily expanding into the canyons. Quite fittingly, however, the Deckers were never consumed. On map after map the Decker plots remained intact. “There was a lot of tension between the Decker family and the Rindge family,” I was later told by Glen Howell, a local historian and a docent at the Adamson House Museum. “But to their credit, the Deckers were one family that refused to sell.”
After eating breakfast together, Millie and I usually retired to the parlor, where we sipped ice water and continued to chat about the various challenges that she faced on the ranch. It soon became clear to me that Millie was battling not just the constant threat of wildfires but also the steady encroachment of modern-day Malibu. “I remember when Malibu was just empty beach and mesa,” she told me. In the intervening years, Millie witnessed enormous changes: Roads were paved, fields were fenced in, taxes were raised, hunting was restricted, and everywhere massive homes were built. This was the force that had rid the canyon of Deckers—not the wildfires—and it weighed on Millie.
In the evenings Millie and I had root beer floats and watched the Western Channel on her television, via a Direct TV satellite connection. I’d never realized that there were actually enough Westerns to supply an entire channel, but apparently there were, and they played twenty-four hours a day in an endless marathon of saloon brawls, Indian powwows, and stagecoach romances. For Millie, Direct TV was more than just television; it was a direct connection to the past. Not only did she recognize most of the actors in these Westerns, she often knew them personally and remembered exactly where they lived. “Oh, that’s Dale Robinson,” she would say. “He lives over in Hidden Hills.” A few minutes later she would recognize someone else: “That’s Buddy Ebsen. He lives over in Agurra, right next to the old Bob Hope ranch.” Millie always spoke of these actors as if they still lived in these places, even though usually they had long since died or moved away.
Millie’s sense of place was defined by memories. This was particularly apparent when she took me on a walk through Nicholas Flats Park, the site of her girlhood home. The parks department had bulldozed all of the ranch’s old buildings and had even redone the landscaping so as to erase any remaining structural traces. “When I first came and saw it like this I sat and bawled for hours,” she told me. Yet even now she could find hidden traces of the past—a nearby cave where forty Chinese laborers once slept, a rock with three smooth dimples that the Chumash Indians used as bowls, and a tree with an oddly bent branch that marked the site where a treasure was once buried.
One place in the canyon that still heartened Millie was Dale Rickard’s ranch. Dale was an old friend of Millie’s, a former mounted police officer who left the force to wrangle horses for the TV show Little House on the Prairie. Eventually, Dale saved enough money to fulfill a lifelong dream, and now at the age of eighty he ran his own movie prop business. Dale’s niche, not surprisingly, was Westerns. He had transformed his property into a fake Western town, complete with a saloon, a feed store, a jail, a blacksmith’s shop, a general store, and a number of other ramshackle structures. A few days after my arrival, Millie and I paid him a visit.
Main Street on Dale’s ranch was a dusty boulevard strewn with steers’ heads, wagon wheels, cowbells, horse troughs, a cannon, and a few signs with sayings like “Trouble rides a fast horse” and “Ten miles to water, Twelve miles to Hell.” Millie and I found Dale inspecting one of his many horse-drawn wagons. Dale was a tall man with a big cowboy hat, false teeth, and a cigarette bobbing from the corner of his mouth. Apparently he was expecting us, for he broke immediately into a tour. “This here was an army wagon built in 1873,” Dale told us. “So it could have fought Indians.”
As we walked the streets of Dale’s small town, learning more about medicine show wagons and cowboy bathtubs, Millie pulled me aside for a moment. “Isn’t this place something?” she asked. “It just takes you back in time.”
Not long after my arrival in Malibu, a brushfire swept through the nearby resort town of San Clemente and destroyed several condominiums. A photograph of the burnt-out remains made the front page of the local news section in the Los Angeles Times. Millie and I both studied the article and the photograph. The brush around this building wasn’t properly cleared, concluded Millie. What’s more, the condos had cedar shake siding, making them very flammable. “My house has stucco on the outside,” explained Millie. “It’s not too pretty but it’s fire resistant.”
“What would you do if your house did burn?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she told me.
“It would be tough, because we don’t have fire insurance.” When I asked her why not, she said it was too expensive. When I asked her how much it cost, she told me that her son, Chip, was the best person for me to ask about this. Nowadays, he handled most of the ranch’s fire preparation. “You’ll like Chip,” insisted Millie. “He’s wonderful with horses.”
I was already quite intrigued by Chip. Both Millie and Bonnie had described him as a kind of horse whisperer. People came from all over, asking him to break their horses. No was his standard reply. Chip never broke animals—he worked with them.
The following evening I made arrangements to visit Chip. Around nine P.M. I borrowed a flashlight from Millie and headed up a narrow footpath that led to the third tier. Along the way I passed a makeshift sweathouse. Basically, it was an old water tank with a hole for an entranceway and a drop cloth for a door. The heat came from a wood-burning furnace that boiled water and cranked out steam. I continued on the footpath, up through a large screened-in garden with swinging doors at both ends. From here the path hooked around a house and dropped me off at Chip’s front porch.
A lean, handsome man with deep blue eyes came to the door. He wore a dusty pair of blue jeans and no shirt. “Glad you came,” he told me coolly. “I’m Chip.” He then led me into a tastefully furnished dining room and introduced me to Claire, his wife. Claire was a tall blond woman from New Hampshire who had graduated from Dartmouth and eventually landed a job teaching Shakespearean literature at UCLA. In her spare time she rode horses, which eventually led her to Chip. “Chip and I are fundamentally different people,” Claire later told me. “Yet I think there is something classically American about our meeting. You know, Eastern schoolmarm comes west and marries a cowboy.”
The three of us sat down at the dining room table and Chip told me a bit more about his career. “I started working other people’s problem horses when I was about nine years old,” he explained. “My grandfather would bring me these ponies that were really rank or tough. I would work with them, and in a couple of days they would be following me all over the place.” As Chip got older, he developed a reputation as an excellent horseman. Often it was the riders who needed his help most. Many of them were poor communicators who gave their horses mixed signals—like goading them to gallop while fearfully tugging on the reins or doing any number of things that subtly begged the horse to slow down. By the time Chip intervened, many of these horses had lost their trust and were wildly standoffish. Fixing this took time.
“Basically,” explained Chip, “I communicate with the horses by recognizing their intelligence and using that intelligence to create a language.”
I nodded vaguely. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, Claire threw herself into the conversation. “Chip really knows what the horse is thinking,” she affirmed. “Its not ESP—it’s more like reading body language or something.”
Later in the week I would see this for myself on a visit to Chip’s stables. Using hand signals and an occasional cluck of the tongue, he had a “troubled” horse walk, trot, gallop, turn, and stop as if via remote control. Often Chip’s signals were too subtle for me to notice. The horse would simply change direction, and it was clear from Chip’s unblinking response that this is what he’d intended.
On our first evening together, Chip also talked about his equally unusual relationship with fire, particularly his instincts for early detection. “I can smell smoke normally before I see any,” he told me. “I know that there’s a fire and I know what kind of fire it is, whether it’s a brushfire or it’s some kind of domestic smoke.” Yet sometimes, Chip asserted, even before the scent arrived, he could “sense” a fire.
“What do you mean by ‘sense’?” I asked him.
“I think you just have a knowing,” answered Chip. “I think there is an inter-spirit that is constantly talking to us if we are listening. I think anytime you are sensing you are just aware of things that are going on.”
The room fell silent for a moment. I looked over to Claire, but she had nothing to add.
“It’s like rattlesnakes,” continued Chip calmly. “I know if there is a rattlesnake around and usually where it is before I’ve heard it or seen it. And I can usually walk right up to where they are, without having heard them, just because I feel them. And it’s the same thing with a fire.”
Chip insisted that his abilities were not extrasensory, but simply a heightened awareness of nature. Still I pressed him. Who raised him to think in this way? Where exactly did that awareness come from? “Memories,” he answered finally. According to Chip, his awareness was rooted in something deeper than his own experiences. It reached downward into a bedrock of family memories. “I am tied into these people that are of homestead clans,” explained Chip. “I am tied into people that were raised in these mountains and literally had to eat off of what they were able to harvest, whether it was deer or rabbit or quail or fish. They lived off the land. By being raised with those people, I was raised on the stories, raised on their memories.”
Toward the end of the evening, I finally got around to asking Chip about the issue of fire insurance, and why the ranch didn’t have any.
“But we do have fire insurance,” insisted Chip. He then reminded me that the brush was well cleared, the water and gunnysacks were always ready, and the ranch was occupied by people who knew how to fight fires. “That’s your best insurance,” he told me, “not the monthly check that you send to some company.”
The following day, I had plans to visit Malibu proper. As I got into my car, I bumped into Carl, a youngish-looking man in his forties who was staying in the trailer next to mine. He was a friend of Millie’s who had moved onto the ranch after his marriage went bad- Officially Carl worked for the Universal Studios theme park, where he monitored such rides as Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, and Terminator II. In his spare time he worked as Millie’s ranch hand, helping her with her daily chores and learning as much as he could about horses. I had seen him around several times, but this was our first real meeting. “I’m in love with this old way of life,” he told me as we chatted in Millie’s driveway. Is it weird, I asked him, when you drive down Decker Canyon Road into the bustle of Malibu? “You mean going through the wormhole?” he asked. “Yeah, it’s weird, all right.”
I said goodbye to Carl and drove through the “wormhole,” following the PCH all the way to Las Flores Canyon, where I turned left and parked at the offices of the Malibu Times. Here I had an appointment with Arnold York, the newspaper’s editor and owner. Roughly ten years ago, York’s life was forever changed when a wildfire destroyed his Malibu home. He was one of roughly 350 homeowners who got burned out in the 1993 blaze. In the wake of that disaster, York distinguished himself as a champion of the rebuilding effort. His story of flight, survival, and refinancing was a modern-day classic in Malibu. Or so I gathered from chatting with Nancy Steiner, the PR woman who first put me in touch with the Deckers.
York was a short, distinguished-looking man in his mid-sixties, a former lawyer who now tinkered with journalism and wore golf shirts to work. I caught him on a busy day, but he agreed to squeeze me in for a quick meeting. “Come on in,” he said in a faded New York accent. Like so many Malibu residents, York was a transplant, a graduate of Brooklyn College who came to UCLA for law school and then moved to Malibu in the 1970s, back before real estate had jumped from pricey to prohibitive. Today he was a member of Malibu’s middle class, which encompassed a mishmash of highly successful professionals who in any other community would be the upper crust. York led the way into a large air-conditioned room with a wraparound desk. “So what’s the story?” he asked me as we took our seats. “I’m interested in how Malibu copes with wildfires,” I explained. York nodded and began to recollect the events of the 1993 fire.
On the afternoon of November 2, as a massive wall of fire moved toward Malibu’s La Costa neighborhood, Arnold York hopped in his truck and drove homeward to save a few irreplaceable family possessions. By the time he arrived
, the police had already cleared out the neighborhood. “It was like a ghost town,” York remembered. Hurriedly he entered his house and began gathering what valuables he could find, including a few paintings, some Persian carpets, and his dog. “By this time,” recalled York, “The fire was sort of moving in our direction, very slowly, kind of at the speed at which a man walks, and my dog was beginning to bounce off the walls and essentially say, Let’s get out of here. So I threw the last of the things I could grab into a truck and we started down the hill.”
The next time York returned home, he found his neighborhood charred to the ground. Nothing was left but smoldering ruins and a procession of freestanding chimneys, which stood like tombstones marking the plots where homes once stood. Slowly, as the shock wore off, Arnold York struggled to get his life in order. “Your immediate priority is just finding a clean set of underwear and some clothes to change into because you don’t have anything,” he recalled. His next concern was housing. Here he got lucky and managed to find a small rental property in Malibu. With shelter and clothing accounted for, York began to organize. He and his wife formed a grassroots organization called Operation Recovery and publicized a series of meetings in their newspaper.
“The weekly meetings were part informational, and part group therapy,” explained York. “A number of the older folks nearly had breakdowns, so we became sort of a support group.” As Operation Recovery became more coherent, its focus shifted from comforting to collecting. The group facilitated a series of meetings with all the major insurance carriers. Some of these exchanges got “really heated,” explained York, because the insurers didn’t want to pay. To deal with this, the group came up with a winning strategy that tapped into the town’s inherent resources. “We said we would make commercials,” explained York. “One of the things about Malibu—you have a lot of people in the TV business. We said we would make commercials and we would go on, first-person, and for those insurers who treated us decently we would say: You’re in good hands. And those who didn’t, we would relate our personal experiences and make sure they ran as public service announcements. Needless to say, that changed the equation significantly.”