Rose Canyon

Posted on May 29, 2006 in Travels - So Cal

Yesterday, we took dinner at the Rose Canyon Cantina, a pastel-painted casa with a broad veranda sticking out into the canyon about three miles away. This is not a restaurant review. You will not hear about how I ordered chili verde and Lynn a taco. Or that we sipped, respectively, a raspberry margarita and a mango one. Or how we both selected black beans over refritos and passed up the cilantro-based Mexican rice for tomato-based Spanish rice. The buxom woman wearing an orange tank top at the next table shall remain invisible as shall the sycamore reaching over our heads and the light fixture that the owners had screwed to it. You now know all these details and there is no story in it.

After dinner, we went up Rose Canyon a bit, into strange country. The yellow “Residents and Guests Only” signs recalled to me an odd incident that I witnessed shortly after we moved down here in 1999. There’s a second road in “downtown Trabuco Canyon” that leads up to the Joplin Youth Facility. Along the way, you pass through a wood that is heavilly marked with Private Property signs. We came, suddenly, to a cluster of sheriff’s cars and an old man sitting in a lawn chair right in the middle of the road. He crossed his arms and resisted listening to the police officers. From what I gathered from our friend Alexia, this fellow is noted throughout the area as being “very territorial”. One of the officers came over. “Is this a public road or a private one?” I asked. “It’s public.” I looked again at the confrontation. “I think I’ll come back another day,” I said. “That’s a good idea,” said the cop in a friendly fashion.

Rose Canyon is a string of such enclaves, wide driveways enclosed by a gate or private streets that wound up to houses with hilltop vistas. People built their own houses to their own tastes: you didn’t see the stuccoed uniformity of tract housing here. Every yard had multiple automobiles — one for each parent, one for each child, and, often, a pleasure vehicle such as a dune buggy or a four wheel. We looked for the red sports car that Alexia drove, but we did not see it.

Matilija poppies blooming atop the ridges signaled that spring was approaching its demise by the drying murder of summer. Still the slopes were green from the late rainfall and the brush thick. As we rolled beneath the live oak canopy I dreaded the fire that could come. I imagined it leaping over the shrubs and the trees, reaching from ridgetop to ridgetop. I could see its teeth.