Learning Life Away From the Riverbed

Ted Edwards and Peggy Wallace knew they were living on borrowed time.

But when rescue workers were forced to pluck homeless squatters out of the raging Ventura River last winter, the river bottom couple knew their time was up.

Edwards and Wallace, along with their 3-year-old daughter, Andy, were not allowed to return to their riverbed home, a three-room shanty tacked together out of old pallets and scrap wood.

“It was a whole different lifestyle down there,” said Wallace, 41, sitting in the family’s cramped apartment on Ventura’s west side. “We weren’t hurting anybody. We didn’t bother anybody. No one ever had to pull us out of the river.”

Edwards and Wallace are among more than 100 former river bottom residents who have been forced to adjust to a new way of life since flood waters flushed the old squatters’ camp out to sea and the area was posted off-limits to the homeless.

Many of the riverbed settlers have moved into housing. Some now roam the streets, sleeping wherever they can. A few have left town.

There was a time when Edwards and Wallace thought about leaving town, to search for a place that could match the isolation of the river bottom. After all, they had lived on the riverbed for more than six years. And Andy was practically raised in the wilderness.

“We miss the peace and quiet,” Wallace said. “And Andy has found that falling on the blacktop hurts a lot more than falling on the sand. She never had skinned knees until we moved up here.”

With the federal government’s help, the family now lives in a small apartment off Ventura Avenue. Andy attends a nearby preschool two days a week. The couple hasn’t even finished unpacking all that they were able to salvage from the river floor.

“The prevailing attitude was, if you lived on the river bottom you had nothing but crap,” Edwards said. “But we had a home. We had a life. And we had no flood insurance.”

A PLACE TO CALL HOME

It took Mark Dodge a couple of weeks before he could sleep indoors.

The 39-year-old Vietnam-era veteran, who until the flood had lived in a clearing ringed by brush and tall grass, said he felt suffocated inside his new apartment.

“I just couldn’t relax,” he said. “I would grab my field jacket and just run outside and walk the streets all night. It bothered me that much.”

During the flood, Dodge made news when his dog got caught in the torrent. A Los Angeles television station broadcast gripping images of the black Labrador mix named Bear nervously pacing on a tiny sandbar in the river as flood waters rose around him.

Bear was rescued and flown out by helicopter. But after a short reunion, Dodge said he was forced to give up the dog because he had no place to keep him.

Dodge is known around town as the “Window Man,” a nickname derived from his sole source of income: He scrapes out a living by scrubbing shop windows along Main Street and Ventura Avenue.

But now, because of the flood, he lives in a one-bedroom apartment subsidized by the federal government.

“I didn’t like it down there,” he says. “But I had no other choice. Now I have a place to kick off my shoes and call my own.”

CHIEF OF THE RIVER BOTTOM

Ray Mahala has had longer than most of his river bottom buddies to adjust to life topside.

The self-proclaimed “Chief of the River Bottom” moved out of the shantytown two months before the flood, after making his home in the overgrown nether world for more than half of his 56 years.

Known as Pack-Rat, the old timer was an institution around the place in his knee-high leather boots, leather pants and jacket and his badger skin cap.

“In the last two years I was down there, it was just getting out of control,” Mahala said. “I left because it was getting worse and worse, and I knew the city was going to push us all out eventually. I saw the writing on the wall.”

After a Ventura couple offered a bedroom in their home and Mahala decided to move out, social service agencies and individual supporters called a press conference to herald the news.

Officials hoped that other squatters would follow Mahala’s example and be persuaded to give up the river bottom life.

But even a year later, Mahala said he knows why so many find that hard to do.

“After living in the wilderness for so long, it’s hard being inside,” he said. “I go down there every now and then just to look at the old place. And you had better believe, if I was to lose all of this tomorrow I would be right back down there again.”

FOR FOTOs SLUGGED river 8, left, and river 11, below