Lighting the fireplace

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Lake Arrowhead:

When Elliott Gotfredson, 33, and his girlfriend of two years, Kimberly Trzcinski, 38, returned from a brief evacuation Tuesday and find their three-story, $1,500-a-month rented house still standing, they prepared to bed down without electricity, heat or clean water. So they lit the fireplace.

“I was freezing cold,” Trzcinski said. “And the fire (which destroyed the next-door neighbor’s house) was gone, so I thought it’d be OK to do it. Soon after, I had like the whole fire department out here knocking on my door.”

Officials didn’t tell them to leave then. But sheriff’s deputies came by Wednesday morning and ordered them out.

They stayed. They have running water now, “but it’s like mud,” Trzcinski said.

“I feel like we’re helping guard the neighborhood,” Gotfredson said as Trzcinski watered down some smoking areas in their yard. “We know the dangers of fires but we moved up here keeping that in mind. It’s now just like camping, but all indoors.”

-- Francisco Vara-Orta