At Beloved Artists Retreat, Nature Shows Its Dark Side
Dorland Mountain Arts Colony always lived on borrowed time. Tucked in a majestic grove of live oaks in the hills above Temecula, the retreat repeatedly fended off both modernity and the threat of flames.
Now it’s gone, its nine rustic cabins burned to the ground last week in the first wildfire of the season.
A young Los Angeles poet, another from Santa Fe, N.M., and two Southern California artists were evacuated as Steinway concert pianos, turn-of-the-century books and works of art produced at the colony over the years were reduced to ashes.
The 300-acre site served as a refuge and nature preserve since 1979. Pasadena benefactor Ellen Dorland, who toured the world as a concert pianist, had owned the property since the 1920s and used it as a retreat for friends and students.
With no electricity or telephones at Dorland, it was the power of nature that nurtured scores of artists, musicians and writers. Best-selling author Alice Sebold chronicled her time there in the final pages of her memoir “Lucky.”
Recalling that sojourn, Sebold, also the author of “The Lovely Bones,” said in an interview last week: “At Dorland you do everything on your own. You have to scavenge for wood to cook, and light kerosene lamps to write at night. You spend a good portion of your day sustaining your daily existence. It changes the rhythm of the way you live.”
Being away from e-mail and the demands of raising children was enormously helpful, she said.
Sebold, who stayed in a cabin under the oaks for almost a year in the mid-1990s, began “Lucky” with a graphic description of being raped in college. She ended the book at Dorland, comforting an old dog frightened by Fourth of July fireworks, shedding her own fears and declaring her personal Independence Day
“I live in a world where the two truths coexist; where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand,” she wrote.
The spartan but serene atmosphere was deliberate, said Karen Parrott, Dorland’s executive director.
“We think the lack of electricity as well as the beautiful environment enable artists to take a step back in time,” said Parrott. “As human beings we don’t want to give up comforts, but I’ve watched it happen time and time again. The artists come in at first and they don’t know what to do. But once they let go, the peace and the natural creativity they find are priceless.”
Amid the propane tanks, potbelly stoves and claw-foot bathtubs, the colony had recently made one nod to the present: two solar panels to power personal computers.
As many as six artists at a time were selected to spend at least a month and as long as a year at the colony. They paid $450 a month in rent. Once they had gained admission, artists were not required to do anything.
They could compose music in one of the two cabins equipped with Steinway grands, paint or sculpt in the large studio cabins or simply hike the Forest Springs trail. Messages, including spontaneous potluck dinner invitations, were left at the “mailroom.”
New arrivals were given orientation by Robert Wills, a World War II veteran and Dorland’s caretaker for nearly a decade. For city folk, it could be a shock to spend nights in enveloping darkness, with the unfamiliar noises of coyotes, foxes and bullfrogs.
“One woman slept the first night with a sound alarm in one hand and a flashlight in the other,” said Sebold.
Newcomers were always warned about the risk of fire. “We told them to keep their valuables together, ready to leave at a moment’s notice,” said Parrott.
Dorland had been threatened by flames many times, but other than a small cabin fire, it was never touched. In 2000, the retreat was evacuated for 10 nights, but shifting winds spared the place.
Last Sunday, Parrott was talking with an artist when they smelled smoke. Parrott looked up to see an ashy, orange glow in the sky.
“Fire,” she said. “Wildfire.”
Firefighters evacuated them that night. When she and Wills visited the next morning, the colony seemed to have escaped again.
“The fire was creeping along, but it was very calm.... I fully expected we would be back that afternoon,” said Parrott.
Instead, flames swept across the property, forcing fire crews to flee down the narrow dirt road. It was the same road she had driven on her first visit to Dorland, which she said felt like a “Cinderella movie, with birds fluttering around my car, and rabbits running across the road.
“I kept thinking, ‘Maybe, just maybe ... the firefighters could produce a miracle. They have before.’ ”
She drove into the colony Tuesday with increasing dread. A few adobe and concrete walls were all that was left. She lost precious possessions, including a recording of her deceased father’s voice talking to her.
“This was the grotto.... This was the kitchen house.... This was our pond,” she said Friday, crunching through cinder and ash, the acrid stench of burnt metal and leaking propane sharp in the air. “When I saw that all of Ellen Dorland’s treasures were gone, I was devastated.”
As Parrott sifted through the rubble, marveling at the odd bit of crockery or the park bench that emerged unscathed, she vowed to rebuild. The elegant bones of the site remain intact in the arching trees and denuded slopes. The colony had fire insurance, and offers of help are pouring in amid the e-mails of despair, she said.
“As this crazy world we live in advances so fast,” she said, “people desperately need a Dorland, a place where they can stop long enough to hear the sound of their own heartbeat, and hear their own voice.”