A Year in Corriganville
How a local park saved my sanity and brought me closer to nature, my family, and to a community of lovely humans and their dogs.
In the spring of 2020, it was very difficult to predict what was going to happen from one day to the next, let alone from month to month.
As a high school teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, I was told in March to go home and “shelter in place.” Before we left, we were instructed to prepare enough work to keep our students busy for a few weeks. A few weeks.
It was difficult to grasp what was happening, or even believe it was happening, as the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic played out.
I have never done well with uncertainty. My least favorite times in life are when one door closes, and I’m stuck in the proverbial hallway, waiting for another to open.
Although I can’t wait for summer break every year, I start to feel strangely unsettled by the lack of routine, the late nights bingeing on Netflix, the freedom of choosing what I want or don’t want to do every day. By the time school starts, I’m like an animal that, upon being set miraculously free, eventually heads voluntarily back into the safety of an enclosure.
Having my daily routine completely turned upside down, along with the rest of the country, was unnerving to say the least. Suddenly even a trip to the grocery store seemed like a life-or-death proposition.
The few times I took a walk in my neighborhood, however, I felt a sense of normalcy and relief. Being outside and seeing nature going about its business unperturbed soothed my nerves, and gave me a sense of hope that someday, somehow, everything would be OK again.
I’ve never been a daily exerciser, despite my best intentions. But when my friend Michelle Sathe asked if I’d like to get out of the house and go for regular walks, I jumped at the chance. I knew that having a buddy to walk with made it more likely that I would actually go.
Michelle and I had met through a mutual friend who had since moved away. At the time we met, Michelle lived in Santa Clarita and I lived in Woodland Hills. But we had both recently found ourselves living in Simi Valley and not knowing many other women here.
Being outside during the early days of the pandemic, with another human being, proved to be a balm to both our souls. We took Michelle’s elderly dogs Louie and Melvin with us at first, but they just couldn’t keep up.
We tried several local hiking trails and parks in and around Simi Valley, but the trail we kept coming back to over and over again was an easy, one-mile loop along a dirt trail in Corriganville Park, a spot with a lot of gorgeous oak trees that provided shade, beautiful sandstone cliffs, and a very colorful Hollywood history.
My 81-year-old father started to join us a few times a week. He was getting cabin fever and also found the walks both a way to socialize, and to exercise away some of his feelings of anxiety over the state of the world.
My dad had planned to join us only occasionally, but he soon found that he craved the physical exercise, beautiful scenery, and the company it afforded.
At first, we would typically do two one-mile loops along the flat and easy trail. Then we pushed it to three loops, and eventually we settled into a routine of walking three miles every day in Corriganville.
We called ourselves the Three Musketeers, and we began walking in the morning, no matter the weather. We could never have predicted how much these walks would come to mean to all of us, and the incredible people, animals, and events that we would experience over the course of a year.
A Season of Protests
My friend Michelle works in public relations for Best Friends, a non-profit animal welfare organization. She has a huge heart, and cares for not just the furry among us, but for human beings as well.
When George Floyd was callously murdered on the streets of Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, sparking intense protests, it seemed like all hell was breaking loose.
For those of us stuck at home and suddenly truly paying attention to the issue of police brutality against people of color, it seemed impossible that a police officer could casually rest his knee on the neck of another human being until the life seeped out of that helpless, unarmed person.
If you are a person of color, you probably weren’t shocked by this scene.
When the protests and riots turned violent, Michelle, who had already been suffering from stress-related hives, began having intense episodes that sent her to the emergency room for relief. Her anxiety was off the charts.
In my ninth grade classroom, we had just finished reading the autobiography When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. Cullors is not only one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, she is also an alumnus of the high school where I teach.
Although I knew much of the history that leads directly to today’s police brutality against black people, I had never before joined a protest against it.
Over the course of a week, I attended five protests, including one on May 31 in Santa Monica where battalions of police squared off with protesters while a few blocks away, looters were given free reign to smash store fronts and steal merchandise with abandon.
My 19-year-old son Sean and I ended up feeling safer being around the looters than in the area where police were shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at unarmed protesters. The irony of that was not lost on either of us.
I also protested, always with masked, outdoor crowds, in downtown LA, on the streets of Northridge, and here, in Simi Valley.
Simi Valley was a particularly poignant location for a protest because of its history with the 1992 Rodney King trial, in which four police officers who were filmed beating King were acquitted of the charges by a jury chosen from the conservative, mostly white population of Ventura County.
I was extremely worried about a protest planned for Simi by a young black woman named Mikiiya Foster. She was a classmate of my son’s, and he and his friends, all seniors in high school at the time, were involved in helping to plan the event.
When the patently racist Simi Valley Mayor Pro Tem Mike Judge made Mikiiya’s name public, she started getting violent threats through her social media account. Another mother and I worried about whether we should let our children get involved in the protest, and whether it would be safe to attend.
Conservatives in Simi worried about riots and looting, while more liberal residents worried about violence from conservatives. Ugly posts were being made on social media by conservatives, who threatened to start shooting looters or to spray raw sewage on the protesters to disperse them (the latter was a suggestion from the Mayor Pro Tem Judge).
The Simi police chief worked with Mikiiya, however, and the protest was wonderfully executed. It was attended by thousands of peaceful marchers, and culminated with speeches and spoken word poetry by Mikiiya and a number of other passionate young people of color.
Michelle and I marched along with the throngs, and my son marched with Mikiiya and her friends. It was empowering, and healing. It gave us a sense that urgently needed change might actually come to America.
After the initial spate of marches, we continued walking every day at Corriganville, trying to process the daily barrage of news about protest-related violence, and a pandemic and a president which both seemed to be raging out of control.
Despite sensing political differences with some of the regulars we met on the trail, we forged a friendly community, and hoped our country could do the same.
Hollywood Is Not Just History at Corriganville
Corriganville Park now comprises a few hundred acres operated and maintained by the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District, but it was once a sprawling movie ranch and entertainment destination owned by Ray “Crash” Corrigan, who rode alongside the likes of John Wayne and Gene Autry in Hollywood westerns from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Thousands of movies have been filmed in the hills of Corriganville, and in the artificial lake that was constructed in the heart of the park, along the Arroyo Simi, including such classics as “African Queen,” “Jungle Jim,” and “Fort Apache.” In the 1960s, Corrigan sold the property to Bob Hope, who developed part of the ranch into a suburban housing tract called Hopetown.
In the 1970s, all of the remaining movie ranch buildings burned down in fires, and in the 1980s, the city of Simi Valley and the parks district purchased several hundred acres to turn into a recreational area. The park features interpretive signs that explain not only the Hollywood history of the area, but the natural history, as well.
Lest you think that Corriganville’s Hollywood days are over, however, let me assure you that film crews are a common sight in the park and its immediate surroundings.
Directly across the street from the entrance to the park lies Allied Studios and 76 Ranch, which boasts 70,000 square feet of fully finished sound stages, and a back lot that looks like a mini version of Universal Studios.
The scenes that portrayed the nearby Spahn ranch (where Charles Manson and his followers took up residence in the 1970s) in the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” were filmed at Corriganville Park.
While that movie was filmed before we started our daily walks, we have witnessed episodes of “The Mayans” and “Animal Kingdom” being filmed at Corriganville.
For a while we ate breakfast regularly after our walks at the Old Susana Cafe on Kuehner Road, and one day we were surprised and disappointed to see it had suddenly reopened as the Candlebirch Cafe.
However, we were relieved to find out that the cafe hadn’t actually changed hands, they were simply filming “The Mayans” there!
We regularly see the cast and crew for “T-Rex Ranch — Dinosaurs For Kids,” a YouTube sensation with millions of followers and nearly a billion collective views, filming at Corriganville.
One of our strangest brushes with Hollywood, however, involved not a movie, but a pop music icon.
In February, we noticed a rather puzzling and elaborate set being constructed among the trees. There were red plexiglass panels in the oaks, and then a stage set up against the sandstone cliffs.
When we first inquired with the crew what they were preparing to film, they said a “mayo commercial.” At first we thought we had not heard correctly. It seemed like a lot of time, money and work for a mayo commercial.
Every day we saw more equipment brought in, and more pieces of the set being constructed. When we pressed the employees, they “caved” and told us they were filming a Hallmark Christmas movie, which would feature a dream sequence at night, and a B-movie star.
If we had known more about sound equipment and lighting, we probably could have figured out that it was a setup for a concert. But, not knowing much about concerts, we believed it when we were told the set was for a Hallmark movie.
After a night of howling winds, however, the sets had all blown over. We felt awful for all the people who had worked so hard to construct them. The location manager told us that the director had used his own money on this scene, hoping to further his career.
He said he didn’t know if they would try again later, but sure enough, we saw the sets being rebuilt a short time later.
Only when the filming was done did we find out that they had filmed Justin Bieber singing live in the forest at night, and against the cliffs in the late afternoon to take advantage of the golden light.
The location manager apologized profusely for lying to us, but he said he had been sworn to secrecy by his employers. Even though everyone on the set had helped maintain the secret, some adoring “Beliebers” still found their way to the top of the cliffs above the stage where Bieber sang, he said.
Not being young, or Bieber fans, we still had fun seeing the videos and “our” park when the recordings were released, but we had no hard feelings about being kept in the dark.
We did have fun singing Justin’s anthem, “Lonely,” however, as we passed the spot where he had sung it live. Fortunately, we were not “low-whoa-oh-whoa-onely”…we still had each other, and “the regulars” we had come to know and love on our walks.
The Regulars
Walking every day in the same place brings lovely surprises, if you keep an eye out and are open to them.
At the height of the lockdowns, we met kindred spirits who just needed to get out. Some wore masks, and some didn’t, but one of the biggest pleasures of our walks in Corriganville has come from the people (and their dogs) whom we have met on the path.
We became so familiar with one another that if anyone were absent on a particular day, they had to provide an excuse — whether it be a doctor or dentist appointment, work-related, or a pressing home repair.
My dad, Ken Bondy, has always had a natural charisma. People are instantly drawn to him, and he enjoys the attention. His six-foot-four frame makes him stand out, but it is his genuine friendliness that draws people in.
We started referring to my dad as the Mayor of Corriganville, because he enthusiastically waves and says “Hi!” to each and every person on the trail. In recent months, he has taken to photographing everyone he sees with his Nikon D7500 and Sigma 150–600mm lens. He looks a little like the paparazzi with the super-long lens when he sneaks a photo of people on the trail.
Most people welcome the overtures, but he gets a few scowls, and even one recent scold. People don’t know that he is merely recording one of the best things that has ever happened to us all.
In addition to being the unofficial greeter of Corriganville, my dad has taken to picking up trash pretty much every day at the park. It’s hard to tell how often the trash cans are emptied, but we are certain we have picked up the same greasy paper plates and pizza boxes for several days in a row more than once.
It’s clear that animals are knocking over the trash cans and feasting on the garbage they find, but despite that, the park’s maintenance crew says it is too expensive to replace the cans with animal-proof versions.
So, we right the upended trash cans, don gloves and grabbers, and pick up the trash ourselves.
We aren’t alone in that, however. Early on, we met Merle, Molly, and Allie — a grandfather, his gorgeous German Shepard, and his beautiful granddaughter, respectively. They also regularly clean up trash in the park.
Due to unfortunate family circumstances, Merle and his wife are raising Allie. He brings her to the park with Molly several times a week, and if they are not at the park, they are at Allie’s horseback riding lessons, the dog park (where Molly can run off leash) or at church.
Getting to know Merle, Allie and Molly has been one of the highlights of walking at Corriganville. We could tell pretty early on that our politics leaned in different directions, but our hearts did not. Merle told us the history of the park, and even successfully convinced us to try a new trail — once.
Seeing Allie go from a shy first grader, to a second grader who runs and hugs us when she sees us, has been beyond heartwarming. And although Merle tries to hide his soft heart under a crusty exterior, we see right through him.
We also befriended Mike Woods and Dori Allen, who sought escape from their cooped up teens by walking at Corriganville. They often grilled me good-naturedly on when schools would open up, but I could give them no better answers than the news.
We enjoyed seeing this happy couple holding hands, smiling, and enjoying being together, despite all the craziness in the world. We wondered what they did for a living, and they told us they were both Simi Valley Realtors. I liked that they never mentioned that until we asked. They were just fellow travelers in Corriganville.
Another surprise came in October, when I found a painted rock in the crook of a tree, just off the trail. It was skillfully painted like a smiling pumpkin, and it really brightened my day.
Soon we found out that there was a thriving community of people who painted and hid rocks all throughout Simi Valley, including Corriganville. When we told Allie about the rock, she told us about the secret “fairy door” hidden in a tree just off the main trail. That was where rocks could reliably be found.
We eventually met Cecilia Gonzalez, who had painted the pumpkin rock, while she was walking her dog. We told her how much we enjoyed her artwork, and she surprised us later by painting beautiful individualized rocks for each of us.
Creative types seem drawn to Corriganville.
On one recent day, I was taking pictures of the trees and trying to use an app to identify the exact species. I wanted to know what the native plants were in the park. On that same day, I found out that one of our regulars, Rebecca Chamlee, is a renowned artist who makes beautiful prints of the leaves of the native trees in Corriganville.
Rebecca even wrote and illustrated an artist’s book about a massive oak that toppled in the park just a few years ago.
We have been seeing Rebecca and her tree-climbing collies for the entire year we have been walking at Corriganville, and she herself has been walking there for the past 25 years. But it was not until the exact day I was intent on taking identifiable plant pictures that we found out about her art and knowledge of the local flora. And it wasn’t because she saw me taking pictures, either. She was showing us the remains of a coyote that had died just off the trail, with no apparent injuries, when I finally asked about her line of work.
This kind of synchronicity wasn’t an isolated incident at Corriganville, however.
A Cast of Characters
Aside from the “regulars” that we saw nearly every day, we continue to meet people who walk in the park occasionally, and who we have gotten to know as well.
Pod Chusub and his dog Sidney always bring a smile to our faces. Pod is retired from the film industry, and we dubbed his dog Sydnee “Happy Dog” because she appears to be the happiest dog on earth.
Thomas Ashworth is an actor known for roles on hit shows such as “How to Get Away With Murder,” and lesser-known films including “Killer Tomatoes Eat France!” It’s always a delight to see Thomas, his wife Christine, and their shaggy companion, Whimsy the Wonder Dog, on the trail.
No one we have met at Corriganville is more colorful than the man whom I will only call The Witch Doctor, however.
For the better part of a year, despite regular encounters, the Doctor would not tell us his real name, only saying that he was a witch doctor. With his walking stick, long hair, moccasin boots and hippie/New Age/Native American vibe, the Doctor seriously piqued my interest. His personality could be perfectly described by the slogan on a T-shirt he wore one day: “I’m a little bit peace, love, and light, and a little bit go f*** yourself.”
The Doctor would seemingly appear out of nowhere on the trail, just around a bend, or lying on his back on a picnic table, face toward the sky, smoking a cigarette (or a doobie?). He seemed keenly interested in our heated political or philosophical discussions, and sometimes surprised us by appearing on the side of the trail, and weighing in.
We coaxed some personal details out of the Doctor along the way: he was taking care of elderly parents in Simi, he had children who lived in Michigan, and he was into a spiritual tradition called “theosophy.”
At one point early on, the Doctor asked me to choose between two objects. He held some prayer beads in one hand, and a lighter decorated with dice in the other. I took the lighter. He later started leaving random objects on my car, including a ceramic dragonfly, some marijiuana candy, and a bottle of sangria.
Occasionally the Doctor left objects on my dad’s and Michelle’s cars as well, including a green stone he placed during the same week as Michelle’s birthday, which happened to be the color of her birthstone. He did not know it was her birthday that week.
I think I was so fascinated with the Doctor because my own mother had been very into the occult and supernatural experiences. She took me to seances and psychic churches where people practiced psychometry (reading the energy of objects) when I was a teen. I even have a close friend who married someone whose mother was a theosophist, and my friend actually lived with her (now ex) husband for a time in a community called Halcyon, near Arroyo Grande, which is owned by an organization of theosophists.
The Doctor had noticed that I have a tattoo of a dragonfly on my wrist, and I told him that it was a symbol of spiritual transformation for me. Then he showed me the tattoo of the symbol for theosophy that he sports on his. Some days he would hold up his wrist so we could “bump” our tattoos.
While I good-naturedly played along with the Witch Doctor’s games and riddles, Michelle and my dad did not have the same background in the “woo woo” arts, and they were a little (OK, a lot) less receptive to his witchy ways.
When the Witch Doctor mentioned that he would like to have a pit bull puppy, I think Michelle was not completely sold on the soundness of the idea, despite the fact that she works in the animal rescue field.
However, a few weeks later, the Witch Doctor showed up with a large, beautiful pit that he named Towser. Towser’s owner basically abandoned him to the Doctor in the parking lot of a Walgreen’s, and they seemed quite taken with each other.
Towser was a lot of dog to handle, though. He was great with humans, but would bark and lunge ferociously at other dogs. He had deep red scar marks on his neck from a sharp-pronged choke chain that his previous owner had used.
One day the Doctor showed up without Towser, and he told us that the last time he had seen the dog was when he ran into the doctor’s office of “the man that got my whole family hooked on Vicodin.” He eventually found Towser again at the pound, but then lost him again.
While the Witch Doctor had been a regular on our walks during the early part of the first pandemic year, he came to the park less and less as time went on. We always knew when he was there, however, because he was the only person who would blast music in the parking lot, no matter how early in the morning it was.
On Sunday, May 9, I met my dad at the park at 7 a.m. as usual, and I could see he was upset.
The Witch Doctor had shown up and left before I got there. He came specifically to give my dad a bottle of herbal supplements, and told my dad they were from “God.” Then he left.
My dad, who is a staunch atheist, was agitated and didn’t know what to make of this latest “gift.”
Neither did I, at first. I tried to reassure my dad that the Witch Doctor didn’t mean any harm; that he was just trying to be helpful.
But as we walked on the trail, the incredible coincidences that had lined up that day were just too much to ignore. I burst out laughing.
“That bottle of supplements must have been from Mom!” I cried out. My dad only looked even more perplexed.
My mother had passed away two years ago to the day, and it was Mother’s Day. For the past several decades of her life, my mother had shared with me her intense regret that she had not been able to lead my father, from whom she had been divorced since I was 11, to God.
In addition, my mother was a huge believer in herbal supplements. When she died, she easily had thousands of dollars’ worth of high-end herbal pills to help with everything from her eyesight to her heart health.
Throughout the years, she had either sent my father stories about alternative medicine, or tried through me to pass them along to him.
Even my father, who pooh-poohs all of my supernatural stories as either coincidence or a figment of my imagination, looked like he had seen a ghost.
After that, we saw even less of the Witch Doctor. Perhaps his purpose in our lives had been served.
The Wildlife
Our human encounters at Corriganville kept us connected with the best of our own species during some of the darkest times in all of our collective memories, but the breathtaking beauty of the park and natural habitat it provides brings us regularly into contact with the wild.
Over the course of the past year, we have seen hawks and falcons, coyotes and skunks, woodpeckers and green parrots, squirrels and rattlesnakes. We have seen the distinct paw print of a mountain lion on the dirt trail, and we have watched a family of great horned owls raise a trio of fledglings, and eventually all fly away.
The park’s sandstone cliffs are home to a variety of birds that use its caves and crevices to nest, while its riparian habitat draws in a plethora of wildlife. A single water trough located in the trees near the middle of our loop trail must draw animals from miles around during this extended drought.
Although the park is bordered on the north end by the 118 freeway, a concrete wildlife corridor allows animals to pass under the freeway and down to the park from the hills north of Simi Valley.
My dad is a serious amateur photographer, and every day he brings his camera just in case we spot an unusual subject. During the owl nesting season, he would carry the camera with its heavy telephoto lens on each loop, just to document the miracle of the baby owls.
After posting the owl photos on Facebook, my dad gained a bit of a photographic following. One day his neighbor, filmmaker Scott Templeton, brought a few of his friends to the park to photograph the owls.
One of those friends was Nick Ut, a retired Associated Press photographer and the man who changed the course of the Vietnam war with his iconic photograph of a young girl running from a napalm strike. As a former newspaper reporter and a history buff myself, it was a minor miracle to meet Nick.
It seems like when the world shut down, Corriganville brought the world to us. Thankfully, my father has been documenting that journey every step of the way.
Whether it is the night blooming cereus cactus just outside the park, the unusual cloud formations for which Simi was named (the Chumash who lived here before us called the area Shimiji to describe the stringy clouds that form over the valley), the quail, the parrots, rabbits, or the people and their pets, my dad never lacks for a good photo after our walk.
Despite the fact that the area once housed a western-themed attraction that is still described as the Disneyland of its day, it’s not hard to imagine what it was like when Native Americans populated the hills and the absence of freeways and fences allowed animals to roam freely.
Except for the non-native eucalyptus trees that line the dirt parking lot, the plant life at Corriganville is largely indigenous.
Lost and Found
While our year in Corriganville was mostly a year of incredible discovery and experiences, we did suffer a number of losses along the way.
When we started walking, Michelle’s beloved dogs Melvin and Louie were already older, but they were in good health. Over the course of the year, she lost both of the dogs to the inevitable physical failings of old age.
One of our regular human and dog pairs, Skip and Gus, also permanently parted ways when Gus was suddenly diagnosed with cancer. My dad brought Skip a photo he had taken of Gus near the end, and Skip choked back tears when he saw it.
And, after a long period of not seeing the Witch Doctor, he showed up one day looking downtrodden and deflated. We almost didn’t recognize him. He told us his elderly father had passed away, and he had had a string of bad luck afterwards.
Despite these sad episodes, the community and the healing nature of the park and our walks kept us all going, literally and figuratively.
After months in mourning, Michelle eventually adopted two new dogs. First came Angus, the shy prancer, and then Suzi, a former reservation dog who bursts with energy and likes to be out in front of the pack, where she has a better view of the many rabbits that line the trail.
But that’s not all. Our pandemic pod continues to grow.
My dad and stepmom, Pam, who had lost their beloved bulldog more than two years ago, suddenly adopted Walter, a rescued stray who stole their hearts and now walks with us every day. Michelle’s boyfriend David joins us occasionally now, too, working with Suzi to keep her from going crazy after the rabbits.
Sometimes we talk about whether we will continue walking when the pandemic is over, but I think we all know the answer. We have come to need Corriganville, and the community we have discovered.
We have all found a piece of ourselves that we never would have known was missing, if we hadn’t gone outside to find it.
