Welcome to A Closer Look Welcome to Closer Look at Crestline, a new feature of the Courier-News. In this column, we won't be reporting regular news. Instead, we will be looking for stories that put a face on the community and the lives of its people. And we welcome your input. Crestline is a unique place, especially considering the urban sprawl that surrounds it, thankfully out of sight and often out of mind. If you don't read highway signs and you drive through Crestline, you might find it hard to believe that more than 8,000 people call this place home. Driving through the town you might see only a few dozen homes on a clear day. Crestline is so pleasant that Santa Claus has chosen to take up year-round residence here. And he's always in character—the essence of jolly. He's always quick with a plausible explanation when a wide-eyed child asks him what he's doing sitting in Billy Bear's at this time of year. Crestline is a place where you keep one hand on the wheel and another in the air waving at people you don't know. You don't want to be caught in a dark alley in Crestline with your anti-war protest banner and your burning flag, especially during the past few weeks. That's when the kind of war demonstrations that you expect in Crestline took place. It wasn't necessarily pro-war, but it was clearly in support of the troops. In the afternoons we could hear the car horns and cheers coming up from the valley below and see a hint of the waves of red, white and blue through the trees. Most heartwarming to us was the participation of many young people, some of them—Carmen Estrada for example—who had brothers and sisters in the war. Now that the war has been all but won, the demonstrators are gone, some of them now waiting for their loved ones to return to their hometown. Like Lake Arrowhead, Lake Gregory's water level is far down this year. However, after a few good snowfalls and a soaking rain or two, Lake Gregory is now flowing over. And now the water is turning blue again, instead of the muddy green hue it has taken on during two years of drought and stagnation. We'll be looking forward to the end of May this year when we can jump into that icy, clean water. Crestline is becoming a dangerous place as we head toward summer. Foot-dragging in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., is putting our homeowners in greater danger. As the hoped-for money dries up and the dead trees dry out, we're keeping our fingers crossed, hoping that the crazies don't come out of the woodwork during the Santa Anas and the sane people keep their wits about them around fire. The Arrowhead fire last year gave us a taste of what might be in store for us. We remember racing to Lake Gregory Elementary and then to Grandview Elementary in the choking smoke to get our children to relative safety. But then we thought, “Where could we go?” This is a difficult place to escape and we had no plan. Do you have a plan?
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