It's a place where residents watched their children, then grandchildren, play in the streets. Where a surfer can check the waves at a world-class point break while still lying in bed. A place that locals say is special not because of what it has become, but because of what it hasn't become.

La Conchita isn't million-dollar, beachside homes. It's trailers and beach houses with odd angles. It's a mix of those working their way up through society and those who have dropped out altogether.

It's a place that, despite the heartache and tragedy that follows its name, is worth the risk, residents say.

"I don't think there is another place in Ventura County where people can feel so free without so many rules," said Lois Buchen, 83, who moved to La Conchita in 1973.

Like many of the other residents in the small coastal community, Buchen is merely waiting for life to return to normal so she and her husband can go back to a place that is anything but typical. This isn't the first time she and her neighbors have been shut out of their homes by a mudslide. They built the community back once before and say they will do it again. It is worth it.

"It is unique," Buchen said of her community.

Affordable living on the beach

In the 1960s and '70s, La Conchita was a funky little former oil hamlet far removed from Ventura, where weekenders came in RVs and tents with surfboards and barbecues, escaping the pavement and bustle of greater Los Angeles.

That's what it was like when Jack and Karen Oren used $5,000 after he returned from the Vietnam War to buy a plot of land and build their home in 1968.

The Orens never had to worry about their three daughters running around the neighborhood because they knew all their neighbors in the 10-block-wide, two-block-deep community. Locals never sped down the small roads with no sidewalks.

"If you saw someone speeding, you knew they weren't from around here," Karen Oren recently said as she sat at her kitchen table, from which she could see Santa Cruz Island in the distance.

Younger families moved in and refurbished some of the old homes, which were cheaper than other beach communities but still had all the appeal of a Southern California beach life.

Young families mixed with the retirees; all came for the slow pace of life by the sea.

"We called it the nearly dead and newly wed," said Larry Mancini, 53, a 20-year resident.

Twice-a-year gatherings

Neighborhood gatherings came every May, when the entire community held a yard sale, and again at the end of the summer, when folks dragged barbecues and guitars and blankets and coolers of beer to the beach for one big block party by the sea.

Unlike Malibu or Venice Beach, La Conchita remained true to the sleepy, beach community it always was. A factory worker could still afford a house with an ocean view.

"There hasn't been that much change," said Bob Voigt, a 15-year resident. "It's always been exactly as it is now: not all rich people, but ordinary people."

The Oren girls grew up and two moved back to La Conchita to raise families of their own. Nearly 12 of the Orens' immediate family members eventually bought homes and settled down in the community.

"It was the place we wanted to live because it was peaceful," Karen Oren said. "Until the first mudslide, it was paradise."

An island on the 101

La Conchita is hemmed in by an unstable mountain at its rear and a highway at its front. The 200 residents have one road in and out of the community. There isn't much room for growth, other than the handful of vacant lots that dot the narrow streets.

In many ways, it is an island.

"We felt like we were on a boat and when you are on a lifeboat, you get along," said Mancini. "If you see a guy in the water, you pull him back in."

Many in the neighborhood came to La Conchita by fleeing the San Fernando Valley, where they didn't know their neighbors' names, much less their business. Not so in La Conchita.

Voigt recalls a time he wasn't home and the gas company came to shut off his gas. Neighbor Charly Womack asked what was going on and paid Voigt's $80 bill. Womack was one of the 10 people killed in the Jan. 10 mudslide.

In the hours before that slide, residents say, there was a partylike atmosphere in the streets, people laughed and joked as they helped each other divert the flood of water and mud from their homes.

"It's probably one of the few small-type towns like this in Ventura County where people come together," said Ventura County Sheriff's Department Senior Deputy Steve Buckley, who patrolled La Conchita on and off for more than four years. "People watch out for each other."

It was a diverse crew watching out for one another. Carpenters and ministers, musicians and teachers, judges and dropouts all called La Conchita home.

"Think how boring La Conchita would be if we were all the same," Karen Oren said.

One home had a number of trailers in the driveway, where transients lived for months on end. Down the street, someone else was fixing up a home to sell to fund his retirement.

Rob Coleman said it all seemed to fit because people respected each other's differences.

"Here you are allowed to be who you are," said Coleman, a 10-year resident.

It's not to say that people of so many different backgrounds always got along. Sometimes a neighbor would have a musical jam session and another would yell to keep it down. Coleman once yelled at his neighbor for doing construction work too early in the morning.

But neighbors could hash out problems and still be friends. It was like bickering with family.

Such is life on an island, Coleman said.

With slides come change

This month's slide wasn't the first. The earth fell from the mountain in 1995, burying nine homes and nearly shattering the fragile life that had existed in La Conchita for so long.

Lawyers came in, fighting for a settlement for some who had lost their homes. Some say a divisive atmosphere developed and some people resented those who had settled for a pile of cash. Home values dropped to near zero and some homeowners near the landslide moved away, keeping their homes but renting them out.

A handful of people of a different element moved in, ones who didn't meld with the laid-back, accepting life so many had created.

"They had mean dogs," Mancini said. "You can tell something about someone if they have mean dogs."

But the town moved on with its yard sales and summer picnics, holding close to what so many other communities had left behind. Home values climbed again in the crazy real estate market. Families started to move back.

"La Conchita is like the boxer that is never going to go down," Mancini said.

But the mountain did come down again Jan. 10. Mixed with the dust that now hangs over La Conchita, there is a sadness.

Everyone knew someone who died in the mudslide. Many lost all the equity in their homes. Karen Oren talks of her relatives who are moving out because they either lost their homes or don't want to raise children in the shadow of that mountain.

But there still is hope.

In the mix of attending funerals and digging out mud, the community has formed a neighborhood group so they speak as one. They talk of reprinting T-shirts from the 1995 mudslide that read, "La Conchita. Down but not out."

They talk of about how in the days since this month's tragedy when they had no power, they emptied their thawing freezers and gathered around neighbors' barbecues for camaraderie over beers and steaks.

"We laughed and we cried," Voigt said.

Until all the water and phones are hooked back up, Lois Buchen is staying at her daughter's home inside a gated community in Moorpark. She can't wait to go home. Something just doesn't feel right in those gates where no one seems to know each other.

"There isn't that connection with your neighbor," she said.

She wants to go back to La Conchita.