Of course, everyone is furious now and trying to figure out what happened and what to do ...

Sarah’s Salamander World
Sarah, age 9, spent almost two months at the motel with her mother, and constructed a world around the Doggy Play Park Vernal Pond for the salamanders and other creatures. Exploring the whole area in detail, she had us move a big old truck tire across the seasonal creek and then filled it with sand from the truck parking lot, one ice bucket at a time, “so the fish won’t have to eat the oil.” It was an amazingly imaginative way of filtering runofff from the truck parking area so the water reaching the creek would not be polluted, and was entirely her own idea and project. Sarah’s idea was also that the salamanders went from the vernal pond down through the flowers and anise of the seasonal creek into a big culvert that carried water to Crane/Hinebaugh Creek, so they really had a long 150 foot tunnel to hide in and they commuted just like the cars on 101 to the cave under the freeway and the food in the creek. (It was hard to find them again because they had all these great caves to hide in during the daytime and maybe ran around at night.) It was another example of how a landscape we adults see in one light (parking lots, freeways, roads) is really co-inhabited by little kids and creatures who view it and live in it in a totally different way. And that somehow wild creatures have found a way to live in ecological niches in what seemed like a very developed area of the city. (You have to crawl around and pretend you are little to get this perspective, but it is kind of fun.)
When Sarah left with her mother for Southern California, Sarah had decided to be a Girl Scout and then a Park Ranger. She had found her world.
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Andrew
Andrew, age 14 going on 40, was here taking care of his father, a truck driver who had been disabled by a heart attack, and an unruly 12 month old dog named _ who was going to get terminated at the pound if he didn’t get his act together.. We began socializing and training the dog and Andrew took over major garbage cleaning and construction responsibilities from the other kids after they moved on. This particular phase of the garbage removal was very dangerous and particularly filthy, as years of clothing, bottles, rotten food and rotten bedding had accumulated in this hidden area used by druggies to shoot up and crash. You did not know whether a pile would include a rusty razor blade, crack pipe, or broken needle, or one of the ballpoint pens used as needles, and even gloves were inadequate, so everything was picked up with sticks and double bagged before being put in the dumpster.
Andrew set up the first true Creek Panther Neighborhood Watch, as he sat counting people going in and out of certain rooms dealing drugs, then told the motel manager and got the drug dealers kicked out. He hated speed dealers in particular because one of his friends had died around some speed related incident and the gangs and dealers were taking over Lake County where they had been living. He taught me to recognize drug behavior and paraphernalia, and some tags and hand signs, and not to wear red or blue, gang colors that can get you killed.
We found an old beach umbrella and Andrew spent hours in the rain teaching his dog to behave so it would not have to be put down. Finally, his father got his check and they bought an old truck and headed north to Oregon where land is cheap and there are no drug dealers.