The Birds and the Beasts Were There

by Margaret Millar

  During the early part of the evening the hundreds fighting the fire and the thousands watching it never really doubted that it could and would be brought under control. Then at nine o’clock, the eventuality which some of us had been secretly dreading sud­denly came. The first gust of a santana rushed down from the crest of the mountain, driving the flames before it like teams of dragons. It soon became obvious that the fire was going beyond the control of men and machines. If it was to be stopped it would have to be stopped by nature herself. Not only was it spreading at a fantastic speed, it was being forced by the santana to backtrack, destroying whatever had been missed or only half burned the first time.

  That night Bill Richardson’s house, miraculously saved by a borate bomber in midafternoon, burned to the ground.

  The stream of sightseers continued. Our street, Chelham Way, is a circle, it goes nowhere, so only a very small percentage of the cars passing were on legitimate business. One of these stopped at the entrance to our driveway and the man behind the wheel asked us how to get to a house in the neighborhood where an elderly woman lived alone and might need help. He added, “Aren’t you Mrs. Millar?”

  I said I was.

  “We met this morning. You were at our house looking at the acreage we have for sale.”

  It was John Van Bergen and his wife. Less than twelve hours previously, we’d been talking to them about fire insurance rates and I’d been surprised to learn that they didn’t have to pay higher premiums than we did.

  There was no time to discuss the ironies of fate. We gave the Van Bergens the information they wanted and they drove on. Later that night they telephoned and offered us refuge from the fire, but by that time we’d decided that if we were forced to evacu­ate we would go to Ping and Jo Ferry’s. We had a number of good reasons for our choice, perhaps the chief one being that when Jo Ferry called she had particularly invited our three dogs to come, too. Many people had indicated willingness to take us into their homes, but they didn’t especially want to entertain a dour and elderly Scottie, a nervous spaniel and a German shepherd the size of a pony.

  Quite a few of the houses on Chelham Way and other streets in the vicinity had already been evacuated. At eleven forty-five the official order came from sound trucks going slowly up and down blaring out the message: “This area must be evacuated. You have ten minutes to get out of this area. This area must be evacuated in ten minutes. You have ten minutes . . .”

  It was enough. I grabbed a coat and three leashes. Ken put Brandy and Johnny in the back seat of the car and Rolls Royce in the front. Then he leaned down and kissed me and handed me the car keys. “Drive carefully.”

  “I thought you were coming with me.”

  “Drive carefully,” he repeated. “And don’t try to get in touch with me by phone. I’ll be out on the ledge with a hose.”

  The sound truck went by again: “This area must be evacuated immediately. You must leave now. This is your final warning.”

  As I backed out of the driveway I saw Bertha Blomstrand climbing a ladder up to her roof. I called to her. She looked down at me and shook her head grimly. Her meaning was clear: every­thing she had worked for all her life was in that house and she wasn’t going to abandon it.

  She looked frail and impotent in the light of the fire that was now surrounding us on three sides, and the odds against her were formidable. Yet I know of dozens of houses that were saved in this manner—by one determined person with a garden hose—after the situation became so bad that firefighters and equipment couldn’t be spared merely to save buildings, but had to be used for the much more important job of keeping the fire from spreading.

  “This is your final warning.”

  I joined the sad little procession of vehicles evacuating our street. Some had obviously been packed earlier in the evening. There was a pickup truck loaded with furniture and bedding held in place by two frightened children, a station wagon carrying suit­cases and camping equipment, a tiny sports car jammed with Westmont College girls and their collections of photographs and folk-song albums and books.

  All I had was a coat and three leashes.

  The Ferrys lived then as they do now on a knoll overlooking the Bird Refuge and the sea beyond. Ping was away on a business trip but Jo was waiting for me with her youngest daughter, Robin, a professional rider who’d driven up from the stables in Somis as soon as she heard about the fire. They both seemed calm, even cheerful, as though the glow in the sky and the pervasive smell of smoke were caused by nothing more than a Boy Scout marshmallow roast or a backyard barbecue. Zorba, the spaniel, repre­sented the facts more accurately—he took one look at my dogs, barked nervously and fled to the rear of the house. Mine set off in pursuit and the game began that was to last, quite literally, all through the night.

  Instead of making good use of the time by getting some rest, Jo and Robin and I sat in the library for a while and talked. Robin especially was to regret this since she was drafted to spend the next two nights helping look after some reluctant and difficult refugees at the polo field—150 show horses, mainly hunters and jumpers.

  Eventually Jo showed me upstairs to my room, gave me a sleep­ing pill and said goodnight. There was a small radio beside the bed, and while I knew it would bring only bad news at this point, I couldn’t resist turning it on. A man was announcing in a voice hoarse with fatigue that fifteen houses had been destroyed and a thousand men were battling the fire on a ten-mile front. There was no hope of containment as long as the santana kept blowing. Flames were fifty to seventy feet high and had already reached Cold Spring Canyon on the northeast, Gibraltar Road on the northwest, and Sycamore and Rattlesnake canyons on the west.

  I turned off the radio and sat on the edge of the bed, the report­er’s words echoing in my ears. I knew those canyons well and had spent many good hours birding in them, especially Rattlesnake Canyon. It was the topography, not the rattlesnakes, that had given the place its name, and the wildlife I encountered, except for deer and rabbits and the occasional red fox and coyote, consisted mainly of birds.

  At the old stone bridge that marked the canyon’s mouth, hun­dreds of wintering robins and cedar waxwings fed voraciously on toyon and coffeeberries and the miniature apples of the manzanita. Oregon juncos and hermit thrushes bathed in the shallow pools, Bewick wrens picked their way fastidiously through the under­brush, pausing to catch a bug or denounce an intruder, and red-breasted sapsuckers played hide and seek with us around the trunks of the live oak trees. Wide-eyed kinglets rattled from leaf to leaf, every fidgety-twitchy movement distinguishing them from their look-alike but more phlegmatic cousins, the Hutton vireos, which were found in the same area though less frequently. The difference between the two species became unmistakable when two male kinglets met and the top of each tiny head burst into a crimson rage.

  When spring came to the canyon, shooting stars, owl’s clover, blue-eyed grass and milk maids bloomed in the sun, and in the shadier places, fiesta flowers and Indian pinks, woodmint and the little green replicas of artists’ palettes that are called miner’s let­tuce because the forty-niners used them for salads. It was then that the phainopeplas arrived to nest in the mistletoe, the lazuli bunt­ings in the silver-lined mugwort along the stream, the Wilson war­blers under the blackberry vines, the black-chinned hummingbirds in the sycamores, the cliff swallows under the stone bridge already occupied by a pair of black phoebes, the olive-sided flycatchers in the pines, and Hutton vireos in the oaks, the western wood pewees and Bullock orioles in almost any tree or bush.

  No summer rains fed the creek and by September some parts of it had turned to mud and some to dust, and the slow trickle of water was only a reminder of the past winter and a promise of the one to come. Along the banks the leaves of the poison oak turned orange and red, and its smooth white berries were eaten by wrentits and California thrashers. Audubon warblers were everywhere, from the tops of the tallest trees wh
ere they flew out after insects like flycatchers, to the ground where they foraged like buntings. From ceanothus and chamise came the golden-crowned sparrows’ sweet pleading, “Hear me! Dear, hear me!” Pine siskins and Amer­ican goldfinches gorged on the ripening seeds of the sycamores and alders, and high in the sky, white-throated swifts tumbled and turned and twisted with such speed that no single bird could be followed with the binoculars. (W. L. Dawson, in Birds of Califor­nia, estimated that a white-throated swift which lives for eight years covers a distance equal to ten round trips to the moon.) Among the fallen leaves brown towhees foraged, both feet at a time, sounding like a whole battalion of birds, while tiny grey gnatcatchers searched the limbs of the pepper trees for grubs, and bushtits bickered through the oaks, followed by other little birds attracted by their antics and gay gossip—Townsend and Audubon and orange-crowned warblers, plain titmice and Hutton vireos, and in some years, mountain chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches.

  This was Rattlesnake Canyon. I thought of all the small confid­ing creatures who lived in it and I wept.

  The sleeping pill Jo Ferry had given me hit me very suddenly. I don’t know what it contained but I can vouch for its effectiveness: I slept through the arrival and bedding down of my fellow refu­gees, a family of eleven with all their household pets, including a snake and a parakeet.

  I woke up at dawn and became immediately aware of a change in the atmosphere. I was cold. The air coming in through the window was grey not with smoke but with fog, and it smelled of the sea, of kelp and tar and wet pilings. The santana had stopped.

  I put on my coat, picked up the three leashes and made my way through the quiet house out to the driveway. Zorba, the Ferrys’ spaniel, was stretched out, dead to the world, under an olive tree. My three dogs were arranged around the car, panting even in their sleep, as though this was merely a short recess in a long game. At the sound of my step they were instantly alert and eager to go home. They hadn’t the slightest doubt that there was still a home for them to go to. Their only anxiety seemed to be that they might have to be separated from me, so they all insisted on riding in the front seat. It was a cosy trip.

  At the top of Barker Pass there was an abrupt change in the weather. The fog dropped away like a curtain and the air was hot and dry and windless and ashes were falling everywhere, some particles as fine as dust, some large as saucers. On Sycamore Can­yon Road I came across a road block, but after a brief exchange of words I was allowed through. The men in charge looked too tired to argue. They had been up all night like hundreds of other volun­teer workers—students from the university and from City and Westmont colleges, Red Cross and Salvation Army workers, civil defense and National Guard units, radio hams, firemen’s wives manning the stations while their husbands fought on the front lines, nurses and nurses’ aides, teachers, city and county employ­ees, and such a varied assortment as the members of a teen-age hot­rod club, a folk-dancing group, and a contingent of deep-sea divers from one of the offshore oil rigs.

  I turned into Chelham Way.

  16

  Fire on the Mountains

  It was like the fringe of a bombed area. The houses were still standing but deserted. In one driveway a late-model sedan was parked with a small U-Haul trailer attached to the rear bumper. The trailer, heaped with clothes and bedding, had been left unprotected and the top layer of stuff was black with ashes. The sedan, however, was carefully covered with a tarpaulin. Perhaps its owner was a veteran of the disastrous 1955 Refugio fire, when a great many of us learned that ashes falling through atmo­spheric moisture made a lime mixture which ruined even the toughest paint.

  Halfway around Chelham Way was a narrow black-top road leading to Westmont College. A locked gate kept the road unused except in emergencies. Beyond the gate, which had been opened, I could see a large section of the athletic field where the main firecamp had been set up the previous day. Here, where Ken and I used to walk our dogs, where we watched robins in winter and track meets in spring, this place meant for nothing more than games was now headquarters for hundreds of men, a kind of in­stant village. Here they ate at canteen tents, slept on the ground, received first aid for burns and cuts, were sent off in helicopters, fire trucks, buses, pickups, jeeps, and brought back to begin the cycle all over again.

  The noise was deafening, most of it caused by the arrival and departure of helicopters and the shriek of sirens and blare of loud­speakers. The “helitack” units of the Forest Service consisted of the pilots themselves, the fire jumpers wearing heavy canvas suits to protect them when they leaped into the brush, and ground crews, in orange shirts and helmets, whose job was to prime and space the copters and keep them out of each other’s downdraft.

  The scene, with its backdrop of blazing mountains, was unreal to me. Even the wounded men being brought in by helicopter looked like extras from the Warner Brothers back lot and the sirens of the ambulances as they left the field seemed like part of a sound track. The dogs knew better. They began to whine, so I let them out of the car and told them to go and find Ken. They didn’t hesitate. It was a good place to get away from.

  Beyond the road leading into the firecamp was the top of our canyon. This part, which belonged to Westmont College and had no structures on it, had been completely burned. The ancient oak trees were black skeletons rising from grey ashes, and many euca­lyptus, cypresses and Monterey pines had been reduced to stumps, some still smoldering. But where the row of houses began, along each side of the canyon, the burning had terminated. There was no evidence that the area had been wetted down nor any reddish stains indicating the use of fire retardant; no firebreak had been bulldozed and no hose laid. Yet at that one particular point the fire had stopped.

  I learned later what had happened. At two-thirty in the morning, just when all hope of saving our canyon had been abandoned, the santana ceased as abruptly as it began and the wind pressed in from the sea, cool and moist. Temperatures dropped, humidity rose, and the flames were pushed back toward the mountains. It was during this lull that the Los Angeles Herald Examiner went to press with the front-page headlines “Santa Barbara Safe. Fire Shifts: 18 Homes Lost.” By the time I got to read those headlines Santa Barbara was surrounded on three sides by an inferno and a hundred more houses had been lost.

  I stopped the car. Through the binoculars I kept in the glove compartment I examined hollows where smoke was still rising and stumps still smoldering unattended. At any moment they could burst into flames again and the santana could return. It had taken a miracle to save our canyon and there was probably only one to a customer. I rushed home to call the fire department.

  Ken was asleep on the living-room davenport, a scribbled note on the coffee table beside him instructing me to wake him up when necessary. He didn’t stir even under the barrage of dog greetings.

  Most of the telephones in the region were out of commission by this time. Ours was still working, though it failed to solve much. The fire department, I was told, had no trucks and no men availa­ble; people spotting areas which were still smoking were urged to cover them with dirt and/or douse them with water. I grabbed a shovel and a length of garden hose and headed back up the road.

  During the windless morning the fire went through a semi-quiescent phase. There was unofficial talk of “early containment,” and a few evacuees began returning. Though the area where I was working still smoldered in places, other people had arrived to assist and the general picture looked good. By noon I felt secure enough to go home for some lunch. The only wildlife I’d seen all morning was an indignant family of acorn woodpeckers living in a nearby telephone pole, and a badly frightened and half-singed fox who came scurrying up from the bottom of the canyon.

  Over tea and sandwiches Ken told me how he’d spent the night dousing sparks and embers that fell on the roof and in the under­brush. He had done his job well. Too well. The tea tree’s natural tendency to lean had been encouraged by the excessive wat
er and it now lay on its side on the ground. Many trees were lost to fire during that week; our tea tree was probably the only one lost to flood.

  We were finishing lunch when my sister called to tell us the fire had started on another rampage. By midafternoon the “early con­tainment” theory had been blown sky high—and sky high turned out to be the precise description. The flames jumped El Camino Cielo, the sky road, and were racing down the other side of the ridge, with nothing whatever to stop them. Ten borate bombers were in operation, but dense smoke and wind conditions had grounded all of them and the fire roared unchecked into the back country, Santa Barbara’s vulnerable watershed.

  El Camino Cielo was the road along the top of the first main ridge, starting at the east end of Montecito and continuing west past the city of Santa Barbara, San Marcos Pass, Santa Ynez Peak, its highest point at 4292 feet, and ending at Refugio Pass. Along this sky road, winter birdwatchers were apt to see mountain spe­cies which seldom appeared in the city itself—a Clark nutcracker noisily prying open the scales of a pine cone; a varied thrush standing in regal silence underneath a live oak, ignoring the rau­cous challenges of Steller jays; golden-crowned kinglets and brown creepers, mountain chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches, and sometimes a large garrulous flock of those erratic wanderers, the piñon jays.

  The previous December, Jewell Kriger and I had done some advance scouting along Camino Cielo preparing for the Audubon Christmas bird count and we had come across a Townsend soli­taire fly catching in the chamise and scrub oak along the sides of the road. A quarter of a mile beyond we found another solitaire. These birds are rarely found on a coastal bird count and we wanted to make sure that at least one of the solitaires would be located when the proper time arrived. Camino Cielo was not part of our regular territory—we were scouting it for Dr. Mary Erickson, ornithologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Mary was to head the group covering the area on actual count day, but she was too busy to do any preliminary looking.