The usual procedure in a situation like this was to note the mileage, and if the find was especially important, like the pygmy owls’ nest earlier in the year, to mark the spot with something that would attract attention without rousing the wrath of anti-litter-buggers. And others. (I mention “others” because on one occasion, to mark the whereabouts of a pair of black-chinned sparrows, I had carefully built a small mound out of stones, the best material on hand. Half our Audubon Society fell over the stones, and by the time the excitement subsided, the black-chinned sparrows were far away and glad of it.)
Near the pygmy owls’ nest we’d been lucky enough to pick up a good-sized piece of board painted red. We couldn’t expect such luck to be repeated, and it wasn’t. We found no marker in the area that would be readily visible from a moving car. Two more factors were against the Townsend solitaires appearing on our Christmas count. The speedometer on Jewell’s car was out of order and the previous weekend Russ Kriger had done one of his enthusiastic cleanup jobs on the car’s interior. A search through the glove compartment and the trunk, and even behind the seats, revealed nothing useable as a marker—no polishing cloth or chamois, no piece of rope or empty bottle, no last summer’s beach hat or last winter’s scarf. I looked at Jewell. She was wearing a white shirt and capris and a yellow sweater the exact shade of the band across the tip of a waxwing’s tail.
“Have you ever noticed,” I said, “how easy it is to identify a flock of cedar waxwings from a distance? The yellow tailbands show up very conspicuously.”
“So?”
“Experiments have shown that yellow is the color most easily seen from the greatest distance.”
“Well, you can forget the experiments,” Jewell said. “This sweater happens to have been a gift from one of my favorite relatives. It’s practically a keepsake.”
“You bought it yourself last year. I was with you, I even remember what it cost.”
“All right, all right. But I want it back.”
I assured her that she’d get it back, providing that during the next three days it wasn’t eaten by some animal, ruined by rain or blown away by the wind.
I tied the sweater to the top of a small ceanothus bush to mark the spot where we’d seen the first Townsend solitaire. To indicate the location of the second bird I was forced to sacrifice the lace hem of my slip, which I ripped off and impaled on a dead oak twig. The lace could easily be spotted by someone who was looking for it, and the sweater was conspicuous enough to prove that the experiments were right: if you want to be seen, wear yellow.
The following Sunday was count day. As usual there was a last-minute mixup and El Camino Cielo, which was to be Mary Erickson’s territory, was assigned to someone else. I didn’t know about this until the following Tuesday afternoon when the group captains and other interested people met in the junior library of the Museum of Natural History to make their official reports and add up the number of species and the number of birds seen between dawn and midnight on the Big Day. No one had remembered to have the heat turned on in the library ahead of time and we all sat around a table, huddled in coats.
The total number of species that year was 166, good enough to place us fifth in the nation, just one up on Freeport, Texas, and Oakland, California, tied at 165.
I greeted Mary Erickson, who was sitting across the table from me, and asked her what mountain species she’d found up on the ridge. She told me she’d been assigned to a beach and slough area instead.
A woman I’d never seen before volunteered the information that she had helped cover Camino Cielo, and except for a Steller’s jay and a varied thrush the place had been very disappointing, bird-wise. She’d obviously missed the Townsend solitaire, so I didn’t mention it.
The library was much warmer by this time and people were starting to take off their coats. The newcomer made a ceremony of removing hers, as though she wanted to make sure everyone noticed the costume she had on underneath. Everyone noticed all right. Especially me. Over a plaid wool skirt she wore a yellow sweater the exact shade of the band across the tip of a waxwing’s tail.
She saw me staring at the sweater. “Like it?”
I nodded.
“You’ll never believe where I got it.”
It was at that point, I suppose, when I should have taken her aside and explained the situation, but I didn’t. Instead, I listened in a kind of numb silence while she described to us how she’d seen the sweater, flapping in the wind, stopped the car and went over to investigate.
“. . . And there, tied to a bush, was this perfectly good sweater which turned out to be exactly my size. I couldn’t leave it out there in the weather to be ruined, so I brought it home and laundered it. And lo and behold, here it is and I am. It makes you wonder though, doesn’t it ? What kind of a nut would leave a perfectly good sweater tied to a bush in the middle of nowhere?”
The answer seems inescapable: my kind.
The second night of the fire came on. At seven-thirty the heavy winds which had been blowing all afternoon at the upper elevations reached the foothills, and many of us found out for the first time what the term “wildfire” really meant. The whole mountain range seemed to explode, and flames were suddenly roaring down toward the city itself, through San Roque Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Mission Canyon, where the Botanic Garden was situated, all the way to Romero Canyon at the northeast end of Montecito. Because of the winds and approaching darkness the borate bombers stopped operating, and by this time, too, there was a drastic drop in water pressure.
Mass evacuations began, with some motels and hotels offering free rooms, and moving companies volunteering trucks and vans. Many people were double evacuees who’d fled Sycamore and Cold Springs canyons the first night and were now forced to flee their places of refuge; and before the fire was over, there was even a small band of very tired and jittery triple evacuees.
Our Chelham Way situation, which had been fairly good all day, was suddenly ominous again as the fire turned back in our direction. I thought of the house on Mountain Drive that had been saved in the afternoon only to be burned to the ground at midnight, and I wondered what similar ironies fate might be preparing for us.
Blessing counters and silver lining searchers found a plus in a negative: there were no sightseers. The noise from the fire camp, however, was incredible, a continuous roar of helicopters arriving and departing, the blaring of air to ground loudspeakers, the shrieking of ambulance and fire truck sirens. It was decibels rather than danger which strained my nerves to the breaking point and convinced Ken I’d be better off elsewhere.
Jo Ferry called to repeat her invitation of the previous night, but Ken decided that this time more constructive action was necessary than simply sending me off with the three dogs. He made arrangements with my brother-in-law, Clarence Schlagel, to bring his pickup truck over. After a series of delays caused by roadblocks Clarence arrived with the truck and we loaded it with our main valuables, manuscripts and books. We owned no art originals, no fine china or silver, no furs, and I wore my two pieces of jewelry, my wedding ring and my “lucky” bracelet which had been a present from our daughter, Linda, many years before. (Some people we knew, trapped in the fire by a sudden, violent change of wind, used their swimming pool as a depository for their silver, jewelry and furs, including a beaver jacket whose original owner wouldn’t have minded at all.)
It was agreed that I would go to the Schlagels’ house with the two smaller dogs, leaving Brandy with Ken. That way Ken could rest at intervals during the night knowing that Brandy would wake him up if anything unusual happened. German shepherds have a highly developed sense of propriety and when things go wrong they indicate their disapproval readily and unmistakably. Having Brandy in the room was like having an alarm clock set to go off in any emergency.
I rode in the truck with Johnny sitting quietly beside me and Rolls on my lap, trembling and wh
ining all the way, partly out of fear and partly anticipation of spending another night chasing around the Ferrys’ house with Zorba. He was in for a disappointment: no chasing was allowed at the Schlagels’ place because there were too many chasers and chasees, and to avoid a complete shambles the animals had to be kept separated as much as possible. I counted four cats—a fat, ill-tempered orange tiger bought for Jane when she was a baby, an alley cat who realized he’d struck it rich and seldom left the davenport except to eat, and a pair of tabbies abandoned by a neighbor who’d moved away; Jane’s pygmy poodle with the giant name of Cha Cha José Morning Glory, my sister’s burro, Bobo, who had a loud, nervous hyena-type laugh he seemed to reserve especially for me, and Clarence’s four Shetland ponies. Sibling rivalry was rather intense on occasion, and the arrival of Johnny who loathed cats, and Rolls who hated horses and rapidly learned to hate burros, didn’t improve matters. There were many times during the night when I would have welcomed the sound of helicopters and fire sirens to drown out some of the yelping, yowling, whinnying, barking, and above all, Bobo’s wild bursts of laughter.
I woke up at dawn, leashed my two dogs and took them for a walk down the road toward the sea. When I faced that direction everything seemed quite normal. The light breeze smelled of salt and moist kelp. Mourning doves and brown towhees foraged along the sides of the road and bandtails gathered in the eucalyptus trees, getting ready to come down to feed. Brewer’s blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds were already heading for the Schlagels’ corral, Anna’s hummingbirds hurled themselves in and out of fuchsia blossoms and the bright red bushes of callistemon and torches of aloe, while half a dozen dogs vehemently denounced me and the company I kept.
When I turned to go back, the whole picture changed abruptly. I remember thinking, with terrible surprise as if I hadn’t been aware of it before, Our mountains are on fire, our forest is burning.
Returning to the house, I found my sister and brother-in-law in the kitchen making breakfast and listening to the radio. It had been a disastrous night. With winds in forty-five mile an hour gusts and flames towering as high as two hundred feet, the firefighters didn’t have a chance. Twenty-three thousand acres and over a hundred buildings were now destroyed and still the fire roared on, unchecked.
Fire, like war, is no respecter of age. Lost hysterical children wandered helplessly around Montecito village, and Wood Glen Hall, a home for the elderly at the opposite end of the fire area, was evacuated when the building filled with smoke.
Fire operates without any rules of fair play. Carol Davis of the University of California at Santa Barbara was helping the residents of Wood Glen Hall carry out their possessions when she learned that her own house had been destroyed and the only things saved were four books and a few pieces of clothing.
Fire makes no religious distinctions. The Catholic Sisters of Charity were burned out, the Episcopalian retreat on Mount Calvary lost a building, and a residence hall was destroyed at the Baptist Westmont College.
Fire has no regard for history or politics. Several buildings were burned to the ground at San Ysidro Ranch, the site of one of the old adobes constructed when Santa Barbara was under Mexican rule, and the place where, in 1953, a young Massachusetts senator named Kennedy brought his new bride, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, on their honeymoon.
Fire does not defer to beauty, either natural or man-made. A multimillion-dollar art collection belonging to Avery Brundage was destroyed, and some parts of the Botanic Garden were ravaged, including the majestic grove of sequoias, the largest of trees, where in the winter we could always find the tiniest of warblers, Townsend’s, and in the spring the almost as tiny Oregon juncos nested under the fragrant heart-shaped leaves of wild ginger.
Even the fire camp itself wasn’t spared. Flying embers started a blaze right in the middle of it and burned an area the size of a city lot before it was extinguished.
Around Santa Barbara that morning few people had a good word to say for Prometheus.
Ken phoned while I was feeding the dogs to tell us that he and Brandy and the house had come through the night in fair shape. Once again the flames had reached the head of our canyon and turned back as the winds shifted and though live coals had left holes in some roofs and all exterior areas were a mess, not a house on Chelham Way had been lost.
Other people weren’t so lucky. Of my fellow refugees at the Ferrys’ house, two were completely burned out: Robert M. Hutchins who lived in Romero Canyon in Montecito, and Hallock Hoffman who lived miles in the opposite direction above the Botanic Garden.
Every disaster has its share of ironies. Perhaps the Coyote fire seemed to behave more simply because they happened to people we knew. One of them involved an old wooden shed which was on the Romero Canyon property where the Hutchins had built their house several years before. The shed was being used to store the antiques Mrs. Hutchins had been gathering from various parts of the world for her art shop. When it became inevitable that fire was going to overrun the area, the antiques were removed by truck and taken to—where else?—the Ferrys’ house. No collector of ironies will be surprised to learn that the old shed, highly inflammable and containing nothing whatever of value, was the only building in the area untouched by flames.
One of the most eloquent of all the pictures taken during and after the Coyote fire was a shot of the formal gardens of the Brundage estate. It showed a marble Athena looking coolly and imperturbably through the bare black bones of trees toward the ruined mountains. No caption was needed; Ars longa, vita brevis.
During that early Thursday phone call, Ken also told me what I’d already guessed: during the night the Van Bergens’ house, which had been offered to us as a sanctuary from the fire, was completely destroyed. Afterwards I learned some of the details from the Van Bergens themselves and from people who’d been watching from below.
The house, situated on a knoll at an altitude of about seven hundred feet and constructed of glass and stucco in a distinctive, semicircular design, was easily identifiable for miles around. Dozens of observers saw the flames advancing on it and they were all unanimous on one point: the place did not burn, it was consumed—and with such rapidity that there was hardly a trace of smoke. Less than twenty minutes elapsed between the beginning of the fire and the end of the house. Evidence of the fantastic heat generated during that time was discovered later in the week when the Van Bergens started sifting through the ruins. The glass and the aluminum framing of the windows had oozed together in an incredible mess and the porcelain on the kitchen sink had completely melted. Since this stuff is applied at a temperature of 3000° F., firemen estimated the fire at that point to be between 3000° and 4000° F.
After breakfast, Johnny and Rolls and I said goodbye to the poodle, Cha Cha José Morning Glory, to Bobo, who let out one last triumphant guffaw, and to the cats Goldie, Neighbor, Neighbor Junior and Sneaky, and the ponies Heidi, Slipper, Tammy and Shasta. None of them showed the slightest regret at our departure.
It was still very early in the morning when I arrived home. For us the fire which had threatened on three sides was over. For others it was just starting. By noon 23,000 acres had burned, more than 2000 men were on the front and preparations were being made to start the backfire that was really to backfire and cause the first death.
Our house and yard, in spite of a covering of grey ash, looked beautiful to me because they were still there. Something was missing though. I noticed as soon as I walked in the front door that the ledge was vacant and the food I’d put out the previous night was untouched. The mourning doves and band-tailed pigeons, normally seen at any hour of any day, were missing. So were our unusual visitors, the ringed turtle dove and the white-winged dove. The only bird life in evidence was a small flock of green-backed goldfinches in the bath on the lower terrace. They were bathing merrily in the grey ash-coated water as if it were the clearest, freshest mountain brook.
The most o
bvious absence, however, and the most mysterious, was that of the scrub jays. I took some peanuts out to the wooden dish on the porch railing, a maneuver that under ordinary conditions would have set the canyon echoing with their harsh cries of, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!” and brought jays down from every tree and rooftop. Nothing happened. The acorn woodpeckers didn’t respond either, but I didn’t expect them to; it was now the final week of September, the month when the acorns were beginning to ripen and there was work to be done. The only bird who appeared for the peanuts was Houdunit, the brown towhee. This was predictable since he seldom ventured more than fifty feet from the house and knew all the things that took place in and around it almost before they had a chance to happen.
We were feeding about a dozen scrub jays at this time, most of whom had been raised on the ledge and were very tame. The word tame might give the impression of birds trained to sit on shoulders and do tricks and the like. That impression would be wrong. Our jays were tame in the sense that they were part of the landscape, like the eucalyptus trees and the cotoneasters; their voices were as familiar to us as Brandy’s basso-profundo bark or Johnny’s howling at sirens; our lives and their lives were entwined, so that you might say we were all part of the same biota.
In the course of the morning a number of the usual birds came to the ledge to feed—house finches, a pair of young song sparrows, cowbirds and blackbirds, a lone flicker and a mockingbird. The scrub jays remained absent, as did the band-tailed pigeons, the three species of dove and two house wrens who’d been with us since spring. We never saw any of them again.
The Birds and the Beasts Were There Page 25