Маргарет Миллар - The Birds and the Beasts Were There

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 obvious 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.