On one of these calm, quiet nights in September, a person may become suddenly aware that changes are taking place. There is a rustle of leaves, the squawk of a gate swinging, the bang of a screen door. A gust of wind roars down the canyon, and the eucalyptus trees begin to writhe. Leaves begin rushing past the windows like refugees fleeing the forest, and the hard little seed pods of the tea tree tap the glass like animals’ claws. If, at this stage of the game, all doors and windows are locked, drapes pulled, and the drafts of fireplaces closed tight, it won’t do much good. The dust seems to penetrate the very walls, and every flat surface in the house is soon covered with it. Skin is taut, throats parched, eyes gritty, tempers short. In a santana the milk of human kindness dries up like everything else.
In general, sea winds are fairly strong and steady, and desert winds come in gusts. Sometimes both are blowing simultaneously and between gusts of the desert wind the sea wind rushes in. Then there begins a tug of war between them with the city caught in the middle, a nervous referee for a battle of giants who haven’t read the rule book. Temperatures go up and down so rapidly thermometers haven’t time to register them accurately — and the range is wide, fifty or sixty degrees.
By sunrise the battle is over, the friendly wind is resting, the stranger has fled, the cleanup begins. Branches and leaves, and the litter blown out of overturned trash cans must be picked up; trees and shrubs and flowers must be hosed down to remove the dust that clogs their breathing pores; damaged bird feeders must be fixed and rehung, and the dirt and debris cleaned out of the birdbaths. If we’re lucky, the stranger won’t come back the next night...
The morning of September 22 was windless. The heavy fog that had blanketed the coastal area at dawn was burned off by the sun before nine o’clock and the mercury in the official temperature gauge, which is located at the shore, began to rise rapidly, up through the seventies into the eighties. Our area, at an elevation of about 550 feet, was a good deal hotter, a situation that was reversed only on very rare occasions.
I had watered heavily the previous afternoon, using the rainbirds on the roof in spite of the outraged protests of the scrub jays. We had had these roof sprinklers installed several years before by an off-duty fireman after the Montecito fire chief had urged all hill and canyon dwellers to be prepared for an emergency as the layers of brushwood grew higher and thicker and more dangerous. The emergency hadn’t occurred, but we used the rainbirds to cool the house and to water a considerable part of our property.
Few people had taken the fire chief’s advice. Rainbirds on a roof were so uncommon that at first when we used ours, passing motorists would stop and stare, and one even inquired if we’d broken a water main. If the effect was peculiar from the outside, it was doubly peculiar to sit inside and listen to rain pounding on the shingles, to see it pelting the windows and gushing out of the eaves troughs, while just beyond the walls of water a brilliant sun shone from an unclouded sky. Ordering up a private rainstorm in the midst of a California summer is as close to playing God as I care to come.
But the three rainbirds, even twirling full tilt, were no match for the September heat and drought. All traces of moisture had disappeared by midmorning the next day, and the temperature was in the nineties and still rising. The birds coped with the heat in several ways. The yellowthroats napped in a sheltered spot down by the creek. Some of the English sparrows and blackbirds cooled themselves by breathing rapidly through open beaks. The hooded orioles and Anna’s hummingbirds drank nectar from the golden hearts of the trumpet flowers and the mockers crushed the ripening elderberries and eugenias. The wrentits kept in the shade, foraging in the dense poison oak that was reddening the canyon slopes. All half dozen birdbaths were in continual use, the champion bathers being the house finches, who looked like miniature rainbirds as they hurled water madly in every direction at once.
None of our winter birds had arrived yet, though several species were due any minute — white-crowned sparrows, Lincoln and fox sparrows, pine siskins and Audubon warblers. Many of the summer visitors had already departed — all the swallows, the warbling vireos, Bullock orioles, Wilson warblers, western tanagers and black-headed grosbeaks. (The two latter species were to return mysteriously at the beginning of December, stay a month, and vanish again.) Summer birds still present included Vaux’ swifts, hooded orioles and the lone yellow-breasted chat who spent a month with us every year. We also had two interesting and unusual guests, a white-winged dove, normally a desert dweller, and a ringed turtle dove, seldom seen here in the wild but familiar to people who frequent certain parks in Los Angeles where the species has become well established. The white-winged dove had recently arrived, on September 3, the turtle dove had been with us since July.
This, then, was the population of our feeding station on the morning of September 22, 1964. Elsewhere in the country the Warren Commission was still weighing the evidence against Lee Oswald; L.B.J. predicted tax cuts to the Steelworkers’ Union; Goldwater hit the campaign trail in Oklahoma; the Phils were 5 ½ games up on the Cincinnati Reds; and Napa County in northern California had been declared a disaster area by Governor Brown after a forest fire had burned ninety square miles and was still raging out of control. One section of it was traveling at a rate of more than a mile an hour.
For some time Ken and I had been planning to buy an acre or two and eventually build a house. Every now and then when a new parcel of land came on the market we would make arrangements through a real estate agent to inspect it. That morning at eleven a young man took us out to see three acres in the foothills at the opposite end of Montecito. The owner, John Van Bergen, an architect, lived with his wife on the adjoining property in a house he’d recently designed and built himself.
We admired the Van Bergen house and its magnificent panorama of miles and miles of coastline. The region was somewhat higher than where we were living — which meant that it was more than somewhat hotter and dryer — and the terrain was steep. But my main objection to the place was the fact that it would not support an abundance of bird life. There was no source of water nearby, and the vegetation was limited to those native plants which could tolerate prolonged periods of drought, various types of shrubs which are usually grouped together under the name chaparral, and a few small live oak trees.
I had another objection. The climate, in conjunction with many years’ accumulation of underbrush, made the place an even greater fire hazard than a wooded canyon like ours. If the Van Bergens, newcomers from Chicago, realized this they didn’t show it. Neither did the insurance companies. In response to my question Mr. Van Bergen said they paid the same insurance premiums as anyone else, though certain precautions against fire had been built into the house, such as a flat roof which held a three-inch layer of water.
It was one o’clock when we left the Van Bergens. We drove down to the beach club, had a cold lunch and headed for the surf. On the ramp to the beach I was detained by a friend who wanted to ask me a bird question, and it was here that one of the lifeguards from the pool caught up with me. A message had just been received in the office from Richmond Miller, the young, newly elected president of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society. Rich, failing to reach us at home, had called the beach club to leave word that a fire had been reported on Coyote Road below Mountain Drive. He didn’t know how big a fire it was, but in that area, in that weather, even a glowworm was dangerous.