I thought of the fire raging through Napa County, traveling more than a mile an hour; the intersection of Coyote Road and Mountain Drive was half a mile crows’ flight from our house. From where I was standing I could see the smoke rising in the air, black and brown and grey, changing color with the fire’s fuel. I asked the lifeguard to call Ken in from the sea and tell him we had to go home.
At 2:02 p.m. smoke had been reported in the Coyote Road-Mountain Drive region by an unidentified woman. A minute later an off-duty fireman living in the area confirmed the report and the Coyote fire, as it came to be known, officially began its long and dreadful journey.
Its initial direction was up. At 2:23 it jumped Mountain Drive and the first houses in its path began burning. By 2:30 two planes were dropping fire-retardant chemicals. On the way home we could see the stuff falling like puffs of pink clouds out of a technicolor dream. Fire Retardant Pink was to become, in certain parts of Santa Barbara, the fashionable shade worn by many of the luckier houses, garages, cars, boats, corrals, horses, burros, dogs, cats, people, and at least one highly indignant peacock. The reddish color, by the way, was deliberately added to the formula to make hits and misses more apparent.
When Ken and I pulled into our driveway we met Bertha Blomstrand, the widow who lived across the road from us. She’d come over to check the whereabouts of our dogs in case they might have to be released, and to turn on the rainbirds. Bertha’s action was the kind that typified people’s attitude toward the fire right from the beginning: it was going to be a bad one and we were all in it together. The three of us stood watching the blaze and the smoke half a mile away, and listening to the shriek of sirens, the rhythmic clatter of the rainbirds and the roar of the borate bombers as they followed the sporty little yellow lead plane that showed them where to drop their loads. It was to be some time before the ordinary quiet sounds of an ordinary day were heard on our street again.
From our living room we saw houses on Mountain Drive burning unchecked. Wind-driven sparks landed in a large grove of eucalyptus and the oil-rich trees virtually exploded into flames. One of the houses in the direct path of the fire had been built by a local writer, Bill Richardson, for his family. It seemed certain to be destroyed, but at the last crucial moment a borate bomber scored a miraculously lucky hit and the place was saved along with a pet burro, four dogs and all of Bill’s manuscripts.
It was three o’clock.
During the next hour men who’d served in World War II were surprised by the sudden appearance of an old army buddy, a B-17 Flying Fortress which had been sent down from Chino in northern California carrying 2000 gallons of fire-retardant fluid. By this time half a dozen other planes had arrived from Los Angeles as well as some helicopters, each capable of carrying 50 gallons of the fluid. A combination heliport and firecamp was set up on the athletic field of Westmont College, a private coeducational institution whose property line was two hundred yards from our own.
Late afternoon also brought the first carloads of sightseers, the first wave of telephone calls and the first outbreak of contradictory rumors:
A storm front was heading our way from Oregon and rain would start any minute. No rain was in sight for a week.
Firefighters were coming from every part of the southwest, including the famed Zuñi Indian crews from New Mexico, and the fire would be under control within a few hours. No firefighters could be spared because so many other areas were highly flammable, and the entire city of Santa Barbara was doomed.
Every householder was to soak his roof, walls, shrubbery and trees. Water was to be conserved to keep the pressure from dropping.
We were spared a great many rumors because our only radio wasn’t in working condition. This lack of communication proved to be a blessing in disguise. There was an advantage in not knowing exactly how bad things were until after they were over.
As for the phone calls, it was gratifying to receive so many offers of sanctuary, some from people we hadn’t been in contact with for years. Yet, as the hours passed and the phone kept ringing, we began to look on it as an insatiable monster demanding our continuous attention. The news it gave us in return was mostly bad — the fire was still going up the mountain, but it was also moving rapidly southward, in our direction, and two hundred acres were burned, including the houses of several people we knew. The only piece of good news was the information about the borate bomber saving Bill Richardson’s place with a direct hit of fire retardant.
As soon as the roof and the plantings around our house were thoroughly soaked, I turned off the rainbirds. The scrub jay, who’d been squawking ever since they were turned on, left his griping post in the pine tree and came down to the ledge to remind me that all the food had been washed away. I put out more and the other regular customers began drifting in, the mourning doves with their two uncommon cousins, the turtle dove and the white-wing, band-tailed pigeons, cowbirds, blackbirds, the hooded orioles and the lone yellow-breasted chat, towhees, house finches, song and English sparrows. The birds were perhaps fewer in number than usual, and one oriole and some of the English sparrows showed heat reaction, increased respiration through open beaks.
As the afternoon wore on and workers began leaving their jobs for the day, the stream of cars on our narrow little road increased. What kind of people were in these cars? I will quote one of them and let the reader judge for himself. A young man pulled into our driveway and shouted at Ken who was on the roof readjusting a rainbird:
“Hey, how do we get to the houses that are already burning?”
Darkness fell. At least it should have been darkness, but on the mountains a strange, misplaced and molten sun was rising and expanding, changing the landscape into a firescape. Instead of the normal quiet sounds of night there was the constant deafening roar of helicopters landing and taking off from the camp on the Westmont College athletic field. The borate bombers had stopped at dusk because they couldn’t operate over the difficult terrain in the dark, and without chemicals to impede its progress the fire was spreading in all directions at once.
I took the raccoon food out to the ledge as usual. The cotoneaster tree remained still and silent, and no moist black noses pressed against the window beside my chair, no dainty little paws tapped the glass. The raccoons’ absence emphasized the eeriness of the night. It was the first time in many months that they had missed us and we didn’t know whether they’d fled the fire or were simply lying low because of the noise and confusion. Raccoons are not particularly shy but they’re sensible enough to want to avoid trouble. Every year on the last night of October, for instance, they stayed out of sight until every witch and ghost and skeleton and every pirate, clown and Batman had gone home to count his loot, and all the neighborhood dogs had finished their Halloween barking binge. For the raccoons, was this a flight for survival, or just another Halloween?
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.