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 where 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.