This was Rattlesnake Canyon. I thought of all the small confiding creatures who lived in it and I wept.
The sleeping pill Jo Ferry had given me hit me very suddenly. I don’t know what it contained but I can vouch for its effectiveness: I slept through the arrival and bedding down of my fellow refugees, a family of eleven with all their household pets, including a snake and a parakeet.
I woke up at dawn and became immediately aware of a change in the atmosphere. I was cold. The air coming in through the window was grey not with smoke but with fog, and it smelled of the sea, of kelp and tar and wet pilings. The santana had stopped.
I put on my coat, picked up the three leashes and made my way through the quiet house out to the driveway. Zorba, the Ferrys’ spaniel, was stretched out, dead to the world, under an olive tree. My three dogs were arranged around the car, panting even in their sleep, as though this was merely a short recess in a long game. At the sound of my step they were instantly alert and eager to go home. They hadn’t the slightest doubt that there was still a home for them to go to. Their only anxiety seemed to be that they might have to be separated from me, so they all insisted on riding in the front seat. It was a cosy trip.
At the top of Barker Pass there was an abrupt change in the weather. The fog dropped away like a curtain and the air was hot and dry and windless and ashes were falling everywhere, some particles as fine as dust, some large as saucers. On Sycamore Canyon Road I came across a road block, but after a brief exchange of words I was allowed through. The men in charge looked too tired to argue. They had been up all night like hundreds of other volunteer workers — students from the university and from City and Westmont colleges, Red Cross and Salvation Army workers, civil defense and National Guard units, radio hams, firemen’s wives manning the stations while their husbands fought on the front lines, nurses and nurses’ aides, teachers, city and county employees, and such a varied assortment as the members of a teen-age hotrod club, a folk-dancing group, and a contingent of deep-sea divers from one of the offshore oil rigs.
I turned into Chelham Way.
16
Fire on the Mountains
It was like the fringe of a bombed area. The houses were still standing but deserted. In one driveway a late-model sedan was parked with a small U-Haul trailer attached to the rear bumper. The trailer, heaped with clothes and bedding, had been left unprotected and the top layer of stuff was black with ashes. The sedan, however, was carefully covered with a tarpaulin. Perhaps its owner was a veteran of the disastrous 1955 Refugio fire, when a great many of us learned that ashes falling through atmospheric moisture made a lime mixture which ruined even the toughest paint.
Halfway around Chelham Way was a narrow black-top road leading to Westmont College. A locked gate kept the road unused except in emergencies. Beyond the gate, which had been opened, I could see a large section of the athletic field where the main firecamp had been set up the previous day. Here, where Ken and I used to walk our dogs, where we watched robins in winter and track meets in spring, this place meant for nothing more than games was now headquarters for hundreds of men, a kind of instant village. Here they ate at canteen tents, slept on the ground, received first aid for burns and cuts, were sent off in helicopters, fire trucks, buses, pickups, jeeps, and brought back to begin the cycle all over again.
The noise was deafening, most of it caused by the arrival and departure of helicopters and the shriek of sirens and blare of loudspeakers. The “helitack” units of the Forest Service consisted of the pilots themselves, the fire jumpers wearing heavy canvas suits to protect them when they leaped into the brush, and ground crews, in orange shirts and helmets, whose job was to prime and space the copters and keep them out of each other’s downdraft.
The scene, with its backdrop of blazing mountains, was unreal to me. Even the wounded men being brought in by helicopter looked like extras from the Warner Brothers back lot and the sirens of the ambulances as they left the field seemed like part of a sound track. The dogs knew better. They began to whine, so I let them out of the car and told them to go and find Ken. They didn’t hesitate. It was a good place to get away from.
Beyond the road leading into the firecamp was the top of our canyon. This part, which belonged to Westmont College and had no structures on it, had been completely burned. The ancient oak trees were black skeletons rising from grey ashes, and many eucalyptus, cypresses and Monterey pines had been reduced to stumps, some still smoldering. But where the row of houses began, along each side of the canyon, the burning had terminated. There was no evidence that the area had been wetted down nor any reddish stains indicating the use of fire retardant; no firebreak had been bulldozed and no hose laid. Yet at that one particular point the fire had stopped.
I learned later what had happened. At two-thirty in the morning, just when all hope of saving our canyon had been abandoned, the santana ceased as abruptly as it began and the wind pressed in from the sea, cool and moist. Temperatures dropped, humidity rose, and the flames were pushed back toward the mountains. It was during this lull that the Los Angeles Herald Examiner went to press with the front-page headlines “Santa Barbara Safe. Fire Shifts: 18 Homes Lost.” By the time I got to read those headlines Santa Barbara was surrounded on three sides by an inferno and a hundred more houses had been lost.
I stopped the car. Through the binoculars I kept in the glove compartment I examined hollows where smoke was still rising and stumps still smoldering unattended. At any moment they could burst into flames again and the santana could return. It had taken a miracle to save our canyon and there was probably only one to a customer. I rushed home to call the fire department.
Ken was asleep on the living-room davenport, a scribbled note on the coffee table beside him instructing me to wake him up when necessary. He didn’t stir even under the barrage of dog greetings.
Most of the telephones in the region were out of commission by this time. Ours was still working, though it failed to solve much. The fire department, I was told, had no trucks and no men available; people spotting areas which were still smoking were urged to cover them with dirt and/or douse them with water. I grabbed a shovel and a length of garden hose and headed back up the road.
During the windless morning the fire went through a semi-quiescent phase. There was unofficial talk of “early containment,” and a few evacuees began returning. Though the area where I was working still smoldered in places, other people had arrived to assist and the general picture looked good. By noon I felt secure enough to go home for some lunch. The only wildlife I’d seen all morning was an indignant family of acorn woodpeckers living in a nearby telephone pole, and a badly frightened and half-singed fox who came scurrying up from the bottom of the canyon.