Over tea and sandwiches Ken told me how he’d spent the night dousing sparks and embers that fell on the roof and in the underbrush. He had done his job well. Too well. The tea tree’s natural tendency to lean had been encouraged by the excessive water and it now lay on its side on the ground. Many trees were lost to fire during that week; our tea tree was probably the only one lost to flood.
We were finishing lunch when my sister called to tell us the fire had started on another rampage. By midafternoon the “early containment” theory had been blown sky high — and sky high turned out to be the precise description. The flames jumped El Camino Cielo, the sky road, and were racing down the other side of the ridge, with nothing whatever to stop them. Ten borate bombers were in operation, but dense smoke and wind conditions had grounded all of them and the fire roared unchecked into the back country, Santa Barbara’s vulnerable watershed.
El Camino Cielo was the road along the top of the first main ridge, starting at the east end of Montecito and continuing west past the city of Santa Barbara, San Marcos Pass, Santa Ynez Peak, its highest point at 4292 feet, and ending at Refugio Pass. Along this sky road, winter birdwatchers were apt to see mountain species which seldom appeared in the city itself — a Clark nutcracker noisily prying open the scales of a pine cone; a varied thrush standing in regal silence underneath a live oak, ignoring the raucous challenges of Steller jays; golden-crowned kinglets and brown creepers, mountain chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches, and sometimes a large garrulous flock of those erratic wanderers, the piñon jays.
The previous December, Jewell Kriger and I had done some advance scouting along Camino Cielo preparing for the Audubon Christmas bird count and we had come across a Townsend solitaire fly catching in the chamise and scrub oak along the sides of the road. A quarter of a mile beyond we found another solitaire. These birds are rarely found on a coastal bird count and we wanted to make sure that at least one of the solitaires would be located when the proper time arrived. Camino Cielo was not part of our regular territory — we were scouting it for Dr. Mary Erickson, ornithologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Mary was to head the group covering the area on actual count day, but she was too busy to do any preliminary looking.
The usual procedure in a situation like this was to note the mileage, and if the find was especially important, like the pygmy owls’ nest earlier in the year, to mark the spot with something that would attract attention without rousing the wrath of anti-litter-buggers. And others. (I mention “others” because on one occasion, to mark the whereabouts of a pair of black-chinned sparrows, I had carefully built a small mound out of stones, the best material on hand. Half our Audubon Society fell over the stones, and by the time the excitement subsided, the black-chinned sparrows were far away and glad of it.)
Near the pygmy owls’ nest we’d been lucky enough to pick up a good-sized piece of board painted red. We couldn’t expect such luck to be repeated, and it wasn’t. We found no marker in the area that would be readily visible from a moving car. Two more factors were against the Townsend solitaires appearing on our Christmas count. The speedometer on Jewell’s car was out of order and the previous weekend Russ Kriger had done one of his enthusiastic cleanup jobs on the car’s interior. A search through the glove compartment and the trunk, and even behind the seats, revealed nothing useable as a marker — no polishing cloth or chamois, no piece of rope or empty bottle, no last summer’s beach hat or last winter’s scarf. I looked at Jewell. She was wearing a white shirt and capris and a yellow sweater the exact shade of the band across the tip of a waxwing’s tail.
“Have you ever noticed,” I said, “how easy it is to identify a flock of cedar waxwings from a distance? The yellow tailbands show up very conspicuously.”
“So?”
“Experiments have shown that yellow is the color most easily seen from the greatest distance.”
“Well, you can forget the experiments,” Jewell said. “This sweater happens to have been a gift from one of my favorite relatives. It’s practically a keepsake.”
“You bought it yourself last year. I was with you, I even remember what it cost.”
“All right, all right. But I want it back.”
I assured her that she’d get it back, providing that during the next three days it wasn’t eaten by some animal, ruined by rain or blown away by the wind.
I tied the sweater to the top of a small ceanothus bush to mark the spot where we’d seen the first Townsend solitaire. To indicate the location of the second bird I was forced to sacrifice the lace hem of my slip, which I ripped off and impaled on a dead oak twig. The lace could easily be spotted by someone who was looking for it, and the sweater was conspicuous enough to prove that the experiments were right: if you want to be seen, wear yellow.
The following Sunday was count day. As usual there was a last-minute mixup and El Camino Cielo, which was to be Mary Erickson’s territory, was assigned to someone else. I didn’t know about this until the following Tuesday afternoon when the group captains and other interested people met in the junior library of the Museum of Natural History to make their official reports and add up the number of species and the number of birds seen between dawn and midnight on the Big Day. No one had remembered to have the heat turned on in the library ahead of time and we all sat around a table, huddled in coats.
The total number of species that year was 166, good enough to place us fifth in the nation, just one up on Freeport, Texas, and Oakland, California, tied at 165.
I greeted Mary Erickson, who was sitting across the table from me, and asked her what mountain species she’d found up on the ridge. She told me she’d been assigned to a beach and slough area instead.
A woman I’d never seen before volunteered the information that she had helped cover Camino Cielo, and except for a Steller’s jay and a varied thrush the place had been very disappointing, bird-wise. She’d obviously missed the Townsend solitaire, so I didn’t mention it.
The library was much warmer by this time and people were starting to take off their coats. The newcomer made a ceremony of removing hers, as though she wanted to make sure everyone noticed the costume she had on underneath. Everyone noticed all right. Especially me. Over a plaid wool skirt she wore a yellow sweater the exact shade of the band across the tip of a waxwing’s tail.
She saw me staring at the sweater. “Like it?”
I nodded.
“You’ll never believe where I got it.”
It was at that point, I suppose, when I should have taken her aside and explained the situation, but I didn’t. Instead, I listened in a kind of numb silence while she described to us how she’d seen the sweater, flapping in the wind, stopped the car and went over to investigate.
“... And there, tied to a bush, was this perfectly good sweater which turned out to be exactly my size. I couldn’t leave it out there in the weather to be ruined, so I brought it home and laundered it. And lo and behold, here it is and I am. It makes you wonder though, doesn’t it? What kind of a nut would leave a perfectly good sweater tied to a bush in the middle of nowhere?”
The answer seems inescapable: my kind.
The second night of the fire came on. At seven-thirty the heavy winds which had been blowing all afternoon at the upper elevations reached the foothills, and many of us found out for the first time what the term “wildfire” really meant. The whole mountain range seemed to explode, and flames were suddenly roaring down toward the city itself, through San Roque Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Mission Canyon, where the Botanic Garden was situated, all the way to Romero Canyon at the northeast end of Montecito. Because of the winds and approaching darkness the borate bombers stopped operating, and by this time, too, there was a drastic drop in water pressure.