Mass evacuations began, with some motels and hotels offering free rooms, and moving companies volunteering trucks and vans. Many people were double evacuees who’d fled Sycamore and Cold Springs canyons the first night and were now forced to flee their places of refuge; and before the fire was over, there was even a small band of very tired and jittery triple evacuees.
Our Chelham Way situation, which had been fairly good all day, was suddenly ominous again as the fire turned back in our direction. I thought of the house on Mountain Drive that had been saved in the afternoon only to be burned to the ground at midnight, and I wondered what similar ironies fate might be preparing for us.
Blessing counters and silver lining searchers found a plus in a negative: there were no sightseers. The noise from the fire camp, however, was incredible, a continuous roar of helicopters arriving and departing, the blaring of air to ground loudspeakers, the shrieking of ambulance and fire truck sirens. It was decibels rather than danger which strained my nerves to the breaking point and convinced Ken I’d be better off elsewhere.
Jo Ferry called to repeat her invitation of the previous night, but Ken decided that this time more constructive action was necessary than simply sending me off with the three dogs. He made arrangements with my brother-in-law, Clarence Schlagel, to bring his pickup truck over. After a series of delays caused by roadblocks Clarence arrived with the truck and we loaded it with our main valuables, manuscripts and books. We owned no art originals, no fine china or silver, no furs, and I wore my two pieces of jewelry, my wedding ring and my “lucky” bracelet which had been a present from our daughter, Linda, many years before. (Some people we knew, trapped in the fire by a sudden, violent change of wind, used their swimming pool as a depository for their silver, jewelry and furs, including a beaver jacket whose original owner wouldn’t have minded at all.)
It was agreed that I would go to the Schlagels’ house with the two smaller dogs, leaving Brandy with Ken. That way Ken could rest at intervals during the night knowing that Brandy would wake him up if anything unusual happened. German shepherds have a highly developed sense of propriety and when things go wrong they indicate their disapproval readily and unmistakably. Having Brandy in the room was like having an alarm clock set to go off in any emergency.
I rode in the truck with Johnny sitting quietly beside me and Rolls on my lap, trembling and whining all the way, partly out of fear and partly anticipation of spending another night chasing around the Ferrys’ house with Zorba. He was in for a disappointment: no chasing was allowed at the Schlagels’ place because there were too many chasers and chasees, and to avoid a complete shambles the animals had to be kept separated as much as possible. I counted four cats — a fat, ill-tempered orange tiger bought for Jane when she was a baby, an alley cat who realized he’d struck it rich and seldom left the davenport except to eat, and a pair of tabbies abandoned by a neighbor who’d moved away; Jane’s pygmy poodle with the giant name of Cha Cha José Morning Glory, my sister’s burro, Bobo, who had a loud, nervous hyena-type laugh he seemed to reserve especially for me, and Clarence’s four Shetland ponies. Sibling rivalry was rather intense on occasion, and the arrival of Johnny who loathed cats, and Rolls who hated horses and rapidly learned to hate burros, didn’t improve matters. There were many times during the night when I would have welcomed the sound of helicopters and fire sirens to drown out some of the yelping, yowling, whinnying, barking, and above all, Bobo’s wild bursts of laughter.
I woke up at dawn, leashed my two dogs and took them for a walk down the road toward the sea. When I faced that direction everything seemed quite normal. The light breeze smelled of salt and moist kelp. Mourning doves and brown towhees foraged along the sides of the road and bandtails gathered in the eucalyptus trees, getting ready to come down to feed. Brewer’s blackbirds and brown-headed cowbirds were already heading for the Schlagels’ corral, Anna’s hummingbirds hurled themselves in and out of fuchsia blossoms and the bright red bushes of callistemon and torches of aloe, while half a dozen dogs vehemently denounced me and the company I kept.
When I turned to go back, the whole picture changed abruptly. I remember thinking, with terrible surprise as if I hadn’t been aware of it before, Our mountains are on fire, our forest is burning.
Returning to the house, I found my sister and brother-in-law in the kitchen making breakfast and listening to the radio. It had been a disastrous night. With winds in forty-five mile an hour gusts and flames towering as high as two hundred feet, the firefighters didn’t have a chance. Twenty-three thousand acres and over a hundred buildings were now destroyed and still the fire roared on, unchecked.
Fire, like war, is no respecter of age. Lost hysterical children wandered helplessly around Montecito village, and Wood Glen Hall, a home for the elderly at the opposite end of the fire area, was evacuated when the building filled with smoke.
Fire operates without any rules of fair play. Carol Davis of the University of California at Santa Barbara was helping the residents of Wood Glen Hall carry out their possessions when she learned that her own house had been destroyed and the only things saved were four books and a few pieces of clothing.
Fire makes no religious distinctions. The Catholic Sisters of Charity were burned out, the Episcopalian retreat on Mount Calvary lost a building, and a residence hall was destroyed at the Baptist Westmont College.
Fire has no regard for history or politics. Several buildings were burned to the ground at San Ysidro Ranch, the site of one of the old adobes constructed when Santa Barbara was under Mexican rule, and the place where, in 1953, a young Massachusetts senator named Kennedy brought his new bride, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, on their honeymoon.
Fire does not defer to beauty, either natural or man-made. A multimillion-dollar art collection belonging to Avery Brundage was destroyed, and some parts of the Botanic Garden were ravaged, including the majestic grove of sequoias, the largest of trees, where in the winter we could always find the tiniest of warblers, Townsend’s, and in the spring the almost as tiny Oregon juncos nested under the fragrant heart-shaped leaves of wild ginger.
Even the fire camp itself wasn’t spared. Flying embers started a blaze right in the middle of it and burned an area the size of a city lot before it was extinguished.
Around Santa Barbara that morning few people had a good word to say for Prometheus.
Ken phoned while I was feeding the dogs to tell us that he and Brandy and the house had come through the night in fair shape. Once again the flames had reached the head of our canyon and turned back as the winds shifted and though live coals had left holes in some roofs and all exterior areas were a mess, not a house on Chelham Way had been lost.
Other people weren’t so lucky. Of my fellow refugees at the Ferrys’ house, two were completely burned out: Robert M. Hutchins who lived in Romero Canyon in Montecito, and Hallock Hoffman who lived miles in the opposite direction above the Botanic Garden.
Every disaster has its share of ironies. Perhaps the Coyote fire seemed to behave more simply because they happened to people we knew. One of them involved an old wooden shed which was on the Romero Canyon property where the Hutchins had built their house several years before. The shed was being used to store the antiques Mrs. Hutchins had been gathering from various parts of the world for her art shop. When it became inevitable that fire was going to overrun the area, the antiques were removed by truck and taken to — where else? — the Ferrys’ house. No collector of ironies will be surprised to learn that the old shed, highly inflammable and containing nothing whatever of value, was the only building in the area untouched by flames.