The Birds and the Beasts Were There

15 Rainbirds on the Roof

It was the first day of autumn, 1964. Those Santa Barbara residents who lived within a block or two of the sea woke up to a dense fog and the ominous warnings of the foghorn at the end of the breakwater. The rest of the city was awakened by the brilliant rays of a September sun and realized it was going to be a hot day. How hot none of us could ever have guessed.

The summer that was ending had been one of drought, as usual. The last rain measurable on our gauge was a tenth of an inch in May. September occasionally brings some moisture — the hundred-year average is about a quarter of an inch — but it is better known for bringing our hottest and driest days. For us this is the month of santanas, the scorching winds that blow in over the mountains from the Mojave Desert, a vast area covering some 14,000 square miles.

We are accustomed to sea winds and their ravages: tons of kelp strewn along the beaches, alive with tiny octopi and starfish and skate eggs that look like black plastic comb cases; boats escaped from their moorings, loose anchors and racing buoys, dead fish and sea lions and leopard sharks; battered sea birds, surf scoters and whitewings, all kinds of gulls and terns and cormorants, western grebes and horned grebes, arctic loons and red-throated loons; and once — and only once, thank Heaven — the newly severed head of an enormous wild boar, brought to my reluctant attention by our German shepherd, Brandy.

Sea winds may be violent and cruel, but in a coastal town they are a natural part of life. Santanas are strangers, intruders from the other side of the mountains. They are not polite or kindly strangers. We give them no welcome and they in turn come bearing no good will. One of them almost cost our city its life.

A santana ordinarily arrives on a calm, quiet night. Some people claim it gives no warning, others sense its approach or “feel it in their bones.” Nothing psychic is involved, and no bones either, merely skin and mucous membranes reacting to a rapid lowering of humidity and rise in temperature. In southern California the temperature always goes down with the sun, and this rule is broken only by the arrival of a santana.

On one of these calm, quiet nights in September, a person may become suddenly aware that changes are taking place. There is a rustle of leaves, the squawk of a gate swinging, the bang of a screen door. A gust of wind roars down the canyon, and the eucalyptus trees begin to writhe. Leaves begin rushing past the windows like refugees fleeing the forest, and the hard little seed pods of the tea tree tap the glass like animals’ claws. If, at this stage of the game, all doors and windows are locked, drapes pulled, and the drafts of fireplaces closed tight, it won’t do much good. The dust seems to penetrate the very walls, and every flat surface in the house is soon covered with it. Skin is taut, throats parched, eyes gritty, tempers short. In a santana the milk of human kindness dries up like everything else.

In general, sea winds are fairly strong and steady, and desert winds come in gusts. Sometimes both are blowing simultaneously and between gusts of the desert wind the sea wind rushes in. Then there begins a tug of war between them with the city caught in the middle, a nervous referee for a battle of giants who haven’t read the rule book. Temperatures go up and down so rapidly thermometers haven’t time to register them accurately — and the range is wide, fifty or sixty degrees.

By sunrise the battle is over, the friendly wind is resting, the stranger has fled, the cleanup begins. Branches and leaves, and the litter blown out of overturned trash cans must be picked up; trees and shrubs and flowers must be hosed down to remove the dust that clogs their breathing pores; damaged bird feeders must be fixed and rehung, and the dirt and debris cleaned out of the birdbaths. If we’re lucky, the stranger won’t come back the next night...

The morning of September 22 was windless. The heavy fog that had blanketed the coastal area at dawn was burned off by the sun before nine o’clock and the mercury in the official temperature gauge, which is located at the shore, began to rise rapidly, up through the seventies into the eighties. Our area, at an elevation of about 550 feet, was a good deal hotter, a situation that was reversed only on very rare occasions.

I had watered heavily the previous afternoon, using the rainbirds on the roof in spite of the outraged protests of the scrub jays. We had had these roof sprinklers installed several years before by an off-duty fireman after the Montecito fire chief had urged all hill and canyon dwellers to be prepared for an emergency as the layers of brushwood grew higher and thicker and more dangerous. The emergency hadn’t occurred, but we used the rainbirds to cool the house and to water a considerable part of our property.

Few people had taken the fire chief’s advice. Rainbirds on a roof were so uncommon that at first when we used ours, passing motorists would stop and stare, and one even inquired if we’d broken a water main. If the effect was peculiar from the outside, it was doubly peculiar to sit inside and listen to rain pounding on the shingles, to see it pelting the windows and gushing out of the eaves troughs, while just beyond the walls of water a brilliant sun shone from an unclouded sky. Ordering up a private rainstorm in the midst of a California summer is as close to playing God as I care to come.

But the three rainbirds, even twirling full tilt, were no match for the September heat and drought. All traces of moisture had disappeared by midmorning the next day, and the temperature was in the nineties and still rising. The birds coped with the heat in several ways. The yellowthroats napped in a sheltered spot down by the creek. Some of the English sparrows and blackbirds cooled themselves by breathing rapidly through open beaks. The hooded orioles and Anna’s hummingbirds drank nectar from the golden hearts of the trumpet flowers and the mockers crushed the ripening elderberries and eugenias. The wrentits kept in the shade, foraging in the dense poison oak that was reddening the canyon slopes. All half dozen birdbaths were in continual use, the champion bathers being the house finches, who looked like miniature rainbirds as they hurled water madly in every direction at once.

None of our winter birds had arrived yet, though several species were due any minute — white-crowned sparrows, Lincoln and fox sparrows, pine siskins and Audubon warblers. Many of the summer visitors had already departed — all the swallows, the warbling vireos, Bullock orioles, Wilson warblers, western tanagers and black-headed grosbeaks. (The two latter species were to return mysteriously at the beginning of December, stay a month, and vanish again.) Summer birds still present included Vaux’ swifts, hooded orioles and the lone yellow-breasted chat who spent a month with us every year. We also had two interesting and unusual guests, a white-winged dove, normally a desert dweller, and a ringed turtle dove, seldom seen here in the wild but familiar to people who frequent certain parks in Los Angeles where the species has become well established. The white-winged dove had recently arrived, on September 3, the turtle dove had been with us since July.

This, then, was the population of our feeding station on the morning of September 22, 1964. Elsewhere in the country the Warren Commission was still weighing the evidence against Lee Oswald; L.B.J. predicted tax cuts to the Steelworkers’ Union; Goldwater hit the campaign trail in Oklahoma; the Phils were 5 ½ games up on the Cincinnati Reds; and Napa County in northern California had been declared a disaster area by Governor Brown after a forest fire had burned ninety square miles and was still raging out of control. One section of it was traveling at a rate of more than a mile an hour.

For some time Ken and I had been planning to buy an acre or two and eventually build a house. Every now and then when a new parcel of land came on the market we would make arrangements through a real estate agent to inspect it. That morning at eleven a young man took us out to see three acres in the foothills at the opposite end of Montecito. The owner, John Van Bergen, an architect, lived with his wife on the adjoining property in a house he’d recently designed and built himself.

We admired the Van Bergen house and its magnificent panorama of miles and miles of coastline. The region was somewhat higher than where we were living — which meant that it was more than somewhat hotter and dryer — and the terrain was steep. But my main objection to the place was the fact that it would not support an abundance of bird life. There was no source of water nearby, and the vegetation was limited to those native plants which could tolerate prolonged periods of drought, various types of shrubs which are usually grouped together under the name chaparral, and a few small live oak trees.

I had another objection. The climate, in conjunction with many years’ accumulation of underbrush, made the place an even greater fire hazard than a wooded canyon like ours. If the Van Bergens, newcomers from Chicago, realized this they didn’t show it. Neither did the insurance companies. In response to my question Mr. Van Bergen said they paid the same insurance premiums as anyone else, though certain precautions against fire had been built into the house, such as a flat roof which held a three-inch layer of water.

It was one o’clock when we left the Van Bergens. We drove down to the beach club, had a cold lunch and headed for the surf. On the ramp to the beach I was detained by a friend who wanted to ask me a bird question, and it was here that one of the lifeguards from the pool caught up with me. A message had just been received in the office from Richmond Miller, the young, newly elected president of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society. Rich, failing to reach us at home, had called the beach club to leave word that a fire had been reported on Coyote Road below Mountain Drive. He didn’t know how big a fire it was, but in that area, in that weather, even a glowworm was dangerous.

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.

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.

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.