The eerie thing about these nights in Montecito has to do with absence. The absence, first of all, of my neighbors, almost all of whom are under a mandatory evacuation order. They are gone, their houses dark, their cars rolling down other streets altogether—or, in the worst cases, crushed as if for repurposing in the scrap yard. Most homes are without electricity, which brings the darkness close, and the stillness too. Apart from the sounds of nature—the muffled hoots of the owls come to nest in the woods out back of my house and the chirrup of the tree frogs enlivened by the first rain here in nearly a year—there is the delicate, almost apologetic beeping of the heavy equipment brought in to clear away the debris. The helicopters, a continuous, twenty-four-hour-a-day presence during the first week, are for the most part gone now, the survivors airlifted to safety and the search for the missing left to the cadaver dogs.
I moved here twenty-five years ago, attracted by the natural beauty and semirural ambience, the short walk to the beach and the Lower Village, and the enveloping views of the Santa Ynez Mountains, which rise abruptly from the coastal plain to hold the community in a stony embrace. We have no sidewalks here, if you except the business districts of the Upper and Lower Villages—if we want sidewalks, we can take the five-minute drive into Santa Barbara or, more ambitiously, fight traffic all the way down the coast to Los Angeles. But we don’t want sidewalks. We want nature, we want dirt, trees, flowers, the chaparral that did its best to green the slopes and declivities of the mountains until last month, when the biggest wildfire in California history reduced it all to ash.
My first intimation of this fire came on a faint whiff of smoke during the early-morning hours of December 5th. I didn’t think much of it. We always sleep with the window open, and occasionally, depending on meteorological conditions, our downstairs fireplace will send a furtive thread of smoke up over the house and down through the bedroom window, so this smell of burning was nothing out of the ordinary. Up early, as usual, I was out in the driveway at six-thirty that morning, fetching the newspaper, when my sister-in-law, Christine, who lives twenty-five miles east of us, in Ventura, wheeled through the gates with her two children, three dogs, two cats, and a hastily triaged assortment of possessions crammed into her car. It seemed that a fire had broken out the previous evening near Santa Paula and spread rapidly southwest to Ventura, from which she had been evacuated. She stayed a week, until the evacuation order was lifted, then went back to a house and neighborhood that had been left untouched and whole, though four hundred and twenty-seven other structures had burned within the county lines.
What I didn’t understand at that point was how relentless this fire would prove to be. Over the ensuing days, stoked by Santa Ana winds and fed with vegetation desiccated by the extended drought that we’ve suffered through for the past five years, it would creep along the face of the mountains till it reached us here, on the apocalyptic morning of December 16th. I was on the roof, wearing a surgical mask and wielding a garden hose, when a great black cape of smoke enveloped all of Montecito and whitened everything with ash until you might have mistaken it for snow but for the unnatural heat. We’d evacuated some days earlier, under the voluntary order, but I’d returned on the previous day in anticipation of the predicted high-velocity sundowner winds, hoping to do what I could to save the house, which is constructed entirely of redwood and surrounded by dense forest. At ten-thirty, the police were at the gate, enforcing the newly imposed mandatory evacuation order, and I drove back up the coast to rejoin my wife, my daughter, and our own coddled and oblivious pets. In all, we were stuck in a motel room for ten days, until the order was rescinded and we were able to return home just in time for Christmas. Disaster averted. Case closed. Or so it appeared.
Despite the calm, I vividly recalled “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” John McPhee’s hair-raising 1988 essay, in which he wrote of the tenuous relationship between foothill communities and the mountain ranges that overhang them, emphasizing the predictable pattern of autumn wildfires and the debris flows that inevitably follow once the winter rains begin. (And I had the example of my own 1995 novel, “The Tortilla Curtain,” in which the climactic action is built around just such a sequence of events.) So I wasn’t unprepared for what came next—theoretically, that is. Rain was forecast for the early-morning hours of Tuesday, January 9th, and it was expected to be heavy at times, very heavy. But rain wasn’t fire, and, like so many of my neighbors, I was suffering from disaster fatigue after more than a month of uncertainty and dislocation. As far as actual preparation for the storm—sandbagging, packing the car, or heeding the new voluntary evacuation order for the zone in which I live—I wound up doing nothing beyond positioning a couple of rain barrels under the downspouts, in order to catch the excess for future use. In fact, I welcomed the rain, which came on Monday night as a long, gentle misting sacrament that just barely dampened the streets and shimmered in the leaves of the trees. Feeling celebratory, I walked down to my favorite watering hole in the Lower Village, and, though I barely needed an umbrella, I carried one with me anyway, mindful of the forecast.
The rain awoke my wife and me at three-thirty the next morning, an intense hammering rain that seemed to explode all around us. Still, it was only rain, and I would have drifted back to sleep but for the fact that the sky was brightly lit to the north, where the mountains lie. What was it? Lightning, I reasoned, and then my head was on the pillow and I was asleep. Unfortunately, the source of that light was much more ominous than a lightning strike. As I was later to discover, the concentrated rain—as much as 0.54 of an inch in a single five-minute period, an intensity seen on average just once every two hundred years—propelled a debris flow down the slopes of the denuded mountains, the first indication of which was that fiery glow in the sky. A gas main had been sheared off, and the escaping methane had exploded in flames, incinerating the houses just below it even as the debris flow tore into them and raged on past, gathering force and seeking the low ground. Here’s the irony: if the storm had come before the fire, in November, when our rainy season typically begins, perhaps there would have been no fire at all, and certainly any fire that might have arisen would have been far less extensive, and, of course, had the vegetation not burned, the root systems of the chaparral community of plants would have contained or at least minimized any mudflow. But it didn’t happen that way. November was drier than normal, and December rainfall amounted to little more than a trace, resulting in the second-driest December on record.
We woke to a gentle rain and the wail of sirens, too many sirens, sirens that multiplied one atop the other and kept on multiplying till it seemed there was no other sound. The electricity was out. There was no newspaper. Though we were just two blocks from ground zero of the worst destruction, our property—our block—appeared no different from the night before, but for the ordinary effects of heavy rainfall, the scattered branches and palm fronds, dripping trees, runoff in the streets. It wasn’t until we drove into Santa Barbara for breakfast—and news—that we began to understand. Or not so much understand as simply be apprised of what had happened, since understanding connotes a way of reckoning with a disaster that, as of this writing, has taken the lives of twenty of my neighbors and left three still unaccounted for, including a two-year-old girl.
And here’s a further irony: the mandatory evacuations in advance of the storm were for the people living closest to the slopes, where it was predicted that the worst of the debris flows would occur, but the less urgent voluntary evacuation warnings were issued to those farther downslope, who would wind up taking the brunt of the damage. We were among the lucky ones. Our house, one of the oldest in the community, sits atop a hill, at the bottom of which, to the east, lies the streambed of Montecito Creek. Through most of the year, the creek barely lives up to the name, reduced to a picturesque trickle in a meandering bed of rock and concrete beneath a canopy of oaks and sycamores, but on that night, catastrophically, it jumped its banks and swept to the sea, taking with it everything in its path. Houses vanished, trees were uprooted like weeds, boulders taller than I pounded through the watercourses like the bowling balls of titans, and the slurry of mud and ash rose as high as fifteen feet in some places. A man who lived just down the street from us was killed, and his teen-age son was swept three-quarters of a mile down Olive Mill Road and across the freeway to the beach. And, at the same time, mudslides were inundating the other watersheds, including San Ysidro Creek, which tore through the Upper Village.
All of this I learned secondhand, through local and national news sources. The affected areas, including both Villages, were cordoned off and remain no-entry zones as of this writing. It wasn’t until the sixth day after the storm that I had an opportunity to tour the devastated areas in the company of a journalist friend and see the effects for myself. At the bottom of my street, where it intersects with Olive Mill, there was a remnant riverbed in the place where once had stood houses I’d seen every day for twenty-five years. Mudflats stretched off into the distance. It took me a while to orient myself, all the familiar landmarks erased in a way that was not only disorienting but profoundly disturbing. I dwell in the familiar. The familiar allows me to sit at my desk day after day and reimagine the world. My house was intact, untouched, and yet here was something else altogether, a thoroughgoing denial of the familiar.
In her essay “The Wreck of Time,” Annie Dillard speaks of compassion fatigue in a world in which catastrophe and annihilation come as regularly as the progression of the days. Her point of reference was the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh, which killed a hundred and thirty-eight thousand people and displaced millions. How can we begin to comprehend the magnitude of that, or of the cascade of disasters before or since, let alone sympathize? These are just figures, digits, symbols on a page. We each inhabit a consciousness, and that consciousness gives us the world and the universe and what we can grasp through the apprehension of our five senses. But the universe has no consciousness. It just is. Twenty of my neighbors are dead. Three are missing. That probably doesn’t mean much to the rest of the world, or, for that matter, to you who are reading this. For me, though, it’s personal, and I want my village back.
