The Price Tag for Paradise Goes Up Again

The roof of the Creek Side Inn near Goleta was a ruin. What was left of the trees was mere stubble, and the embankment out back was charcoal. But on Thursday morning Jack Wright was pouring drinks at the Creek Side Inn, like always.

“Great weather, small-town atmosphere and relaxed living,” Wright said.

He meant all those travel-brochure cliches. He nearly lost it all the night before. For seven hours, he and two guys from the house band had stood their ground with garden hoses, as the eucalyptus trees went up like firecrackers and parked cars exploded, “boom-boom-boom,” around them.

A night like that makes a man think--but it doesn’t make him leave. “Ninety percent of the year this is the most benign climate in California. It’ll change. Give us a couple of days.”

The fire that hurtled out of the hills on Wednesday upped the price tag for paradise once again. What the earth has put Santa Barbara through in 20 years or so makes the area look like a bull’s eye for natural disaster, even by harsh Southern California standards. Fire eats it. Earthquake shakes it. Oil fouls it.

“What are we doing here? What are we doing living here?” the wife of Chamber of Commerce director Steve Cushman asked her husband as they unfurled sleeping bags for seven friends who could not get home Wednesday night. Cushman went to college here. He loved it here. He had waited 20 years for the chance to come back here. “We’re not moving,” he said.

So exquisite is this place, an oasis from the encroaching urban monster, that it has been a cherished escape for big names, big money. President John F. Kennedy honeymooned here. So did Gloria Vanderbilt, at least once. John Galsworthy wrote “The Forsyte Saga” here, and here, Frank Capra filmed “Lost Horizon.” Lauren Bacall said she fell in love with Bogey among Santa Barbara’s purple bougainvillea. The property rolls have at one time or another included the names of Ronald Coleman, Mike Nichols, Steve Martin, Robert Preston, and the pioneer settler, Dame Judith Anderson, who arrived 50 years ago and is still here.

The 50 mostly inner-city Los Angeles children at Jane Fonda’s Laurel Springs summer camp were evacuated Wednesday, and again Thursday, when wind whipsawed the fire back toward the property. “They all think it’s fun, like it’s a game,” said a spokeswoman. Evacuated too were any guests at the adjacent Fonda fitness retreat, guests whose $2,500-a-week fee help to subsidize the camp.

The Santa Barbara they all come for the chocolate-frosting of California living, a seaside settlement of leisure and charm.

The Santa Barbara many awoke to on Thursday morning did not look like that. The great tawny rolls of lands to the north had become brush-upholstered firechutes. Yesterday’s rows of pale Mediterranean houses today were like mouths full of blackened, broken teeth. And offshore glittered the ocean, a taunting blue illusion for a drought-dry town that counted its water by the gallon even before the fire hit.

In a sheriff’s department van, Santa Barbara Mayor Sheila Lodge cruised the wet and ashy streets Thursday, as solemn as the stricken and newly homeless residents standing on the wreckage of lawns. Already, she said, “this has been a very tough year in Santa Barbara with the drought. This fire is very tough timing.”

Stress finds its own release points. A score of massage therapists volunteered their services for the weary, the sleepless, the bereft. “People need a little TLC. We’re trying to take their minds off the stress.” That, from Philip Babcock, 44, who was heading out to Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta. The message had come over the pager: Firefighters were coming off the firelines, and they were “frantic” for a massage therapist.

Carolyn Aijian managed to get her quarter horse and pony out of their corral with embers dancing at their heels. But the only place she could take them was to her mother’s in Goleta. Her mother lives in a condominium. Aijian lashed the horse to the lamppost and the pony to the mailbox. The neighbors only asked that she be sure to clean up the horse droppings.

Fire had raged up to 10 feet from the Valley Verde nursing home when Edgar Hoover and about 400 others got trundled out Wednesday night. Thursday afternoon, Hoover was stretched out on a cot in a local Presbyterian church. He sought refuge, excitement, in an Agatha Christie novel. “Anything to pass the time,” the 83-year-old said. “This is really boring.”

As often as it happens--more than 500 houses have burned up in Santa Barbara in less than 20 years--crisis can find us all unready.

For months, the woman in the red dress had been a good citizen, watering her lawn hardly at all because of the drought. Come Thursday morning, along an equestrian trail in Hope Ranch, a plummy area to the northwest of Santa Barbara where the riding stables would put most ordinary houses to shame, the woman in the red dress stood where her house had stood and wept.

Then she turned to her lawns. “Good grief, look at it. The grass I’ve been watering sparingly is still here.”

You can pave, you can build and spray and hack away brush, but fire lets you know who is still in charge.

The fire was on its way when Vivian Nelson drove off from her Rancho San Antonio house just after 6 p.m. Wednesday, hunting for a generator to pump well water. She didn’t find one, and she, her brother and neighbors spent the night splashing out hot spots on the lawn with buckets of water carried from the kiddie pool.

“I guess everybody thinks if you have a fire, the fire department is going to come,” said Nelson. “We were on our own totally. We had no aid. No phones. And, no water when the pipes melted.”

Elizabeth Downing drove back home Thursday afternoon to the Painted Cave area north of the city, near where the fire began. She loaded up photos and diapers from a house that was still standing. A day earlier, she had driven out the other way, as the wind blew the fire down the brushy canyons, not knowing whether the house would be there the next time she came back.

“We live with the idea of a fire up here, that we’re vulnerable,” she said. “And we live with the risk. We were due for a good one. Very much due.”

Those who were born here knew all along what others had to come here to find out. Whatever the precariousness of nature, nothing so transitory as fire can dislodge a lifetime of feeling.

Peter DaRos and his sister, Kathy Mackins, are third-generation Santa Barbarans. DaRos stood his ground in 1977, when the Sycamore Canyon fire that ate 212 houses swept up his block. On Wednesday, the fire didn’t stop, and the Mackinses’ house near the Sierra Madre hills burned down. ‘We’ll be out there as soon as we can,” said DaRos, “with shovels and brooms,” to build anew.

“It’s still the best place in the world to live. Where are you going to go--you’re gonna fight tornadoes in the Midwest? Hurricanes along the Caribbean coast? Winter weather to contend with? You just have to have your faith grounded in solid ground, and have good friends to help you through it.”

Through his 39 years, experiencing dozens of fires, mudslides, quakes, he has a native’s matter-of-factness: “That’s the way the mountains are . . . these things have gone on forever, and nature still holds the key to everything.”

Morrison reported from Los Angeles; Corwin reported from Santa Barbara.

CONTRIBUTING TO FIRE RELIEF

The Los Angeles chapter of the American Red Cross provided the following addresses and telephone numbers for sending contributions for fire relief. Checks are to be made payable to American Red Cross with “Disaster Relief Fund” designated on front of check. Glendale-Crescenta Valley Chapter 1501 S. Brand Blvd. Glendale, CA 91204 (818) 243-3121 Santa Barbara County Chapter 2707 State St. Santa Barbara, CA 93105 (805) 687-1331 Orange County Chapter 601 N. Golden Circle Drive Santa Ana, CA 92705. (714) 835-5381 Riverside County Chapter 8880 Magnolia Ave. Riverside, CA 92503. (714) 422-3359