Wealthy Enclave Ablaze

My father's father gave him a parcel of land he owned, located way up in the foothills in Santa Barbara, CA, close enough to what became the Botanical Gardens that we went there to play during our childhood. When my father built a home in the early 1950s for his ever-expanding family, he built on that parcel. The view was spectacular as there was a handful of other homes in the area and limited vegetation. From the living room window of the 2-story house, we could watch the ships, as well as the whales, travel the Santa Barbara Channel from Goleta to Carpinteria and had an unrestricted view of the sailing ships docked in the harbor.

It took about a decade for other homes to be built and the vegetation to mature, interfering with our view and crowding our neighborhood. The old gully that I played in as a child, a deep, natural gully that became intriguingly dangerous during the rainy season, was finally filled in and homes built on top of it in the 1970s. As the years passed and the homes suffered from constant drainage issues, no one believed the "kids" who told them that their homes were built on a natural gully that fed into Mission Creek down at the foot of the hill. After all, no one would build on a gully, right?

As the neighborhood became more and more crowded, our lower lot remained one of the few natural parcels of land. However, as the neighborhood became population-dense, the complaints from the new neighbors about the animals we always had while I was growing up, animals that provided us with food, became legend. There were also complaints about our unfenced lower lot, where my brother parked his boat, and the citrus trees and the vegetable garden my mom always maintained continued to thrive. There were many people who came onto the property and helped themselves to our produce, in spite of continued requests to respect the privacy of our land. One woman backed her car onto the property and began filling her trunk with what she thought was fire wood, but was actually some specialty lumber that my brother was storing for a friend while it cured. The woman's point, when she was confronted by my mother, was that if it was private property, we needed to fence it and lock a gate to keep her out.

Once, when another neighbor who was building a home in the area needed to store some soil, he used our field. That resulted in an immediate visit from an inspector, obviously called by a neighbor, who gave us 30 days to remove the unstable earth or face criminal action. Another neighbor began harassing phone calls to the county about the chickens, ducks, turkeys and pigs we raised, and that ended our right to have a food source on our own private property. Then, without rhyme or reason, the county not only installed sewers, but decided that what had always been 2 parcels, the parcel with the 2-story home on it and the lower lot, would become as 1. After my mother's death, that became a big deal because what the county does once lives forever.

Thursday night, my brother and his family fled the house in Mission Canyon, ordered to evacuate because a fire that began in Montecito was headed their way -- driven by 70 mile an hour winds that were hurtling burning embers a half-mile ahead of the main fire, spreading the fire at an uncontrollable rate. Although the fire was still about a mile, as the crow flies, from the Mission Canyon area, it was headed in that direction. Because it's a neighborhood in the foothills, the roads into and out of it are few, narrow, and congested, the existing roads that we used when we drove up the hill to build the home in the 1950s. The street in front of my family home is literally not wide enough for 2 cars to pass, which prompted my father to move back the front wall to create space in front of the home, an improvement that no one else in the neighborhood ever did.

If the fire jumped airborne into the Canyon, it would be chaos. My brother would watch the house burn before he'd jeopardize his family by staying to see what happens.

The fire settled down yesterday a bit when the daytime winds died down, but there is no containment of even a small part of it. The biggest worry were the Sundowner Santa Ana winds expected to fire back up last night. The fire isn't being covered on the local news that comes to us from the LA stations, so I'm not sure how my family is this morning. I do know that whatever happens, the people will be safe.

This is NOT the wealthy enclave of celebrity homes in Montecito, but, as the crow flies, it's about 7 miles from them. We used to take the back roads into the backside of Montecito, traveling through Rattlesnake Canyon, which was ablaze yesterday and is, perhaps, a mile from my family home. There have always been estates in the Montecito area, owned by residents who built way out there, rather than in the crowded Santa Barbara city area, much as my father built up the hill when he needed a large home for his wife and 6 children. I'll venture a guess that homes owned by the Hollywood/ entertainment crowd lost in the fire are many fewer than the homes owned by residents who, like my father, built their homes many, many years ago on a much less grand scale than the recent sprawling mansions of the rich and famous.

My daughter was aghast when I told her that her family had to evacuate as she didn't know there was a fire endangering them until I told her. When she read about the fire in the "wealthy enclave" to the east of Santa Barbara, she had no idea that fire was so close to my family home, a decidedly unwealthy neighborhood up the hill in Mission Canyon. She, too, waits to hear.