Wednesday, November 19, 2008
In 1977 Payne Green and his family lost their home to the Sycamore Canyon fire in Santa Barbara. The family faced many struggles, including bitterness because of the widespread belief outside of Santa Barbara that only people who were wealthy lost homes. "We heard the stories--they were all over," said Mrs. Green. "They said that all the wealthy people from Montecito watched the fire burn from their yachts. It was crazy." Retired police officer Green's house burned again last week in the Tea Fire.
Yet once again, as the fire made headlines, I kept reading reports about this fire burning in a "wealthy enclave". Hardly. My old home at 340 East Mountain Drive had fewer than 900 square feet of interior space. It was built by hand, over more than a decade, by a scrappy Mountain Drive family (Doug and Leal Grant). The beautiful redwood lumber was salvaged when the old Laguna Ballpark, built in the 1930's, was torn down.
Santa Barbara's "pioneer bohemian community," as local writer Elias Chiacos calls it in his history of Mountain Drive, still possessed its pioneer flavor when I moved there in 2002. Frank Robinson was still alive and ensconced in his cabin just across the street, climbing the steep driveway to the bench on Friday afternoons for happy hour (tequila for Frank). His children were peppered around the neighborhood. Frank embodied the spirit of Mountain Drive, which is hard to talk about without sounding trite.
What other community elects a King and a Queen every year for the purpose of making sure there are enough social events each month? Where else do neighbors re-enact Twelfth Night annually, with players in full Renaissance regalia? I've never experienced any thing of its sort.
The Mountain Drive that I knew was no wealthy enclave. It was more like a time machine, or a secret refuge from the fast pace of life in town. Many of the families who lost their homes are second generation Mountain Drive dwellers. Their homes were built by family and friends. They're not wealthy folks by any stretch of the imagination, except, of course, for the immeasurable wealth that comes from the true feeling of belonging in a place.
The disaster of the Tea Fire is so much more devastating than simply a list of addresses lost. There was a whole world up there, a whole culture and history, whose story was written word by word and stone by stone in every funky Mountain Drive cabin. I trust that the resilient Mountain Drive community will rebuild, but in the meantime let's set the record straight. Those homes that burned down on Mountain Drive and Coyote road weren't (mostly) McMansions. They were sweet homes built with love by the hands of the people who lived there. -Michelle Howard