Mountain Drive Spirit

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End of an Era?: The last Erica and Treavor Ortiz heard after they fled the Tea Fire, their East Mountain Drive home had crashed, stilts aflame, 60 feet down into a creek. Most other homes in the legendary bohemian enclave burned last week, but is this really the end of an era?

True, Mountain Drive, scene of 1960s naked Wine Stomp queen celebrations, hedonist lifestyles, permitless jerry-built homes, and making of the 1966 Rock Hudson movie Seconds has long been overgrown by creeping gentrification. Will the counterculture spirit live on?

On the Beat

With Erica and Treavor, I walked the ashes of their home Tuesday. On all sides were other burned-out houses, some next to places the capricious flames had spared.

What’s known as the Mountain Drive Spirit still wafts above the ashes, I’m finding, but what of the future? Will scorched earth give way to combined-lot, multi-million-dollar luxury view homes, or will owners of the quarter-acre lots return for a renaissance of rebuilding, this time with benefit of the building department?

Long gone is the revered patriarch of Mountain Drive, Bobby Hyde, who bought 50 acres up there in the 1940s and sold lots off for a pittance and a promise, helping those with a dream of creating a community of freedom. Certainly a freedom from tiresome bureaucrats with their downtown rules of lot sizes, deeds, and roads. You built your own house out of what was at hand.

Among the Tea Fire losses is the Castle, a ramshackle monument of timbers from the old Ellwood Pier, windy in winter, leaky in rainy weather, and featuring a storied, cantankerous septic system. Regardless of who lived there, it was de rigueur to host the countless celebrations: Bastille Day, Bobby Burns’s birthday complete with pipers, Twelfth Night in costume, Cinco de Mayo, and other wine-soaked bashes. One night I visited then-Castle residents Anne and World War II vet Vernon Johnson and found the place dark and eerily quiet, seemingly restless for the next party.

I covered the first day of the 1964 Coyote Fire, when flames ravaged the tiny community but didn’t kill it. The Wine Stomps and Pot War handicraft sales became famous, luring townsfolk up to loll in the nude around pools and in the hot tubs. Over the years, Mountain Drivers aged and some moved on, and young families moved in, among them house painter Treavor Ortiz, 34, and his jeweler wife, Erica, 29, parents of Cuyler, 3, and Kayla, three months.

Driving up to their rented place at 209 East Mountain Drive, minutes after last week’s fire broke out, Treavor said he looked up and saw flames at the arches of the Bothin Tea House high above. “I said, ‘Oh, God, Erica, this is it.’ In five minutes, 60-mph winds were pushing the fire straight at our house.” While Erica gathered family photos, Treavor alerted neighbors.

“Our 3-year-old was screaming. I said, ‘Erica, go now.’ She dropped everything and ran to the car and went.” In his haste he forgot the collector’s-item Mike Hynson surfboard he valued at $10,000. “I looked up and here comes the fire.”

The next day he returned to find a scene of “complete, total, utter devastation.” Searching the ashes, “I found a gold necklace that was my mother’s.”

Treavor lost all his painting supplies, and Erica’s jewelry material for her Lotus Boutique on Chapala Street was gone as well. They found quick aid from Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, which provided them a room at the Mar Monte, Los Arroyos restaurant vouchers, and a bag of toiletries and other necessities. Bank officials, hearing of the fire, aided more than 200 dislocated families. The couple established the Erica and Treavor Ortiz Fire Fund at Montecito Bank & Trust and are looking for a place to live.

Patrons at Vices & Spices coffee shop, where Erica once worked, have been stuffing bills into a counter jar to aid the family. The couple can be reached at 452-2929. “We’re in shock,” Treavor told me. “We have to look at it as though change is going to be good.”

Erica’s grandfather is Gordon Forbes Sr., author of the scandalous 1955 novel Too Near the Sun, a scalding satire of prominent Montecitans.

Ted Adams, who lived with the Mountain Drive tribe during the 1960s heyday, found it “a kind of liberal, bohemian, intellectual group. It was quite wonderful if you didn’t have a lot to do.” It was “all style and no substance, living free, unfettered by convention.” Sexual freedom reigned.

In view of the too-frequent fires that have swept the hills, he said, “I’m opting for disposable structures rather than indestructible.” While he estimates that 90 percent of the homes were destroyed or damaged in the fire, Adams feels that most owners will come back.

“They see it as a renaissance and re-stimulation of the Mountain Drive spirit.”

(For a vivid picture of the halcyon days, see Elias Chiacos’s photo-filled book Mountain Drive.)

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