I lived in Santa Barbara from 1999 until 2006. I left on impulse (that’s another story) and stay in touch with friends there, some of whom are among the best friends I have. Today almost all have been evacuated from their gracious homes or are in the warning zone and ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

My former home is in a red zone on the county fire map, which means I would have been evacuated if I still lived there. Today I look around at my things, my stuff, my books and objets and furniture. My family photograph albums. Had I not moved, they all might now be, or soon be, ashes.

That fate is fickle is a cliché but even a cliché can be hard to grasp, to get your mind and imagination around, when you are confronted with the immediacy of a nightmare reality.

A couple of months ago, I was at a dinner party for mutual friends from Chappaqua given in Santa Barbara by Ann and Art. They told this story of their experience in the Tea Fire last November (taken from an email they later sent at my request):

Forty-two of the forty-seven houses below us on the mountain were burned to the ground. Our house was miraculously saved. We had two guardian angels that November evening.

The first showed up early on. Neighborhood boys, who had stayed behind to protect their family home, were perched on their roof and watched flames race down our driveway and ignite a large pepper tree with branches hanging over our wooden deck. Our house was about to go.  But at that instant, a helicopter cruised by and dropped a large load of water on the tree, extinguishing the fire.

Our second guardian angel was a volunteer fireman who, while heading for the inferno at the bottom of our road, peered around our hedge and saw flames coming up toward our house. He jumped down onto our steep driveway, pulled out our hoses, and used a high-power nozzle that he had with him to fight the fire, staying with our house for hours.

We are fortunate and are thankful every day for all that we have, at the same time mourning the losses our many neighbors experienced.

Today Ann and Art’s beautiful house is deep in the red evacuation zone on the county’s fire map.

New stories of loss and of heroism, of close calls and of valor are unfolding now. I knew rather casually a firefighter’s wife in Santa Barbara. She talked about how much her husband’s career worried her. Remembering that one woman personalizes for me the prayers, fears, and hopes of so many people waiting today at home for family members and friends who are courageously struggling to defeat the inferno that is the Jesusita fire: a fire that may have been caused by arson, which is too huge and horrible a possibility to imagine.

Santa Barbara has had wildfires before, and people who live there factor  in the risk. Each time there is a fire, there are surprising stories. I dated a lawyer who had lost a house in a wildfire before I moved to town. He and his late wife had to evacuate in the middle of the night. He said their greatest regret was forgetting that the former owner had an aviary, which they had maintained. When they fled, they didn't open the door and free the birds.

The current fire has encroached on the lovely botanical gardens and destroyed an historic house scheduled for renovation. What of the plants and wild birds at home there? 

What will the future look like? Art and Ann had mentioned that neighbors planned to rebuild. I understood that decision, because a friend who lost her house to fire in the Oakland hills in 1991 had rebuilt, and she and her husband are very much at home again in a new house at the same location as the one that was destroyed.

But now that another fire has attacked Santa Barbara so soon after a previous one, how will people who lose their homes face the fork in the road: will most rebuild? If not, how will their decisions affect the future of the scenic and vibrant community where protests against the invasion and occupation of Iraq were so vigorous and unrelenting that empathy and conscience seemed alive and well beside more high-profile, rich, right-wing lifestyles?

And how will insurance companies that suffer losses in Santa Barbara fires evaluate estates worth fewer millions in today’s market than when they were first insured? Will the homeowners who didn’t have their estates re-valued and perhaps re-mortgaged be paid what their residences were originally worth and fare better than those whose insurance has been adjusted to the deteriorating economy?

Insurance comes to mind because when I lived in Santa Barbara, one company refused to sell me home insurance. They claimed I lived in a zone at risk for wild fires. But I was not in the mountains. I laughed at them. 

As I think about Santa Barbara, a memory floats into consciousness: I meet a woman in a chic white sharkskin suit, sunglasses perched on top of her gray hair. We are at my uncle's mother's apartment in Rome, and I am on vacation from college. She tells me that her plantation in Virginia had burned to the ground, and everything, including treasured family memorabilia, was lost.

It had taught her a valuable lesson that she would pass along to me: "Never become too attached to things. They can disappear too easily. And they aren't what matters most."