A SIEGE OF FIRE : Welcome to California : Tourists Are Having Second Thoughts Amid the Embers

SANTA BARBARA —  Ash was falling. So were spirits around the hotel swimming pool a few steps away from this city’s famed tourist beach.

Visitor Laurence Dutal from Paris shifted uncomfortably in her lounge chair and squinted into a sun turned orange by the smoky pall from the firestorm raging a few miles away. Her week’s stay at the Sheraton Santa Barbara Hotel and Spa was off on the wrong foot.

“The smoke and soot bothers me,” Dutal explained.

Across town, James O’Conor’s visit was off to an even worse start.

The Boston accountant lost his luggage to flames when the fire roared down the mountainside an hour after he arrived Wednesday night to attend his brother’s wedding.

“I stopped off on the way to the hotel at my parents’ house and we went out for dinner,” O’Conor said. “The fire hit while we were gone. Their house was destroyed.”

O’Conor was left with only a pair of shorts, a sport shirt and sandals. Saturday’s wedding was still on, but Friday night’s rehearsal dinner was canceled, he said. It was to have been held in his parents’ back yard.

“I’m not too sure I’ll come back to California too soon,” O’Conor said.

As the arson-caused fire swept through neighborhoods this week, some Santa Barbara visitors couldn’t get out of town fast enough.

When the raging flames prevented Norm Sheppard of Bedford, Mass., from reaching the Goleta motel where he was staying with his wife and two children, his family joined a race with other tourists to leave.

“We had to drive all the way to Ventura to find another room,” he said. “We stopped at every place between here and there. At each motel, you’d see other people run inside from their cars to see if there was a vacancy, and then run back out to their car again when there wasn’t.

“All we need now is an earthquake to send us back to the East Coast for good.”

Barry Mitchell of Springfield, Mo., fled on foot when flames swept toward his Santa Barbara motor lodge.

“Smoke and fire was everywhere,” he said. “Two of us were trying to get five people’s bags out of there. We dragged them across the street to a gas station lot.

“We thought for sure the motel was gonna go up. I’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve seen smog and heat here. Now this.”

At Santa Barbara’s historic 1905 train station, Al and Margaret Hough of San Francisco--veterans of last October’s Bay Area earthquake--decided brush fires were worse than temblors.

The pair were waiting for a bus. Two miles away, the fire had burned away the wooden understructure of an 85-year-old steel railroad trestle. Amtrak service between Los Angeles and the Bay Area would be disrupted for more than 24 hours. Thirty-five rail passengers were temporarily stranded at the station.

“I’d take an earthquake over this,” Al Hough said. “Any day.”

At Stearns Wharf, the city-owned pier that is one of Santa Barbara’s most famous tourist attractions, honeymooners Patricia and George Schwerdt of Brewster, N.Y., stared sadly at the plume of smoke still rising from the mountains Thursday evening.

“Friends back home said be sure not to miss San Marcos Pass, but I guess we’ll have to leave without seeing it,” Patricia Schwerdt said. “This fire is horrible. From what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t want to live here.”

Many Santa Barbara visitors were determined to stick it out, however.

At the Earl Warren Showgrounds at the edge of the fire disaster area, horse owner Patty Bence of Thermal was looking forward to the Los Amigos Peruvian Paso Horse Show scheduled for Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Bence’s show horses would be sharing the sprawling showgrounds stables during the weekend with dozens of locally owned horses uprooted by the fire. The equine refugees included a frightened pony named “April” being comforted by owner Katie Carter, 10.

“It’s a terrible thing. I wouldn’t want to be in these people’s place,” Bence said. “But it’s a natural disaster--you can’t stop fires like these when they start. These are not just problems in Santa Barbara.”

At a Goleta motel, visitors Sandrine and Arun Inam of Red Bank, N.J., were hastily replanning their vacation. A trip over the mountains to the Santa Ynez Valley would have to be scrubbed because of the fire.

On Wednesday, the pair said they passed within 50 feet of the fire as it was just starting. They had been visiting the Painted Cave, a rocky outcropping near San Marcos Pass that is decorated with Chumash Indian pictographs.

“Three bushes were burning. There were Forest Service people there. We thought it was under control,” Sandrine Inam said. “I wish we’d taken a picture of it.”

Said her husband: “It’s still fun here. Every time I come to California it’s exciting. I like it here.”

But Santa Barbara beach-area ice cream shop manager Todd Jones was upset that many visitors seemed oblivious to the fire.

“It irritates me. They’re enjoying their vacation, just as happy as they can be,” said Jones. “People who live here are suffering. One of my co-workers has lost her house. Another’s mom called an hour ago to say they are evacuating.”

The locals said they hope the 4,000-acre fire area with its 567 burned-out homes does not become Santa Barbara’s newest tourist attraction.

“We don’t need lookie-loos,” said Gail Figueroa of Melni Bus Service, a charter bus company that offers tours of Santa Barbara.