Fire 9 – Trial by Fire
By Angie Brenner
November 8, 2007
Marguerite Eliasson stretches her long legs out on the wicker table over looking a yard of cool green grass. Beyond the veranda of the small one bedroom house are two large corrals. “That’s Turkoman,” she says and looks out at the black horse in the corral on the left. “He’s a sweetheart, over twenty years old and still one of the best breeding stallions we have.” Beemer, Marguerite’s square-jawed rotwieller tries to heft his hundred and ten pound body into my lap and lick my face. “He does that when he’s stressed,” says Marguerite. I push him down gently and keep a calm demeanor; the last thing I need is a nervous, unpredictable rottie in my face. “The stallion that belongs in this corral lost fifty pounds while he was confined to a barn stall.” She points to another expansive, empty arena with part of the fencing blown over from the winds. “Once we put him out in an open space he calmed down immediately.”
The EA Ranch, a 927 acre estate that breeds, boards, and trains thoroughbreds reminds me of a movie set (something between Falcon Crest and Seabiscuit), a mountain top with four or five houses, seven barns, countless corrals, and a racetrack. The long road leading into the ranch is lined with pepper trees and winds past an elegant arched barn with chandeliers and an upstairs office decked out in oversized Spanish furniture. There’s a small pool with ducks and turtles, and another that’s left dry due to drought. The ranch owner’s Spanish style house sits above the corrals and racetrack. The smaller house, where we sit, is used by one of the owner’s daughters and her husband when they visit the ranch and will be where Marguerite lives temporarily.
We watch a silhouette of horses graze on a western hill backlit from the setting sun, and I try to imagine how this picture might have been different. If not for Marguerite’s loyalty, commitment, and determination to stay and fight off the raging fires that two weeks earlier surrounded and encroached the ranch and ultimately razed her two story home, this entire estate and the horses might have all been destroyed.
Marguerite's house
“It was a nightmare,” says Marguerite. “Because the fire started on a Sunday, only four of the twenty-three workers were on the ranch. When we saw smoke, we had to get the horses (a hundred and eighty high-spirited thoroughbreds) into the barns.” Marguerite and I hop into her white jeep for a drive around the ranch, and it becomes obvious that even the gathering up of the horses must have taken several hours. The barns and fenced pastures reach every edge of the ranch. “I left that white mare in the middle of open dirt fields with a few yearlings. She’s a calm horse and I knew they would be safe. We’re treating one yearling for a corneal ulcer from an ember, otherwise there were no injuries.” The tranquility of the mare and a half dozen yearlings munching hay is a long stretch from the chaos they must have endured during the fire and wind storm.
"For a day and a half we fought with hoses and shovels.” She tells how the 100,000 gallon water tank had drained due to a melted PVC pipe. This required her and one of the men to drive down to a smaller water storage tank to fill five gallon buckets by hand, then drive to each barn to water the horses. “They would drink the water as fast as we filled up their buckets,” she says. “We must have made a hundred trips until my jeep finally ran out of gas.” The logistics seem overwhelming. She shows me the palms of her hands buffed smooth as glass from hours of flattening haystacks inside barns to keep embers from landing on them, and tells me how she jumped on stacks of packaged stall shavings piled around barns for the same reason. At one point during the fire, she drove to an area of small corrals near the racetrack that are shaded by several oak trees. “I beat out a fire that started from an ember landing on a small haystack with a board. I didn’t want to lose the trees,” she says.
Hay Barn
“I had one man working the barns non-stop to put out flying embers that might ignite hay or the shavings in the horse stalls using a shovel and sand, and left two men to fight off flames down by the water tank. When I went back to the water tank and found the men sleeping, I told them, if you sleep, you will die.” Later, she shows me one of the barns where the winds tore off part of the metal roof and ripped off the sliding door. Fire ravaged two huge hay barns. “It took two days to burn $70,000 worth of hay,” she says. I tell her that I’d heard that winds had been clocked at 110 mph during the blaze. “I believe it. There was so much sand and smoke that we could barely see the roads. I kept pouring saline solution that I use for the horses into our eyes.” Time has become somewhat of a blur. She doesn’t quite remember when it was that two fire engines drove in to escort some cars out and advised everyone to evacuate, or when and who dropped off their horses at the ranch. “There are about five horses still here that we’re caring for, but I don’t know who they belong to.”
Marguerite Eliasson
I hadn’t realized until our conversation that the 2003 fire had also threatened the ranch, but it was a different fire to fight, and while flames overtook hundred foot trees there weren’t the high winds shearing the landscape like a giant blow torch. “During that fire they (the CDF) dropped hot shots (fire fighters who parachute into terrain unreachable by vehicles and begin to cut brush and make fire breaks), and one fire engine came in to help,” says Marguerite.
A fire captain who drove into the EA Ranch last week to secure smoldering areas around the estate had said that he had taken one look at the fire the day it started and told his guys to go get some sleep and come back the next day. “There’s nothing you can do when the winds are blowing off roofs,” he said. “You can’t fly planes or send in hot shots and trucks. You just have to wait until it blows through.”
Eventually, our conversation shifts to Marguerite’s personal life. While she fought to save the ranch and horses, her house burned down. Yet when we walk to the ashen property with an almost three hundred and sixty degree view where she has lived for the more than twenty years that she has managed the ranch, it is not to show me what has been lost, but to fill numerous bird feeders and water containers for wildlife now left without their habitat. We move around hoses to drip water on charred oak trees that had already been stressed by years of drought. She picks through brittlebush and rosemary bushes to determine what might come back in the spring, and ignores the 10X10 patch of burnt nails, all that’s left of a gazebo. I asked about her mate of the past sixteen years, knowing that it had been a relationship with many ups and downs, and I learn that though he had lived with her, he worked as caretaker for a Rancho Santa Fe property. Where was he during the ordeal?
“Oh, he was here at the ranch during the fire,” says Marguerite. “But he couldn’t handle the stress of it all and stayed in the office and slept.” I’m more than a little shocked. He was here but didn’t do anything to fight the fire? Marguerite shakes her head. “He isn’t like me, and he did what he could, he made sandwiches for us. He tried his best, but just couldn’t handle the situation or understand why I wouldn’t leave when told to evacuate. After he left the ranch, his employer found him a home close to his work and gave him money. Our house where we lived and all our belongings burned. I told him there was nothing left to come back to.” Marguerite’s competent façade begins to crumble, just a bit. “I know that I’ve let the ranch consume my whole life, and I can’t expect my partner to feel the same. I’ve made mistakes in the relationship too and trying to learn from the past and move forward, even if it means that after the end of the day I’m here alone.”
