At 9 a.m. Thursday, three men met on the ridge and studied the mountainside above their homes.
The worst looked to be over. White smoke rose in listless little spirals from blackened earth. The air was still. The mourning doves did their usual dirge from the overhead lines. Sprinklers swish-swished.
But Santa Barbara's endemic twist on the Santa Ana -- the "sundowner" wind -- is as cagey as it is ferocious.
The winds rush out of the canyons without warning, often around sundown (but not predictably so). They can turn cool days into sweltering nights and, when there's a fire, drive it straight out of the mountains and to the city's northern edge.
And then before dawn, they retreat. The fire wanders back into the hills, like some nocturnal predator. Morning breaks peacefully -- and the restless waiting begins.
"I guarantee you this afternoon there will be a full wind event pouring out of this canyon," said Jack Franklin, a Santa Barbara firefighter who stayed in his evacuated neighborhood to protect his home. "This isn't over yet."
Franklin's wife and daughter had left. He and his 14-year-old son hunkered down Wednesday night as the firestorm with winds of more than 50 mph burned about a dozen nearby homes to the ground. When the sun rose, the sky was clear, with a panoramic view of the ocean all the way to Santa Rosa Island. Franklin left his son to sleep, checked on his father down the road and walked up Ben Lomond Drive to the ridge to chat with a couple of neighbors, Ken Jones and Jim White.
"I spent half my morning trying to rein my dad in," he quipped. "He's 72 in shorts and T-shirt, trying to wet down his house."
They looked out across the vast smoky amphitheater rising to La Cumbre Peak, nearly 4,000 feet high.
Two hawks rode up on a thermal and hovered above the charred ground. "They're looking for barbecued rats," said White, 46.
The fire was high in the pines, miles away for now, as if it were no longer a concern.
If this disaster were a hurricane, this moment would the storm's eye -- a strange slice of outward calm suffused with a blasted heat and the anxiety of what's to come.
Everyone is stuck in place psychically, if not physically. The evacuees can't get back into their neighborhoods to see if their homes have survived. The ones who stayed can't leave, because the sheriff's deputies won't let them back in.
