He and Rachelle were bickering about the sport before they had even met in person. She had grown up in a Los Angeles Dodgers house; he remained faithful to the Giants. After a mutual friend put them in touch, they began messaging about their allegiances on Facebook. Their teams were scheduled to compete in a three-game series, so Chris and Rachelle made a bet: Whoever lost would have to snap a photo wearing the rival’s hat. The Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw was pitching against the Giants’ Tim Lincecum. Chris knew his chances weren’t great, but he was willing to take the gamble.
He lost.
The next morning, a picture pinged on Rachelle’s cellphone. In the snapshot, Chris wore a blue Dodgers cap and weakly smiled—it was more of a grimace than anything else. He was attractive, with light blue eyes and closely cropped blond hair, his arms muscled from running chainsaws and lawn mowers. They went on their first date soon after, meeting to watch a coed softball game in Chico. Chris brought his pitbull mix, Posey, who was named after a Giants catcher. Rachelle joked that she would refer to her only as “the dog that shall remain nameless.” He laughed. They left the game early and walked in the park, stopping to rest on a bench. College students biked past, chains grinding as they shifted gears. Geese floated in the nearby pond. Rachelle felt she could talk about anything with him. Like her father, Chris was thoughtful and reserved, parsing what he wanted to say before speaking. And like her, he was direct. She had two children from a previous marriage, and so did he. They each had baggage. The obstacles seemed great.
“Do you still want to do this?” he asked.
“I’m a package deal,” Rachelle said. “I have two little kids. I’m not going to waste my time or your time. If we are going to date, you need to know that this is what I come with.”
“I’m in,” he said.
Somehow it worked. Chris made her laugh, and Rachelle drew him out of his shell. She brought her children, Vincent and Aubrey, to his softball games. He introduced her to his adult daughters. Later, Chris moved into the house on Pentz Road. Rachelle’s grandparents had relocated to Fresno. They hinted that they would sell the home to Rachelle soon, though on visits, her grandmother continued rearranging the cupboards and picture frames to her liking, unable to relinquish control.
Two years passed. Rachelle’s ex-husband, Mike, ran again for a seat on the five-member Town Council. This time he won. He married a woman who had a daughter named Aubree, adding further complexity to their blended family. He nicknamed his stepdaughter Peanut for her petite size, while his Aubrey was still Pop-Tart.
In December 2016, Rachelle remarried too. She and Chris drove three hours east to Reno and wed at the Chapel of the Bells. They didn’t care about pageantry—no photo package, no flowers, no sheet cake—but they wanted their four children present. Chris’s daughters were home from college for winter break. Rachelle wore a shiny silver dress with long sleeves, and Chris dressed in khaki slacks and a button-up shirt. The ceremony lasted less than an hour. Afterward, his daughters took their new stepsiblings to the circus, which also had arcade games. Aubrey won the hundred-ticket jackpot, shrieking as colored squares cranked out of the machine, enough to purchase a stuffed animal. Rachelle and Chris, meanwhile, sneaked back to the Sands Hotel, giddy with joy.
In early 2018, not long after their one-year wedding anniversary, as irises and crocuses stabbed the soil and the sun lingered on Sawmill Peak later into the evening, something had changed in the house on Pentz Road. Rachelle knew, intuiting the shifting and multiplying of the cells within her, long before letting herself acknowledge it. She had always been active, competing in adult softball leagues, training at the gym, and racing after two children. But she was increasingly exhausted. Her chest felt tender.
She was thirty-five; Chris was forty-eight. After a half dozen discussions, they had decided against conceiving a child. Instead, they invested in their future. Chris bought run-down yard equipment on sale—trucks, trailers, lawn mowers, weed-eaters—and opened his own landscaping company. He hired nine employees and signed lucrative contracts in Paradise, pruning homeowner association flowerbeds and edging the grass in manicured subdivisions. He and Rachelle reveled in the stable income and dreamed of travel: They wanted to lounge on white sand beaches and explore Mayan ruins. Chris had seen Nebraska’s rippling prairies through a windshield and had whooshed by the Grand Canyon at 65 mph, both on road trips to visit his ex-wife’s family in the Midwest—the extent of his previous adventures. He had worked full time since he was seventeen and hadn’t been able to afford vacations. On the other hand, Rachelle had first left the United States when she was eleven years old, driving to Mexico in a tour bus with her church’s youth group, and had visited every state except Alaska. She wanted Chris to see the world as she had. A baby wasn’t part of their plan.
On that cool spring evening, Rachelle tucked her children into bed before fishing an expired pregnancy test out of the back of a bathroom cabinet. Chris rested in the living room, watching a true crime show in his broken-down easy chair. Canned dialogue pierced the stillness. Rachelle took the test, popped on the plastic cap, and walked outdoors to wait on the back patio. Chris followed. The sky bruised navy, then black. A breeze prickled her skin and agitated the dogwood tree, its limbs heavy with cream-colored buds. Hands shaking, she glanced down at the faintly intersecting blue lines.
* * *
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PARADISE SPREAD ACROSS a wide ridge about 2,000 feet high, just beneath the snow-capped cathedrals of the Sierra Nevada. Here, in northeastern Butte County, the landscape hardened as it rose, the farmland, orchards, and rice paddies of the valleys giving way to volcanic benches and ravines. The town was shaped like a triangle and sculpted by two deep canyons: Butte Creek to the west and the West Branch Feather River to the east. Four main streets cut downhill. Only one connected to the north, looping past a reservoir and skirting Magalia, an unincorporated village of 11,500 people. Altogether, the area was nicknamed the Ridge.
The Konkow band of the Maidu tribe were the first to call this place home. The Indigenous group ignited small grass fires to clear brush and gathered acorns as their primary food staple. After the Gold Rush thrust California into statehood in 1850, stoking even greater dreams of easy wealth, the native population was slaughtered by the newcomers—through malaria and smallpox or outright genocide. Within two years of the Gold Rush, a hundred thousand had died. Much of the killing was state-sponsored, with Indigenous groups enslaved over petty offenses or forced into indentured servitude. Within twenty years, about 80 percent of California’s total native population had vanished. In 1863, the 461 surviving Konkows were marched ninety miles west to the Round Valley Reservation. Only half of them survived the journey, called the Konkow Trail of Tears.
Then, in 1864, after a hot and dusty day of travel from the valley floor, one of the first prominent white settlers, a man named William Leonard, arrived in town. As oak land gave way to pine, he took a deep breath of crisp mountain air and said to his wagon crew, “Boys, this has got to be paradise.” Or that’s what some people say. Others maintain the town was named after an old saloon called Pair o’ Dice. The true origin remains lost to history.
What is known is that the area delivered on its promise. Between 1848 and 1965, more than $150 million worth of gold was unearthed in Butte County. The most valuable find was a 54-pound nugget excavated in Magalia, then known as Dogtown, in April 1859. Naturally, this boom gave rise to others. The Diamond Match Company erected a lumber mill in nearby Stirling City, and Southern Pacific established railroad service from the northern Sacramento Valley. Leonard, the early settler responsible for the town’s name, operated a sawmill in an area of town that became known as Old Paradise. The buzzing of blades and thumping of falling timber echoed across the mountain, and the scent of fresh-cut pine wafted on the breeze. “I felt as though I had been transported to another planet,” remembered a visiting miner from Iowa. “There was
nothing here I had ever seen or heard before. The great forests, the deep canyons with rivers of clear water dashing over the boulders, the azure sky with never a cloud was all new to me.”
Agriculture soon topped timber as the main driver of the economy. Farmers seeded orchards in the red volcanic soil, cultivating Bartlett pears, kiwis, prunes, peaches, and apples. Attempts to grow olives largely failed. There were more than fifty orchards, the most famous belonging to the Noble family on Lot 26-G. Apple trees drooped with yellow and red fruit in the fall, the cool air sustaining them long after competitors’ harvests had ripened on the hot valley floor. The fruit was popular, shipping as far east as Denver. To keep up with farmers’ demand for water, in 1916 residents passed a $350,000 bond to establish Paradise Irrigation District. Crews dammed Little Butte Creek above Magalia—the former Dogtown, renamed for the Latin word for “cottages,” for propriety’s sake—to funnel water to farmers.
Despite its thriving economy, Paradise wasn’t well known. The population was less than ten thousand. Only a handful of churches and bars operated on the town’s main street, the Skyway. In 1934, a home sold for $205: $95 for lumber and another $110 for labor. That same year, the national average cost for a new home was $5,970. Developers hawked the town’s affordability and location as part of a concerted effort to get more people to move to Paradise. “All roads in Paradise lead to some point of scenic beauty,” a 1940s Chamber of Commerce brochure exclaimed. “Come lose yourself in Paradise awhile and learn what living really is.”
The advertisement was a triumph. From 1962 to 1980, the population more than doubled, reaching twenty-two thousand. Wood-frame cabins with shake roofs dotted the heavy brush that had flourished in the wake of logging. Invasive Scotch broom and mustard coated the hillsides in flaxen splendor. The village expanded into a town with little oversight from the county. When a young woman applied for a permit to open the first ballet studio in the 1970s, there was no relevant building code, so officials tried to classify the establishment as a church, then a meeting hall, before creating a new category: dance hall. Meanwhile, logging roads and cow paths became residential streets, freezing the town’s rambling and unplanned layout into place. Officials named the main streets after early settlers: Clark, Neal, Bille, Wagstaff. (Pence refused the honor, so that road became “Pentz.”) More than 280 miles of additional private roads twisted along ridgelines to abrupt dead ends. Some of these remained entirely unpaved, ribbons of mud or dust depending on the season. They were so rough, local lore went, that a few miles of driving over their potholes could reduce a crate of berries to juice.
As the population of California skyrocketed from 3.3 million in 1919 to 39.4 million in 2018, retirees on fixed incomes and middle-class families increasingly began to feel the crunch of housing prices in urban areas. They pushed outward to “the wildland-urban interface,” the name for the areas that reached into the mountains or deep into the woods. Their homes weren’t always built to code, but they were cheap. Here there was room to dream. In November 2018, houses sold for an average of $304,000 in Sacramento, $671,000 in Los Angeles, $1.31 million in San Francisco, and $2.46 million in Palo Alto. The median property value in Paradise was $205,500.
People were drawn to the hamlet because it was affordable, or because it was a little out of the way, or because it had small-town charm. It was the kind of place that lined the Skyway with more than a thousand full-sized American flags on Memorial Day and allowed a ninety-nine-year-old to compete for the title of Chocolate Queen at the annual Chocolate Fest; the kind of place that celebrated holidays like Johnny Appleseed Day, when volunteers baked a thousand pies to sell for $15 each in Terry Ashe Park and an actor dressed up as Johnny, wearing a silver bucket atop his head and toting a wicker basket brimming with apples. In April, everyone looked forward to the weekend of Gold Nugget Days, when children competed in the costume contest and teenagers vied for the Miss Gold Nugget crown. Families cheered at the donkey derby and lined lawn chairs along the side of the road to view the parade, parents rubbing sunscreen onto their children’s wriggling bodies as they waited for it to depart from the Holiday Market shopping center.
Retirees had always dominated the Paradise census, but the demographic was changing. In 2001, nearly 62 percent of the Ridge’s population had been of retirement age; by 2018 the percentage had more than halved. Still, the population skewed conservative. Residents could choose where to worship from among thirty churches, including the Center for Spiritual Living and the Paradise Church of Religious Science. Even the local hospital was faith-based, affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church: no pork in the cafeteria, prayer-led meetings. But in town there were no synagogues, no mosques. In the 2016 presidential election, a majority of the county’s vote went to the Republican candidate, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! stickers adorned many bumpers—causing tension downhill in liberal Chico. The older folk loved to gossip, chattering while volunteering at the Elks Lodge or getting their hair set at one of the many salons. They were a warm but skeptical bunch with a tendency toward nostalgia. Sometimes they posted on a Facebook page called “Paradise Rants and Raves!” They were mostly proud of their town.
For all of its wholesomeness, Paradise wasn’t perfect. It was the largest community west of the Mississippi River that still relied on septic systems to dispose of wastewater. Without a central sewer system, the town struggled to draw businesses and bolster a strong commercial corridor. When Coffee’s On opened a hut-sized joint across the street from the Holiday Market shopping center, it cost the owners $80,000 to install a septic system, which failed twice in only a few years. McDonald’s paid $250,000 to update its system. The restriction scared away many larger corporations—though in 2018 Paradise finally attracted its first Starbucks, a cause for celebration. The mayor liked to say it was a sign they had “made it.” The town did have a Cinema 7, an Ace Hardware, and a Kmart to anchor its sluggish economy. But there were no car washes, no major hotel chains.
For special occasions, residents drove downhill. Chico had nicer restaurants, as well as a Costco and a Walmart. Most locals spent their money outside Paradise, which was one reason the town had been known as Poverty Ridge as far back as the early 1900s—though old-timers always joked that it was a “darn nice place to starve if you have to.” Social Security was the predominant source of income. Councilmembers earned a $300 monthly stipend, and their coffers were as limited as their constituents’. The Adventist Health Feather River hospital was the largest private employer in town, providing a steady paycheck to thirteen hundred employees—many of them locals. The unified school district, which included Magalia, was the second-largest employer.
On Tuesday, November 6—one day before Rachelle was admitted to the hospital—voters approved the extension of a half-cent sales tax to cover public safety, road repair, and animal control, among other things. Without it, town leaders feared insolvency. It was bigger news than the new Starbucks or the fresh coat of paint on Town Hall: The measure would generate $1.4 million annually. The money would help the town’s police force do its job. Paradise avoided some of the problems of an urban center—no gangs, little congestion. But outlaws moved to junglelike plots in the foothills to evade rules and dodge authority. Paradise Police’s sixteen patrol officers and four sergeants stayed busy busting methamphetamine and opioid rings, cracking down on domestic violence, and responding to calls from the Ridge’s thirty-seven mobile home parks. They rousted the homeless who camped in remote canyons.
The poverty affected Paradise’s children the most. The Paradise Unified School District had among the highest number of students with Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, in the state. They were traumatized by abuse, poverty, addiction, or alcoholism in their homes. Nearly 70 percent of the thirty-four hundred students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. Behavioral issues were so widespread that one academic year, the high school principal had handled thirty-one fights. The distri
ct had recently started teaching mindfulness, in the hope that it would help alleviate stress. Outside school, there wasn’t much for teenagers to do aside from drinking beer, hiking the old mining flumes, four-wheeling, and shooting at street signs.
That changed on Friday evenings, when the townsfolk piled into the bleachers on Om Wraith Field, named after a former coach, to cheer on the high school football team. The boys converged on the field to the band’s rendition of Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” Students dressed in cutoffs and flannel, donning CMF headbands—an acronym for Crazy Mountain Folk, or something more crass, depending on one’s interpretation. Parents wore the Bobcats’ team colors: green and gold. The concessions stand sold hot dogs named after the head coach.
On Friday, November 9, the team was scheduled to play Red Bluff High in sectionals. Everyone was anticipating a win—a bright spot for administrators, who besides the daily challenge of fights in the school hallways were now contending with a dwindling faith in the local education system. Charter schools were springing up, siphoning 21 percent of the town’s students. A new high school had opened in August on Nunneley Road, rattling the district, whose own buildings were run-down and couldn’t compete with hallways that smelled of epoxy and fresh-milled lumber. At least voters had approved a $61 million bond on Election Day to rebuild Paradise Elementary and Ridgeview High, renovate Ponderosa Elementary, and replace the athletic fields at Paradise High. It was the town’s biggest bond issue in thirty years—and a sign of hope.
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