Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

  Native Americans had long used these low-intensity burns to release nutrients back into the soil, control weeds, and improve wildlife habitat—and they worked. Trump was making reference to this practice, but many Californians scoffed at his insensitive delivery and limited understanding of forestry. There was rarely public support or funding for fire prevention efforts. Stickers reading MAKE AMERICA RAKE AGAIN and PROUD TO BE FROM PLEASURE soon proliferated on bumpers across Butte County.

  Less than an hour after the president had arrived in Paradise, the motorcade left and returned to Chico to visit the incident command post. At a table made of plywood and two-by-fours, the president pored over a map with Cal Fire director Ken Pimlott, who explained that the Camp Fire had grown to 149,000 acres and was 55 percent contained. Trump walked among the weary firefighters and applauded them for “fighting like hell.”

  Afterward, a reporter inquired whether Trump thought climate change had been a factor in the Camp Fire. Trump said he thought it was more a matter of forest management. The reporter pressed. Had the Camp Fire changed his mind on climate change? “No,” Trump said. “No. I want a great climate. I think we’re going to have that.”

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  —

  FIVE DAYS LATER, it was Thanksgiving. And finally the seasonal rains arrived, rinsing the town of ash and helping to further contain the Camp Fire. Soot congealed like glue in the footprints of ruined houses, and rain droplets glistened in the pine boughs. For the first time in weeks, the sky turned from a murky gray to a light, chilled blue. And a familiar milestone had arrived in the midst of so much unfamiliarity: a holiday.

  But there was no savory waft of sage and rosemary from roasting turkeys. No families gathered around the hearth as the ponderosa pines quivered outside the window, perhaps dusted in snow or studded with yellow warblers or long-eared owls. Life was in a holding pattern. The evacuation zone hadn’t reopened. The meaning that Carr and others sought remained elusive.

  More than fifty-two thousand people were still displaced. They were struggling, one by one, to find housing—the first step in regaining what was lost. Evacuees had scattered far and wide. At the state operations center in Sacramento, the director of the Office of Emergency Services felt hopeless. The Camp Fire wasn’t Mark Ghilarducci’s first disaster, or even his worst. The fifty-eight-year-old had served as the incident commander on the Oklahoma City bombing and had overseen the recovery of 169 bodies, nineteen of them children’s. Their tiny appendages—fingers, toes—had been mixed in with the debris. The trauma had deterred Ghilarducci from taking government roles for the next twelve years, but he had returned to the work in 2012, when Brown had appointed him to his current post. Now the state’s fire siege was testing his fortitude. “Everybody was punch-drunk coming off a series of these wildfires,” Ghilarducci would later say of the 2018 fire season. “In all my years, I’ve not seen a fire like this…. This is everything in ash: schools, hospitals, care centers, restaurants, churches, homes, roads. Absolutely everything.”

  Bus driver Kevin McKay and his girlfriend, Melanie, had moved into a second-floor room in a rundown hotel off Interstate 5 in Corning, about thirty miles northwest of Chico. Obtaining lodging any closer to home was impossible. Every hotel room was booked. Their room had scratchy blue carpeting and a low desk, where Kevin worked on his homework or compiled an inventory list for their insurance company. His knees bumped against the desk’s underbelly as he racked his brain, noting every possession down to spatulas and dog dishes in a spreadsheet. His life, itemized. He and Melanie slept in the king-sized bed. His twelve-year-old son, Shaun, was relegated to the fold-out couch a few feet away. Kevin’s mother, in decline from melanoma, had caught pneumonia and been admitted to a hospital in Red Bluff, where Kevin had once managed a Walgreens store. They planned to spend Thanksgiving with a former colleague who lived nearby.

  Meanwhile, Jamie Mansanares and his family were crammed into a fifth-wheel trailer, which he had bought after the fire and hauled across the mountains from Nevada County after local dealerships had already sold out. They parked the trailer at the Butte County Fairgrounds—south of Chico in Gridley—until the site unexpectedly closed. Afterward, they settled outside a former colleague’s house on East Avenue in Chico. It was a tight fit for six people—including Jamie’s mother, who slept on the couch—and their pet cat and their dog, Ginger. The freezer was so small that Erin couldn’t even cram in a frozen pizza. The oven didn’t work; the water heater was broken. Every two days, she and Jamie carted Tezzrah and her sisters to a friend’s house to bathe. They washed their clothes at the laundromat. This was all inconvenient, but it was better than being homeless. To free up space, they eventually took Ginger, who enjoyed eating from the cat’s litter box, to a temporary shelter.

  Jamie worried about their future. He and Erin had lost not only their house but also both their jobs. Heritage Paradise had burned to the ground. Now the entire staff needed to find new employment. Erin knew they could float for a few months on the money in their savings account and the cash in their safe, but not much longer than that. By Thanksgiving, she had secured a job at a rehabilitation center in Oroville. Jamie also took the first job he could find: an entry-level gig at Sierra Pacific Industries. He worked the graveyard shift at the timber company, sorting lumber and feeding it through the mill, his fingers stiffening in the cold. With their opposing schedules and long commutes, Jamie and Erin rarely saw each other.

  On this holiday, though, they tried to forget about their dismal reality. They joined Erin’s sister for a family dinner in the town of Bangor. The spread was more bountiful than anything Tezzrah had ever seen—enough food to fill several Tupperware containers of leftovers, though they wouldn’t fit in their trailer’s fridge. Erin missed the familiarity of her parents’ worn dinner table and the comfort of their holiday traditions, like the carving of a turkey her brother had raised. Luckily, her father had made his signature “Martian salad,” a dish of layered green Jell-O, canned fruit, and Cool Whip. It was Tezzrah’s favorite and left a frothy white mustache on her upper lip.

  For Thanksgiving, three public dinners had been organized for fire evacuees, one of them at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. The owner of the brewery had decided to ferment a special “Resilience” beer to raise money for Camp Fire victims. On the day of the feast, Sheriff Honea tossed the first handful of hops into the tank and grinned bashfully for cameras. To celebrate the holiday, Travis and his wife, Carole, drove to the brewery from their hotel in Roseville, eighty miles to the south in the Sacramento suburbs, because they felt “too messed up” to be around their extended family or other “normal” people. They had been regulars at Sierra Nevada Brewing for years and wanted to get as close as possible to Paradise.

  After the firefighters had left with Paul and Suzie Ernest, Travis Wright had stayed on the Ridge for a few more days. His Subaru, filled with his and Carole’s most precious possessions and paperwork, had burned, leaving him with no means of transportation. He’d waited for help to arrive, soaking in their unheated hot tub, scrubbing at his ash-caked skin. He’d napped on the couch. Late one evening, he’d watched as a line of police cars and vans inched down Edgewood Lane to collect the skeletons of his neighbors. Beverly Powers and her partner, Robert Duvall, trapped at death in separate trucks, unable to be together in their final moments. Ernest Foss, the musician, in his wheelchair in the driveway, his oxygen tank and a garden hose the only things left intact. His stepson and caretaker, Andrew Burt, outside their minivan with Bernice the dog. Joy Porter and her son Dennis Clark, less than a half mile from their home on Sunny Acres Way. Then the vehicles had left with their somber cargo, headlights slicing the darkness.

  The Ridge had been strikingly quiet. Travis’s thoughts looped endlessly. He’d wondered if he was going insane. Meanwhile, Carole hadn’t known whether her husband was even alive. His cellphone battery had died, and the search and rescue crews hadn’t c
hecked their house. Travis had finally managed to hitch a ride to Chico with a firefighter two days after the fire. When he’d arrived at his in-laws’ house in Rockland, he’d refused to unlace his work boots. He needed to keep them on, he thought, in case he needed to run. His hair and eyebrows were burned off in patches; it looked like he had mange. Carole had finally coaxed her husband out of his boots, then shaved his head. At a local mall, she’d helped him pick out a pair of checkered slip-on Vans as a replacement. Travis had wanted a pair since he was a child. After hearing his story, the teenage salesclerks pooled their money to pay for the new footwear. Travis and Carole were touched by the gift. Now they tried to blend in at dinner in the crowded brewery, which felt something like home.

  Rachelle and Chris Sanders, meanwhile, opted to spend Thanksgiving at the home of friends in south Chico. They had moved into the couple’s spare bedroom while they decided what to do next. Rachelle’s grandparents still owned the family home on Pentz Road, and she didn’t expect to receive anything from an insurance payout. Chris, meanwhile, fretted about how his landscaping business would fare in a town with no living vegetation. At least they had each other. Rachelle couldn’t help but think they had it all: good health, friendship, love. For the holiday, all five children were present: Chris’s two daughters; Rachelle’s little ones, Aubrey and Vincent; and baby Lincoln, of course, who’d dropped one pound in the weeks after the Camp Fire and had been admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit at Enloe Medical Center. Luckily, he was home by the holiday.

  Another of the public dinners took place at Cal State Chico, in the Bell Memorial Union. Fourteen long tables were covered in white cloth, and twinkle lights glittered along the rafters. Soft jazz pumped from speakers. Hundreds had volunteered to help. They couldn’t replace what the victims had lost, but they could ladle mashed potatoes and gravy onto paper plates. It was better than adding to the warehouses of extraneous items that well-meaning people had pulled from the backs of their closets—old bikinis and prom dresses, even a shipment of white Crocs that wouldn’t sell in stores—not understanding that what evacuees really needed was soap, toothbrushes, and underwear. (Eventually, officials had to rent an empty Toys“R”Us building, then a municipal auditorium, and finally two 20,000-square-foot warehouses to store the unwanted items.) The aisles at Target and Walmart had been stripped bare of necessities.

  This university hall wasn’t home, though, and it didn’t feel like Thanksgiving, not to the people gathered. They sat in clusters: one couple here, then a few empty seats, then a family with their toddler. These survivors found their minds wandering back to the houses that no longer existed. There was no sense of when they might experience normality again. One evacuee mused about past holidays as she sat with her son in the auditorium. There had never been enough seats, not even at the children’s table, she recalled. “It’s strange for me,” she commented to a volunteer clearing plates. “To tell you the truth, it’s like you’re dreaming but awake. That’s the way I feel. To lose everything…” She trailed off, remembering the enchiladas that she usually rolled and slotted into the oven on this day.

  The Camp Fire’s devastation had provoked shock and horror across the nation—even in Guy Fieri, who had shown up at 5 a.m. on Thanksgiving to do his part, setting up six smokers in the college’s parking lot to help cook dinner. The famous restaurateur and bleached-blond TV personality basted more than seven thousand pounds of turkey. Firefighters, more accustomed to vanquishing active flames than chatting with a celebrity, huddled around him, sleep-deprived and awkward. Fieri clasped their shoulders, telling them they were superheroes without capes, that they were crazy—“remarkable!”—warriors. He praised their uniforms, which were clean and pressed. He called them “brother.” He agreed to every request for a selfie. “You bet, brother!” Fieri said. “Whenever you’re ready, I have turkey for you.”

  The grief had been overpowering, but light was seeping in. By the end of the day, containment of the 153,000-acre Camp Fire would hit 100 percent. Volunteers wearing plush turkey hats guided lines of people indoors to eat and give thanks.

  * * *

  —

  ABOUT FOURTEEN HUNDRED PEOPLE were crammed into twelve temporary shelters that stretched to the mountains of Plumas County. Evacuees slept on inch-thick foam pads layered with pilled blankets and drank watered-down coffee or tea. An outbreak of the highly contagious norovirus—causing muscle pain, nausea, severe diarrhea, and vomiting—worsened conditions, sickening at least 145 people across four shelters. After the fire, the county had helped more than two thousand people find temporary housing. Usually, administrators expected to need to assist about 10 percent of the population—but the Ridge had brought challenging extremes: an influx of elderly people with special needs and families living below the poverty line. “That’s who you see in the shelters,” said Shelby Boston, the county director of social services. “You see the least-resourced individuals, the folks who don’t have a support system.”

  The county had also set up emergency disaster shelters for animals in Oroville, Chico, and Gridley. Within twenty-four hours, all facilities were full. They housed more than thirty species, including a few wild turkeys that had been rounded up by mistake and a parrot prone to cursing. There were chickens, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, miniature donkeys, pigs, geese, llamas, fish, dogs, tame and feral cats, koi fish, and three hermit crabs (only one of which would survive). For the first time, the National Guard was mobilized to help with an animal operation. With four thousand animals in shelters and another six thousand animals trapped in the evacuation zone, county staff desperately needed their help. The shelters went through a ton of cat litter and twenty tons of feed every day. Meanwhile, the chickens continued laying eggs, which volunteers drove by the hundreds to UC Davis for toxicity testing. Even more eggs were thrown out because scientists couldn’t say whether they were safe to consume. (They never got an answer. Funding for the study ran out before the eggs could be tested.)

  At the Walmart in Chico, a refugee camp had sprung up in the parking lot and an adjacent field. Employees from the superstore set up portable toilets to accommodate the makeshift city. To stay off the damp ground, fire victims slept in their cars or in tents set up on shipping flats. In some ways, the encampment, which came to be known as Wallietown, was better than the Red Cross shelters; here, at least, the evacuees could keep their pets close. Residents of Chico volunteered their help, smoothing white tarps on the concrete and piecing together plastic shelving, which they filled with diapers, tampons and pads, sports bras, toilet paper, canned pet food, and children’s toys. A row of canvas tents contained food. There were bulk bags of navel oranges, powdered pink lemonade, carafes of hot coffee, and boxes of frosted doughnuts.

  Volunteer Mel Contant, dubbed Wallietown’s “mayor,” helped people get situated. Looking out over the encampment, she knew people’s living situation would get ten times worse before it ever got better. Paradise had offered relative comfort to the everyman—to the teachers, the electricians, the laborers, who couldn’t afford to live elsewhere. Even if fire victims were lucky enough to have insurance that paid for a hotel, they were still left without food and clothing. They showed up at the Walmart parking lot, hoping to gather supplies from the bins of donations. FEMA had opened a Disaster Recovery Center in the former Sears storefront at the Chico Mall, but the lines there were long and the process so convoluted that it put further strain on the fire victims. FEMA would distribute $79 million in housing assistance over the next five months, a pittance compared to the payouts from insurance policies. In Wallietown, a flyer posted on a bulletin board promised that a trailer of laptops would arrive the next day in case anyone needed to reapply for their driver’s license or Social Security card.

  On Thanksgiving Day, volunteers dropped off aluminum pans of crispy turkey and fluffy mashed potatoes for everyone. Overhead, storm clouds churned, threatening to deluge the parking lot—a
known flood plain. The food steamed in the autumn chill. Condensation dripped from plastic ceilings. In a few days, Walmart would hire a private security company to roust the encampment and seal off the field with a chain-link fence. But for now, on this holiday, there was space enough to stretch out and eat.

  Meanwhile, 475 people were still unaccounted for. Captain Sean Norman was tasked with leading the field recovery operation. He oversaw the search and rescue teams, which now included four thousand people—even anthropologists, army infantry, and cadaver dogs. It was the state’s largest recovery mission. He was getting up at 5 a.m. every day and reporting to his post, listening to his colleagues as they yelled at him and wept in anguish. At 10:30 p.m., he’d climb into bed, feeling broken, only to do the same thing the next morning—pulling on his boots, knowing he had a job to do. “My feelings didn’t matter,” he said later, “because there were a whole bunch of people who needed an answer about their family members.”

  Norman was unwittingly drawing the blueprint for body recovery efforts, developing a model for mass casualties that state officials could one day use after an earthquake in San Francisco or Los Angeles. But the experience was crushing. “In the fire service, we don’t like giving up one inch of ground, one bedroom during a structure fire, one extra acre,” he would later say. “We don’t like losing, because loss, in our business, is people’s properties—their livelihoods and businesses. We exist to reduce loss. People would tell me, ‘You’re helping people find closure.’ I think we like to say that, but I don’t think that’s real. Do you ever find closure when you find you’ve lost someone?”