Five years after Camp Fire, Paradise is both a community and a place in our hearts | Opinion
The fifth anniversary of the Camp Fire is today. There will be remembrances in communities across the North State. Supervisors, assembly members and senators gathered last week at the Capitol in a solemn ceremony to mark the occasion and the lives lost that day when a spark from a PG&E electrical tower in Jarbo Gap. The town of Paradise will hold a silence of 85 seconds, one for every person who died that day. They will seal a time capsule on Wednesday. And so too, will there be quiet, private remembrances in homes and with friends who find themselves many miles away from that day and place.
I didn’t evacuate through the flames, but I’ll never forget the vicarious trauma of listening to hundreds of 911 calls that morning from The Ridge, how the locals describe the foothill communities of Paradise and Magalia that burned that day. I never learned if some of those voices made it out alive
I’ll never forget driving up Skyway, the main road through Paradise, in the days after the fire, seeing the rivulets of cooled aluminum that had leaked from cars trapped in the inferno, streaking down the streets like metal tears.
But I’ll also never forget Paradise and the ridge the way it was — a vibrant, small-town community nestled in the tall trees, that loved to come together for holiday parades down Skyway or sweet festivals in the parks.
That community wasn’t lost in the fire, it just dispersed.
In the weeks and months after the Camp Fire, thousands of people displaced by the Camp Fire found themselves scattered across the nation. While a majority of former Paradise, Magalia, Concow and Yankee Hill residents who fled the fire wound up in nearby Chico, Redding or Sacramento, a few found themselves in entirely different states, and sometimes in different countries.
Researchers from Chico State University mapped a small part of the diaspora of Camp Fire evacuees a year after the fire, and found that more than 50% had moved 30 miles or more away from their previous home. While the research wasn’t comprehensive, it showed that the older a resident was at the time of the fire, the more likely they moved further away. Possibly because of their financial ability to do so, but perhaps also because the younger population was more invested in rebuilding all they’d ever known.
Kyla Awalt and her husband Rusty were both born and raised in Paradise and though their home survived the Camp Fire, multiple of their rental properties did not. They initially chose to stay in Paradise and join the community’s fight to rebuild.
“I was trying to fight as much as I could to rally the community,” Kyla Awalt said, “to get everybody the resources that they were looking for and information out.” She worked in the town’s “Resiliency Center” which gathered information in one spot in those confusing days and months after the fire. But eventually, living in the only house on the street became a lonely prospect for the Awalts.
“There was just no one up there. It was really lonely and isolating. There (were) no resources in the town for a long, long time. Like grocery stores, that kind of stuff. It was just very scarce. And so that’s why we ended up leaving.”
The Awalts moved to Chico for a time, and then to the small town of Gallatin, about 25 minutes northeast of Nashville, Tenn., in December 2020.
“We would have stayed there,” she said. “We would never would have relocated to Tennessee, or even really been entertaining the idea had the fire not happened. But once that happened, friends left and family was scattered. And we didn’t really have a home anymore.”
As friends and family began to visit the Awalts in their new home, they too came to love Tennessee and Gallatin. Kyla’s brother and father moved there, as did several of their friends in the CrossFit community. And so, more than 1,900 miles away, a new paradise has formed.
None of the new community is planning to go back for the anniversary, Awalt said. “We don’t really have any reason to really go back and visit for now that we’ve moved and reestablished home here.”
“Do you ever miss it?” I asked her.
“I miss what it was,” she said. “I miss pre-fire, I miss the community, the friends, the memories. I mean, Paradise is still there … but it’s just so different that it’s just a different place. There’s different people there now. A different landscape. And I don’t think you ever get back what it truly was, even though you can have little pieces of it.”
Tonight, I’m meeting a friend after work to raise a glass to the 85. She and I were both reporters at The Chico Enterprise-Record in the weeks and months after the Camp Fire, and though years have passed, we’ve found ourselves in the same city again on this anniversary.
I’ll also toast also to all the survivors of the Camp Fire. Wherever you are, I hope you’re with people you love. I hope you’ve found some peace and I hope you remember that both trees and life can regrow.
People and land may carry a scar, but not even fire can destroy a community.
