Paradise

by Lizzie Johnson

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  THE FEATHER RIVER CANYON had a long history of wind-driven wildfires. Station 36 existed in part because of its proximity to this yawning crack in the earth. The sixty-mile chasm snaked across Butte County, from Lassen National Forest to Lake Oroville; it trapped seasonal winds as they spun clockwise over the Sierra Nevada and pushed them toward the low-pressure coast. The winds blew day and night, billowing up the canyon walls as sunshine warmed the air and down them as temperatures cooled, clocking speeds upwards of 100 mph and blasting the towns of Magalia, Concow, and Paradise. They pelted homes and windshields with pine needles like obnoxious confetti. When there was a fire, the Feather River Canyon also funneled smoke south, directly to the hallway outside McKenzie’s bedroom. The scent was always a swirling, ghostly harbinger of terrible things to come.

  McKenzie, who had a laid-back nature and a dry sense of humor, considered himself a pessimist. This mentality served him well as a firefighter, but it had not served him so well in his personal life; always anticipating the worst was not good for relationships. He was divorced, and his daughter, Courtney, now eighteen, lived with her grandparents or his ex-wife during fire season. His senses, so finely attuned to potentially disastrous conditions on the landscape, failed him in more ordinary environments. He struggled to find a balance between his family and his job. He was rarely on time to Courtney’s concerts and assemblies at Oroville Christian School, parking his red engine amid the rows of bumper-stickered sedans and minivans. With his handheld radio and bright yellow uniform, so unlike the other parents, he embarrassed her. Children often don’t understand that kind of love. Now that she was older, he wished he’d shown up more often.

  McKenzie had grown up near the county seat of Oroville, a city of nineteen thousand that was bisected by the Feather River about twenty miles south of Station 36. Teenagers raised in Butte County tend to fall into law enforcement, firefighting, construction, or methamphetamines; the latter account for 80 percent of the county’s crime. (The district attorney had turned a glass laboratory vessel seized during a drug raid into an aquarium, which he proudly displayed in his office.) McKenzie’s mother was a chiropractic assistant; his father managed a chain grocery store. They were strict, and McKenzie and his older sister, Jennifer, were taught to work hard. His first job was bagging groceries to pay for the insurance on his Ford Ranger. He was eventually promoted to night shift janitor.

  When McKenzie was seventeen, his father died of cancer. Afterward, McKenzie felt directionless. He debated signing up for the police academy and even completed courses in arrest methods and firearms, only to decide that it wasn’t the right fit. At twenty, he enrolled in the firefighting academy at Butte College. Tuition was $2,500 plus the cost of uniforms. Coursework bored him, and his ornery streak and love of partying nearly got him thrown out. But he was excellent in the field, and thanks to an attentive mentor, his grades rose enough that he managed to graduate midpack. A few months later, Cal Fire hired him full time. McKenzie became a firefighter; his sister joined the local police force.

  His father’s cancer diagnosis had come quickly and unexpectedly, and in the decades that followed, McKenzie vowed he would not let the worst catch him by surprise again. In 2011, when he was on a dove hunting trip, a stranger accidentally shot him in the back with a .22-caliber handgun. McKenzie called dispatch and ordered his own medical helicopter instead of just phoning 911. The bullet permanently lodged in his left lung, robbing him of 25 percent of his breathing capacity. But he continued fighting fires, and whenever he struggled to keep pace with the younger men, he would blame his age, not his lungs.

  When a blaze called the Wall Fire erupted in California in 2017, McKenzie was trawling for salmon off the sparsely populated Lost Coast. His phone lit up: The fire, it turned out, was headed toward Robinson Mill, where he lived on a ten-acre property, a factory-built unit at the end of a winding three-mile dirt road that stymied even ambulances. Over the course of the six-hour drive home, he convinced himself that his house had been destroyed, along with his menagerie of rescue animals, which included a goat mangled by coyotes, a boxer with damaged vocal cords, and an abandoned llama. Worst-case scenario.

  He arrived early that afternoon, as an officer was barricading the dirt access road, and parked his truck, inflatable Zodiac boat in tow, in the driveway. His neighbors’ homes lay in rubble. Their marijuana patches smoldered, the air pungent with weed and smoke. But he found his property mostly unscathed. The wildfire had scorched a fence post, turned a small cabin to ash, and roasted half of the mature oaks. His donkey—dubbed Ghost Donkey, or G.D., for his shy nature—was still in his pen, as were the goat, boxer, and llama.

  Perched on the roof, McKenzie poured himself a glass of tepid scotch, no ice, and drank deeply. For once he was happy to be proved wrong.

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  ON THIS NOVEMBER MORNING, the pine needles continued to fall as McKenzie finished his shower and headed to the kitchen, his hair damp and smelling of fruit-scented shampoo. The fridge was stocked with fresh groceries, and he pulled vegetables from its clear plastic drawers, lining up ingredients in a rainbow on the counter. He sliced red potatoes for a corned beef hash—it was his turn to cook breakfast. Normally the radios chattered and screeched, reporting communications between stations across Butte County, but he had muted the emergency radios overnight so he could sleep. He kept them off, relishing the quiet. His cellphone rested faceup on the counter. Wind thudded against the windows. His knife clipped the butcher block.

  Outside, the anemometer whirred.

  THE FIRE: PREVAILING WINDS

  Hundreds of miles from Butte County, a high-pressure system was brewing. The dry air mass settled above high deserts and sprawling salt flats, pooling in the Great Basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. To the west, California’s sunbaked valleys beckoned. The air ached to reach them, pushing against the mountains that stud the Golden State’s spine like an irregular dam, threatening to spill through their uneven peaks. The Sierra Nevada slants higher as the range runs south, with mountaintops rising 7,000 to 10,000 feet near Lake Tahoe and 14,000 feet near Mount Whitney—so it was over the leeward slope of the Northern Sierra that the air mass overflowed first, whistling through gaps and passes in the granite. Hours later, the tempest would crest even the immense peaks of the Southern Range, unleashing the winds on the lands below.

  Southern Californians call the winds the Santa Anas; to Northern Californians, they’re the Diablo Winds. Each locality has its own vernacular for these mountain gusts. Swiss Germans call them foehn winds. In the Rocky Mountains, they’re the Chinook Winds. In Butte County, they’re known as the Jarbo Winds. They pummeled Butte County’s bluffs from the northeast—powerful enough to ground aircraft, set off car alarms, sandblast homes, and uproot trees.

  At first, nothing made the weather on this particular day seem extraordinary. The Jarbo Winds were a well-known event, reversing California’s prevailing airflow and depositing a ribbon of hot breath along the coast. The dry currents undulated above the white-capped Pacific Ocean, weaving their way across the water. Everything about the phenomenon was expected, except for the timing: The winds usually followed the seasonal rains, but this year, the rains had yet to come.

  It had been more than seven months since even a half inch of water had tumbled from the sky. Tall grass that had thrived in the previous winter’s rainstorms now cured in the sun. Brown husks from the state’s historic drought, which had killed 150 million trees, matted the ground. Atop them, more needles and leaves fell. The ten-month period from January through October was the fourth warmest in California in more than 120 years, following five years of chart-topping heat. July was five degrees warmer than it should have been—the hottest in history. The whole world was warmer than it should have been.

  Live fuel moisture—a measure of the water stored in a plant—was at
74 percent for a common evergreen shrub known as manzanita. The historical average during November was 93 percent. In the Northern Sierra Nevada, the National Fire Danger Rating System’s energy release component—an estimate of how quickly a flaming front could consume a landscape—broke records all summer. Any of these signs would be troubling on its own: the curing vegetation, the parched landscape, the gales wailing like banshees.

  Combined, they foretold an unprecedented peril.

  CHAPTER 2

  ALL ITS NAME IMPLIES

  A warm breeze filtered through the town of Paradise on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 7, 2018. It ruffled Rachelle Sanders’s blond hair as she made her way across the hospital parking lot, flip-flops thwapping against the pavement. It was 75 degrees outside, and sunshine bleached the sky. Rachelle paused to lock her white Suburban from a distance and then stepped through the facility’s sliding glass doors. Her belly, full and round, strained the fabric of her athletic T-shirt.

  The Adventist Health Feather River hospital sat on the town’s eastern edge, overlooking the steep river canyon flecked with manzanita and gray pine. The hundred-bed facility served the largest community in the Sierra Nevada foothills, including its sizable elderly population. The average Paradise resident was fifty years old, and about a quarter of its roughly 26,500 residents had a disability of some kind, making the hospital indispensable. The Birth Day Place had become a respected labor and delivery unit that drew expectant mothers from across rural Northern California, where medical care was limited. Since it opened as a fifteen-bed sanatorium in 1950, only thirty-one thousand infants had been born within its walls, though these days there was more than one birth a day, marking a shifting demographic.

  Rachelle, thirty-five, was due to give birth in three weeks and had scheduled a routine nonstress test, typical for older mothers in the last trimester. She had spent the morning with her personal trainer at the gym, doing Russian twists, lunging off a BOSU ball, and sipping the cold dregs of her morning coffee. She was still dressed in leggings, expecting the checkup to last less than thirty minutes. Her seven-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son would soon finish classes for the day; she would need to change clothes and pick them up at their charter school. “Full mom mode,” she called it.

  A nurse settled Rachelle in the pregnancy triage room, a sterile white-walled space with three beds partitioned by flimsy curtains. She squirted cold gel onto the globe of Rachelle’s middle. Sensors measured her contractions and the baby’s reaction. The prenatal heartbeat flooded the room, so thunderous that a patient resting in the far bed flipped over to scrutinize the scene. The volume had been turned up too high. The baby recoiled from the noise, and the rhythmic thudding of its heart sputtered—a sign of fetal distress. The nurse studied the grainy ultrasound screen and made a quick call to the obstetrician.

  “Let’s admit her,” the doctor said.

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  DOWN PENTZ ROAD, the nursery in Rachelle’s home was bare, and a stack of Amazon packages touched the ceiling in the entryway. Neither she nor her husband, Chris, had wanted another child. Their home mirrored that apprehension. They had already given away their children’s old clothing and toys and had been forced to rebuy it all. Refusing to unpack the looming tower of cardboard packages—a monument to the baby’s expected arrival—was a way of making it feel less real. It was the sort of denial that Rachelle had learned from her parents as a child.

  She had grown up three hundred miles south of Paradise in Fresno, a working-class city named after its ash trees. Her mother was a dental assistant; her father owned a contracting company. (He had somehow managed to charm her during a routine teeth cleaning.) As the oldest of three daughters, Rachelle was responsible for minding her sisters, two and six years her junior, while her parents worked. When her mother began to show signs of mental illness, it was Rachelle, an eight-year-old child, who managed the household. She used a two-step stool to scrub the kitchen counters clean and walked her younger sisters the half mile home after school. Her parents pretended nothing was amiss with this setup.

  On weekends, Rachelle (rhymes with “Michelle”) woke up early and accompanied her father to his work sites. She loved riding in his truck, listening to the local country radio station and watching the farmland whip past in a blur of tans and yellows. With him, Rachelle felt her responsibilities fade, and she enjoyed just being a kid. Even so, he could be stern, impatient with childlike behavior. If she promised to put away her art set and forgot, he wouldn’t hesitate to throw it in the trash.

  Some of her best memories took place during the winter holidays, when she and her family would drive to the mountains to visit her grandparents, who owned a retirement home on Pentz Road in Paradise. In the nineties, they had added a playroom off the garage that Rachelle and her sisters christened Motel 6 because it easily slept a half dozen people. Puzzles and game tables, including ping-pong and foosball, lined the walls. An exterior bulb with a frosted cover was the only source of light. It was ugly but couldn’t be swapped for a new fixture because of updated code requirements. On those trips, Rachelle and her father would comb the many antiques stores for traditional piggy banks. In the evening, her grandfather, a retired cop, taught her to stargaze. He pointed out Orion’s glittering belt, named the diamond point of the Big Dipper, and traced Cassiopeia’s sharp peaks. To a city girl, the constellations were a revelation. So was the snow. Sometimes storms dusted Paradise in sugar-spun beauty—enough to marvel at, but never enough to shovel. Thickets of ponderosa pine cloaked entire blocks. Houses with long driveways were lined up as neatly as teeth. There were no streetlights and no sidewalks. In the spring, tens of thousands of butter-yellow daffodils bloomed along the roadsides.

  By college, her trips to the mountains had grown more infrequent, though she still thought of Paradise often. Rachelle was studying to be a teacher at the state university in her hometown; she had always dreamed of teaching kindergarten. She was still an undergraduate when she met Mike Zuccolillo. She had finished job shadowing at a nearby high school and stopped at Chipotle for lunch, as did Mike, a recent divorcé with olive-hued skin and dark hair. They hit it off in line—complete strangers laughing over things neither now remembers—and began dating soon after. She took him to Paradise to visit her grandparents—it made for a cheap vacation. On that visit and the ones that followed, Mike came to love Paradise as much as Rachelle did.

  They hatched a plan to settle in Paradise, moving first to Chico, twelve miles downhill. At 92,861 people, it was Butte County’s largest city and sprawled across the valley floor. Mike applied for his broker’s license and operated a real estate business from a home office in their backyard. They married and had their first child, Vincent, in June 2009. He was a cyclone of a baby, feisty and vocal, with his father’s Italian coloring and slightly outturned ears. Six months later, they bought a house for $245,000 in Paradise and moved onto Castle Drive. Their neighborhood looked across Butte Creek Canyon, nicknamed the Little Grand Canyon for its rusty ridges and cavernous basin, on the western side of town. The house was an outdated foreclosure with mauve fixtures and appliances, but it was redeemed by its back patio. At night, the city lights below mirrored the starry sky. By Christmas, the family had settled in. Their neighbors welcomed them with a homemade gingerbread house, their new address iced above the candy door.

  For a few years, they were happy. Mike was appointed to a seat on the town’s planning commission. Rachelle quit her job teaching kindergarten to help with his real estate business. She looked up property listings; he attended the auctions. They had another child, Aubrey, a miniature of Rachelle with lake-blue eyes and pale hair. Mike nicknamed her Pop-Tart for her sweet, affectionate nature. They took their toddlers to play at Bille Park, a former olive orchard, which Rachelle had enjoyed on her childhood visits.

  And then their marriage collapsed—an ordinary enough occurrence that in a small town
like Paradise became big drama. They divorced in 2013. Mike kept the house overlooking Butte Creek Canyon and ran for Town Council, losing by 250 votes. Rachelle and the children moved in with her grandparents on Pentz Road, where that ugly frosted light fixture still shone from the wall. She got a job in the human resources department of an Oroville company.

  As she drove through the outskirts of town day after day, she would pass Paradise’s most famous icon, a wooden welcome sign. It had been there for forty-six years, topped by an actual bandsaw blade fashioned into a metal halo. It read: May you find Paradise to be all its name implies.

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  IN THE SUMMER OF 2014, as Rachelle settled into the routines of single parenting, she met Chris through a mutual friend. Chris was thirteen years older and managing a landscaping company in Chico, where he had been born. His mother had given birth when she was fifteen, a high school freshman unprepared for motherhood, and her parents had stepped in.

  His grandparents, who had already raised three daughters, cared for Chris like the son they’d never had. His grandfather taught him to pitch a softball and root for the San Francisco Giants, to hook worms on a fishing line and grease a rifle for duck hunting. Chris called him Bompa. His grandfather worked long days delivering Wonder Bread, and his clothes always smelled of flour and yeast. After hours, he was one of the best baseball pitchers in Butte County—his photo even hung on the Wall of Fame at an Applebee’s restaurant. Chris never saw him lose his temper, though he was known to be less patient with other family members. With the boy, he was gracious and giving, and Chris idolized him. For Chris’s sixteenth birthday, his grandfather bought them tickets to see the San Francisco Giants play the New York Mets at Candlestick Park. Baseball legend Darryl Strawberry hit two home runs, the ball cracking across the stadium. Chris couldn’t stop smiling.