Scenes From a Fire · 7:59am Dec 3rd, 2018
By now you should have already seen my report from the Camp Fire. This isn't that. There, I tried to put the disaster in its larger context. Here, I just want to offer little snatches of experiences from my seven days in the dead zone.
(Here, I also won't be sharing any of my photos. There's a standing ban on posting your fire deployment photographs to social media sites; I had to get a special waiver to add them to the RCL interview. Also: No politics this time.)
In my previous post, I shared news photos of the fire's devastation that made it look … well, literally post-apocalyptic. Skeletal remains of cars littering an empty roadway. Burned shells of buildings, and piles of debris where not even the shell survived. Smoke reducing visibility to a city block or less, as if the video game was trying to save on rendering power by occluding line of sight. My first impression of Paradise was … well, that, except literally in front of my eyes rather than on a screen.
My first impression of Magalia — slightly to the north, reached by driving across the dam spanning the Butte River — was worse. Blackened, bare tree trunks and brick chimneys were typically the only things within eyesight that stood higher than waist level. "Man, Fallout was indescribably romantic with its survivors breaking into buildings for supplies," I thought at one point. "If you were a survivor in this wasteland you'd simply starve, because there wouldn't be anything left to loot."
That was, fortunately, overselling the devastation. (If not by much.) As that first day went on, we ended up averaging maybe one standing structure per block. And many areas fared much better, especially the commercial areas surrounded by enormous asphalt parking lots which served as a natural fire buffer. We started out in the middle of one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, and it was never quite that bad again.
Still, Magalia was probably the most accurate image in terms of the human cost. The fire took less than 24 hours to make 18,000 structures basically vanish.
Searchers came from all over the state — and beyond. There was a fire crew from Albany, Oregon. There was a search team from Santa Barbara, eight hours southwest, where I went to college and also broke the arm which drove me to within 24 hours of medical bankruptcy. There was a search team from San Diego, which meant that they had to drive past the equally-apocalyptic-but-much-less-deadly Woolsey Fire in order to get to the Camp Fire.
There were searchers from Butte County, too. I ate lunch one day with a sheriff's deputy who lived in Paradise. Due to his job, he had the chance to visit his property while the evacuation order was still in place. His house had survived. None of his neighbors' homes had.
A lot of people on the search looked numb. He had the best excuse.
Photographs and memories:
What looks like a sleeping squirrel, sprawled peacefully on its side, except that it's covered with a thin layer of fallen ash.
A black head-sized sphere, its surface cracked and flaking off in layers. You walk around it to a different angle, and see the even, circular pits of a bowling ball's finger-holes. Gently press the tip of a shovel to it, and the whole sphere starts peeling apart.
A row of utility poles with power lines strung between them. Near one pole, the lines angle downward, taut; the crossbar holding the lines is a few feet below that of the other poles nearby. Then your eyes stray down toward ground level, and you realize that that power pole stops existing four feet above the ground, its charred lower end dangling in midair above the hole of its foundation.
A downed power line — posing no hazard except potentially wrapping around the axles of vehicles driving over it; there's been no electricity here since the fire — lies across the asphalt along the shoulder of the road. As you keep walking, there's a small spot of blue next to it. A songbird, claws still clinging to the line, lying on its side, as if it were still perched atop the line and gravity merely decided to locally flip sideways.
A fist-sized chunk of charcoal on the forest floor in the middle of the devastation. I assume it's debris until a teammate looks at its irregularities and points out it's a burnt-to-death bird.
The metal handle of a shovel. A precise three-foot gap. The metal blade of a shovel, its shaft hole lined up with the handle.
A perfectly untouched car just feet away from the white-and-grey pile of ash and metal, six inches tall, which once used to be a garage. Two garbage cans at the roadside in front of an ex-house. An intact chicken coop, twenty feet away from a similar ex-house. We fed the chickens.
A line of debris half-damming the Butte River, which for the previous 132 years had been a historic covered bridge.
Day one: In Magalia, searching door-to-door for human remains. I find what used to be a bedroom. I can tell by the rectangle of steel springs, which are all that remains of a mattress. There were once bookshelves at the head of the bed. I can tell because there's a rectangular blob of white fluff which used to be a stack of books.
At the time of the fire, there was a book on the bed. I can tell because, when I start to stir the ashes above the ex-mattress, a single legible word catches my eye amid the featureless debris. Capital letters, bold, sans serif:
BONE
I take a picture. My teammates and I share a laugh. I call my team leader over. "Hey," I say, "I found a bone." The only one within miles which we wouldn't be obligated to report.
Minutes later, as we've cleared the house and are about to move on, I have a terrible thought. I go back and very carefully sift through the surrounding debris, on and under and around the bed. Because it's one of those stories which wouldn't be nearly as funny in hindsight if we were to laugh it off and then there were to be actual human remains underneath.
(There weren't.)
After sunrise, day one: The sky was a solid light grey. Near the horizon, barely visible, a pale red circle of light: the sun through an entire atmosphere's worth of smoke.
After sunset, day five: The sky was a solid dark grey. High above, a small, ghostly circle of light: a waxing gibbous moon.
"The only difference between day and night," I remarked to a fellow searcher at one point, "is whether they've turned the lights on."
I didn't see a shadow until my third day out.
I got to talking tonight (at the coffee shop where I'm writing this) with a paramedic who drove to Paradise to evacuate people from their hospital once the fire started. He shared his photos of driving through the flames as they sped down Skyway on their way out of town, and talked about how they could feel the heat even through the vehicle's doors.
He also shared a photo he took of a billboard as they were driving through Paradise. "Fire Brings People Together," it reads. An advertisement for a fireplace/stove showroom.
In the background, behind the billboard, roaring flames light up the sky.
On day six, I was leading a team which searched the banks of the Butte River, to see if anyone might have perished there after trying to escape the flames by running to the water. "Great!" we said. "We're not going through the debris of houses, just the burnt-clear areas where brush used to be. It'll be a simple hike. We won't even need our Tyvek suits!"
Turned out that while fire clearing out the brush is great for visibility, actual motion through the burnt areas still had to contend with all the black-charred trunks and vines left behind. You'd occasionally step onto white-colored ground to find your foot sinking into six inches of ash. You'd step onto slopes of brown dirt and rock to find them giving way underneath you. We returned to the base wearing three different colors, none of which were the orange-and-green we started the day with.
Shortly before lunch, I noticed a suspicious object near an island in the middle of the river, and waded out through shin-high water to check it out. It was the vinyl skin of a long-abandoned inflatable boat. Afterward, when I got back to the riverbank and climbed out to rejoin the team, my waterproof boots obligingly did their job of preventing water from passing through. When we stopped for lunch, I stripped off my boots and upended them, and christened the resulting pool "Lake Horizon".
(Lake Bax, actually, but the joke works better when it uses the context of the name you all know me by.)
That was also when I discovered two nails embedded in the sole of my right shoe — flat metal heads flush with the rubber of the sole. One was near the toe on the far left side, a fraction of an inch from the edge. The other was perfectly in line with it but on the very far right.
I got a knife and dug one out. And kept digging. And kept digging. It was over an inch long; it was a wonder it hadn't pierced through the top of my boot as well.
Back in one of my earlier trips through destroyed houses, I'd apparently stepped on some nails left lying upright in the debris as the wood they were driven into burned away. The boards they'd held together were just a teeny bit wider than the size of my bare foot, and my foot came down exactly into the gap between two of them, so that my shoe picked up two souvenirs without me noticing. If I had stepped a fraction of an inch to the left or to the right, I'd have earned myself a hospital visit and a series of tetanus shots.
I think I accidentally left the nails at our lunch spot — a small patch of concrete at the river's edge where the old road used to go, before it washed out and the modern one was built several hundred yards away.
Shortly thereafter, though, I picked up a gorgeous turkey feather, whole and pristine and untouched by fire. There was no sign of the turkey.
A teammate startled a fox out of a bush by the river's edge. It apparently ran right past me, about five feet away, hidden by a small rise by the bank. Everyone saw it but me.
There were deer hoofprints by the water, and larger divots in the sand which were probably canine pawprints. There were piles of half-digested berry-seed dung which were most likely bear scat. And at the start of the day, as we first reached the water, we spooked an extremely distraught housecat.
I tried to gently, slowly, approach it to within petting range. It wasn't having any of it. I couldn't even leave it any food because, in an effort to make my pack for the day lighter, I'd specifically removed the plastic bag of cat food I'd packed for the days we were going through housing remains.
We had to leave it be. At least it had easy access to water.
I have a picture from that day, taken in the burnt woods on the river flats. Dark tree trunks ringed by withered leaves stand in the foreground against the white backdrop of the surrounding land. If I told you it was taken in the mountain foothills in November, you would assume I had bundled up to go out in the frigid fog after a snowfall.
That day, the temperature was T-shirt weather. It had been over six months since California had had precipitation of any kind. The white on the ground was a field of ash.
November 19. Scrolling through my Twitter feed, in the evening after a filling meal of Korean-style barbecued ribs. Someone retweeted a New York City resident saying they were looking at the haze outside and thinking, "No. That can't possibly be from the Camp Fire."
It was.
NOAA's Vertically Integrated Smoke maps from that day show a plume of high-particulate air sweeping south through the desert, along the Mexican border, through Texas, then northeast over Washington, D.C. and New York City before dispersing over the Atlantic. California's wildfires were literally causing smog a full continent away.
The reason that aforementioned meal was so filling is that I accidentally ended up with triple portions.
I knew I'd enjoy the ribs — well, "ribs"; they were boneless fist-sized chunks of beef so tender you could cut them with a fork — so I gave my best puppy-dog eyes to the CDC convict serving us from the Cal Fire food truck, motioned through the glass at the meat, and held up two fingers. He smiled and put two chunks of meat on the plate making its way down the hot food line. A few seconds later, we both realized I'd miscounted: I'd made my request while he was serving the woman in front of me. So he put two ribs on the next plate, too.
The woman got into a brief debate with the servers. She hadn't asked for extra meat! There was almost two pounds of it on her plate! I apologized, clarified the situation, and she joked she'd track me down in the dining area and make me take the extra.
She did.
I made it through the two I'd asked for and half of the third — not to mention clearing my plate of all the sides I'd grabbed, and dessert — and one of my teammates took pity on me and finished the rest. I walked off with a clean plate, and the clock ticking on one hell of a food coma.
Spraypainted orange on particle board, propped up against a barbed-wire fence:
"LOOTERS BEWARE, WE HAVE GUNS AND A BACKHOE"
On my last day, our team was deployed to the Concow area, up Highway 70. We crossed the bridge over a spur of Oroville Lake; the sky was yellowish-brown and visibility was about a mile.
If you looked over the side of the bridge, you could see a jaw-dropping swath of bare dirt above the waterline. A year and a half ago, when the Oroville Dam made news by flooding over its emergency spillway and forcing an evacuation of downstream communities, it was at 100% capacity for the first time ever, at 901 feet depth. On Thanksgiving, the lake level was at 669 feet, and that 232-foot vertical difference was a sloping bank of bare, uniform brown.
(Picture standing at water level underneath the bridge. Look uphill. There's not a single blade of grass until you've climbed over 30 times your height. It's as if someone took a football-field-sized razor and shaved away all the life. And when all you're seeing in the hillsides is the black of charcoal and the white of ash, the bare dirt of dry lakebed is an entirely different sort of chilling.)
We drove onward and upward into the charred hills. Then we drove out of the fire zone, into a little peninsula of green southwest of the burned area, on our way to the forward operating base at Scooter's Cafe. The normal brown-and-green of the trees felt weird — though not that weird; it was oddly common in the fire zone for trees to survive nearly untouched because the underbrush around them burned too fast for the trunks to catch and too low to ignite the pine needles. More disorientingly, however, the air cleared, and for the first time in four days I saw blue sky. We had ascended above the smoke.
Scooter's Cafe — at the top of a pass near where the Feather River cut the foothills — was one of those institutions peculiar to rural California, which thrived in a singular balance between two very different strains of backwoods residents. Its exterior porch was plastered with a melting pot of signs and posters: expressing support for guns, lamenting the spending habits of wives, promoting a local green music festival, urging readers to bring kindness forth into the world. Its sign had the word "Scooter's" curving atop a Harley-Davidson motorcyle which rode atop the "Cafe". The few dilapidated wooden tables left outside held stacks of coasters advertising Sierra Nevada pale ale. The cafe was boarded up, and the parking lot was our staging area. With vibrant green pines sprouting above the cherry-red trucks, it was the most color I'd seen the whole trip.
They deployed our search team to a neighborhood mostly already cleared, to follow a fire crew covering the remaining houses — returning to the ones where earlier searchers had been stymied by collapsed metal roofs, so the fire crew could pull the roofs off and we could clear the areas underneath. We drove down winding pavement into a neighborhood mostly accessed by dirt roads amid steep rolling hills. At one point, rounding a corner, I got my first real glimpse of the landscape of the fire — still up above the worst of the smoke, with a clear view out to the horizon. Most everything within sight was a silent, sullen grey, scarred by black skeletons of trees and brown veins of roads normally concealed by brush. Occasional islands of unburned faded green had been left standing by the capricious flames, and even more occasional houses among them.
Both marijuana farms were a total loss.
We noticed, driving back from our Day 4 assignment, that the tax preparer's office was still standing amid the surrounding rubble.
"Huh," I said. "I guess even in Paradise, the only certain things are death and taxes."
The entire car laughed. Then everyone else gave me that Look that said, "That was horrible and wrong and we are bad people for having laughed along with it."
For the first few days, we drove up Highway 191 toward Paradise every morning as we approached forward Incident Command, and drove back down the same road on the way home.
The first day, there were no guardrails, only a long strip of metal on the tiny ledge past the edge of the asphalt. All of the wooden posts holding the guardrail up had burned away.
The second day, we passed road crews driving metal posts in to replace the old ones.
The third day, some of the hillsides were a bright artificial green, as they'd sprayed grass seed on the ashes in hopes of getting plants re-rooted before the rains came.
Each night, on the way home, we would pass a sign that came up suddenly on us amid the thick, choking smoke.
Breathe, it said.
The good news is: California has had heavy rain on and off since Thanksgiving, and around the end of November the fire was officially declared 100% contained. Our SAR team hasn't been back since; the fire crews and urban teams, who are getting paid, are mopping up in a dwindling inward spiral.
Magalia and Concow (both of which I helped search in) are having their evacuation orders lifted tomorrow. Paradise itself, not quite yet. I heard a lot of news expressing fear of mudslides as rain opened up on denuded hills. I haven't heard anything yet about how bad that got.
Last night was our annual Search & Rescue holiday party. I got lost trying to find the country club, and had to pull out my iPhone to reorient myself among the twisty hillside streets. When I got there, they called me up to honor me with the "Ground Team Searcher of the Year" award, specifically citing (among other good qualities) my stellar navigation skills.
I came out to see the ground covered by a thin coating of white.
But the only haze in the air was the clouds of condensation from my breathing. There was no smoke. It wasn't ash.
It had merely hailed while we were inside.
Couple of things for all y'all making it down to the comments:
Hello to my new followers! I notice I picked up nearly a dozen after the RCL post.
Hello also to those of you wondering what happened to the Smoking Tigers project! It's tempting to say "👆 this", and also not entirely wrong, but there have been a couple of other factors which overwhelmed me these past few months, the run-up to the American election among them, as well as the need to put together a resume (which I'm very close to being done with).
The good news is the stress of fall has been receding, inch by inch. The bad news is, winter and its lack of sunlight historically has done a number on me emotionally. At least that's something I can plan and compensate for.
Once I'm through this week (with the resume done and some family visiting handled) I'm going to try to take a few deep breaths and kick myself back into productivity again. Thanks for your patience.
Hey. Glad you're ok. Glad you're getting seasonal precipitation.
Thanks for this, Horizon. Beautiful writing about a horrible situation, and a sincere effort to make a difference.
Holy geez, Bax.
Lil-Miss-Jaye, the pony porn artist who created Li'l Miss Rarity and is otherwise an upstanding gent and asset to this fandom, lives in Magalia, and he's been my window onto the Camp Fire this whole time. His house apparently survived the flames intact, and he's been back home for a while now. It's just mind-blowing to think anyone can have a house to come back to when all that's happened. :(
You are awesome and congrats on your award.
Also, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Well, this was haunting. Vivid imagery combined with just enough of the small things (darkly hilarious bits, the occasional slip-up) to remind me that humans were very much present.
Congrats on the award!
At first I thought the bowling ball was a human head you were just describing metaphorically.
My foot is so uncomfortable now.
great textual photographs here.
never thought about that before. sounds like it should be a blessing, but it's probably quite painful in itself.
Hey there, thanks for all your hard work.
CDC convict?Of course that stands for California Department of Corrections and not Centers for Disease Control like I initially thought. Don’t mind me… Moving on:That old adage "they should've sent a poet" comes to mind in a roundabout way. I've seen facts and figures, read news reports, breathed the smoke, and seen videos, but your words are a big part of how I've been able to mentally digest the large and small magnitudes of what all happened. Thank you for that, and for your service to humanity in general (iPhone navigation skills notwithstanding).
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Don't let the winter get you down! Let us know if you need writing prompts, friendly pokes, or the like.