I stopped doing the whole social media thing a while back for a variety of reasons, so I don't have the photo timeline here, but if I look at the photos on my phone for the week leading up to November 8th, 2018 it is surreal to see how normal they were:
- Pictures of Kate and the kids playing in the car dealership as we waited for the financing department to come back with paperwork for our RAV-4.
- A video of Oak teaching Sky how to push the button on the water dispenser to refill our 5 gallon jugs at the Holiday Market.
- Sky and Oak playing in the front yard at 716 Roberts Road, Paradise, California.
I don't have any pictures of it, but we also have the clippings from Sky's first haircut on November 7th, 2018. Everything seemed so normal without the faintest hint of what was to come. Memory is unfortunately such an imperfect thing. I read that every time you recall a memory it is like taking a book off the shelf and smudging the words a bit, maybe rearranging a page or two, and then putting it back on the shelf so that the next time you read it, it is altered from the time before. I am sure that my memory is fallible in regards to that miserable day, but this is what I remember and I am hoping that writing it down will help to get it out.
November 8th, 2018 started like most days do with an early morning wake-up call from Oak and Sky. I really don't remember which one it was who woke up first that day. I also don't remember exactly what we were doing, although based on that snapshot in time, I am confident that it probably involved building some variant of a "Dinosaur/Airplane/Schoolbus" out of Duplo blocks and then rebuilding it into an "Airplane/Schoolbus/Dinosaur".
At 6:36 AM my phone buzzed annoyingly at me through my pocket. It was my CEO paging me since I was the on-call "Duty Manager" that week. This was not an unusual occasion and one that was well rehearsed. I acknowledged the page, woke Kate up to let her know that I needed her help with the kids and then disappeared into my closet/office to find out what the issue was.
It was Kate who first noticed the smell and saw the tinge of smoke in the air. It was a curious wisp at the time, nothing too exciting given the time of year and the propensity for agricultural burns and distant wildfires in the area. I don't think we ever reached the cavalier point, but we certainly were starting to feel a little nonchalant about this fixture of California living. We probably wouldn't have thought about it as much as we did if it wasn't for the message that PG&E had sent the day before advising that they would be cutting power due to high wind and wild fire risks.
We stepped outside to survey the situation and saw that some of our neighbors were doing the same. No one had any news but there was a definite tension in the air. These meetings of neighbors in front of our homes were a hallmark of the Paradise experience. Kate had been planning to take the kids down to Chico in the morning so the combination of that and the uncertainty prompted us to decide that maybe they should head down early (Around 730) to be safe. Who knows, maybe she would even be able to see the source of smoke from that vantage point on Skyway since we had been unable to find any good information about it.
Things had been really stressful at work so I was going to take the morning to pack up some bags for Kate and the kids so that they could visit Grandma and Grandpa in the mountains while I tried to get my head sorted out. This has always seemed to be my modus operandi; I run myself into the ground and then try to recover with a few days in isolation. This has never proven to be a great formula, but it was the best tool that I had in my toolbox at the time. I grabbed our suitcases from their home in the closet and started to fill them with a weekend's worth of clothes, never imagining that I was saving the only belongings that would remain after twenty four hours save some incidental stuff that happened to already be in our cars. I could have saved myself a lot of difficulty if I had packed a bit more thoroughly.
In between the kid's clothes and Kate's clothes, I would step outside to check what the sky was looking like. For a while it wasn't too exciting and I would pause to speculate with the neighbors since there was still nothing on the news or on Cal-Fire's website.
I am going to guess that it was around 9 AM that things started to get really scary. There was a rumbling in the sky that sounded like thunder, but not a regular thunderstorm. It had an evil timbre to it and the skies were streaked with a darker stain than just minutes before. It was a result of static created by all the smoke and ash in the sky. This was not going to be a normal day at all. Looking back, it is so funny to think that my biggest stress when I woke up that morning was dreading having to figure out how to send out an email to about 30K customers using the crappy mass email tool that we had. I tried not to panic as I started to shift my plans from a relaxing weekend to getting the hell out of our house and hopefully surviving to see my family again.
We had a "dress rehearsal" for this, in a way, about two weeks after Sky was born when we had to load everyone up and drive to Sacramento when a fire seemed like it may be paying a visit to our neighborhood. That had turned out to be a false alarm, but it had provided a level of confidence that I knew how to do this. I started with the dogs, loading them up in the car along with their food and some bowls and beds, just like the last time. Then came the bunnies, although this time they would need to share a carrier since we had added two cats to our menagerie since the year before. They weren't happy about it, but they went along begrudgingly. Next was Cera iguana. The tupperware container that she had ridden in during the move to the house from Pittsburg, CA seemed like more of a tight fit, but there weren't any better accommodations and being loose in the car was not an option.
It wasn't until I got to the aforementioned cats that I started to lose a lot of time. I had never had cats before and had definitely never tried to put them into carriers, never mind double-occupancy. It is worth mentioning that we had only recently adopted them as kittens and they were definitely not entirely sure what to make of Kate and I, the little monster toddlers, or the situation in general. I am sure that they could sense impending danger and my stress but I know they were not doing great at connecting the dots that morning. I would catch one and manage to get it into the carrier and then chase the other one down. Time after time, the first cat would jump out of the carrier as I tried to load the second. I could feel the clock ticking down with each failure. Finally I thought of a better plan and decided to put the carrier in the bathroom to limit the distance that any cat could escape to and Diablo waited inside while I went looking for Shasta for what I hoped would be the last time.
I couldn't find her anywhere. Kate called and as I scrambled around tossing furniture I let her know that I couldn't find Shasta anywhere. I imagined how I would feel leaving her there and weighed the lives in the car against hers. I pictured the look on Kate's face if I left an animal behind in my frantic state. Finally, I found her under a bed I had already checked under at least twice. I am not ashamed to say that I was not as gentle as I could have been in wrangling her out from under the bed and into the bathroom for a successful transfer.
With all the animals finally loaded up, and fogging up the windows, it was definitely long past time to go. It is worth pausing to mention at this point that the car we were loading up into was my Toyota RAV 4 with about 250K miles on it which had barely made it back from San Francisco a couple weeks before due to overheating (While Oak loved this "big blue truck", its unreliability was the reason why we had purchased the new RAV-4 just days before) and had not been driven since. It was the only option we had though as there was no way to fit everyone into the Prius sitting in the driveway. The idea of trying to make it out of town in the best of circumstances would have been frankly daunting; this was a lot worse.
I pulled out of our driveway onto Robert's Road and made the turn that I had made a thousand times before onto Oliver Road. None of those thousand times had involved traffic backed up for more than a mile though and I immediately found myself boxed in. There weren't really any alternatives available at that point. I split my attention between the fact that the traffic wasn't moving and the fact that the car was getting very hot. I was running the heat full blast to try to keep the engine from overheating and the windows were up because the smoke was becoming thicker and thicker outside. The dogs, rabbits, and cats were noticing too and were clearly getting agitated. Cera Iguana is likely the only one enjoying the climate control, or lack thereof.
It seemed like forever, but based on the pictures I was taking at the time to share with Kate regarding my progress, it took about an hour to make it up Oliver Road to Skyway, a.k.a. the only accessible road out of town at that time. I was scared and trying to play it cool. Between calling and updating Kate and my family, I was checking in on Slack to let people know that I would probably be offline the rest of the day. It is clear to me now reading those messages that I was beginning to understand the gravity of the situation based on the calm and cool persona that I was trying to project, casually providing updates and cancelling meetings. I was desperately looking for something to feel in control of as control become elusive.
I don't know exactly what I was expecting to see as I approached Skyway, but I know that I was expecting to feel a sense of relief that didn't come. As the sky got darker and darker, the air smokier and smokier (Even in the car), the sight of another traffic jam started the real sense of hopelessness. Up until that point I had been worried largely about my car dying and blocking traffic. I hadn't really considered that I might die that day. Turning onto Skyway and seeing people starting to abandon their cars, it was hard to imagine a happy ending.
Between 10:03 AM when I got to Skyway and 11:08 when I knew I was safe, I called Kate six times and my parents twice. Two of these calls were "goodbyes" and one turned from relief to another "goodbye". There are a number of videos out there for people who want to look for them (I did not personally take any but the Netflix documentary does a great job) that show what things were like, but there is really no way to capture it without having been there. I will try to hit the high/low points here:
- It was night time at 10 AM. The sky was so dark and visibility was so low due to the smoke that it was hard to see what was in front of you or around you at any given moment. It was the demon child of dark and fog rolled into one except that even the fog was dark when your lights would hit it.
- The only light visible was from the flames creeping up the ridge and occasionally shooting into the sky and the embers and branches falling onto the hood of the car and spraying their light across the windshield.
- The smoke was pervasive at this point and there was no keeping it out of the car anymore.
- The temperature gauge was hovering in the red for long periods before finally dipping slightly below and repeating the grueling cycle.
- There were explosions on all sides as the flames caught up to the propane tanks attached to houses and businesses along the sides of the road. These would rock the car and every time I would be sure that it was my car exploding which seemed more and more likely as time ticked by.
This was my first near death experience. I have done a lot of stupid things in my life that could have killed me, but this was the only time where I had time to reflect on what was happening and what it would mean to those I would be leaving behind. I imagined all the things I would miss, but mostly the chance to be the husband and father that I had always aspired to be. I wondered what my kid's lives would be like. They were at that age where they probably wouldn't even remember I ever existed. What a strange reality for two tiny humans I cared so much about. I imagined Kate raising them by herself and wondered what the rest of her life would be like without me. It's so interesting how your thoughts turn to others when you don't expect to have a future anymore. By this point the fire and imminent threat had expunged any other thoughts, even as a distraction from what was looming.
The hour is very hazy for me and I remember more of the emotional journey than the physical one. I remember the resolution that I wasn't going to make it and the utter despair that I felt as I fought through tears to communicate that to loved ones. I remember the very real pain in their voices, especially Kate's because they knew they were just along for the ride and powerless to help as she tried to track my phone's location and saw it going nowhere. I remember the exuberation as I found a gap in traffic as they opened up the oncoming lanes to evacuation and I made my move into it. I remember that melting into panic as the flames crested the ridge ahead of me and obliterated the freshly kindled joy as wholly as the smoke had obliterated the sun. I remember the numbness of pushing into that orangy darkness and the shock of seeing sunlight on the other side. I remember taking a couple minutes to feel safe before turning around to take a picture of the sky behind me once I knew I was going to live to see my family again. And I remember thinking it was over, but of course it wasn't. Finding normal would prove much harder than finding the light at the end of the tunnel of smoke and flames.
The drive was lonely with the animals. The adrenaline was wearing out and the reality of everything would rip through my brain like a bullet. With speed came air flow which lessened the imminent risk of overheating, but I still found myself constantly checking the needle on the temperature gauge in the belief that it would make a difference.
In the days to come, we would hole up in the mountains processing the first wave of loss. We didn't actually know what we had lost or the extent, but we knew we had lost something. At the very least, we had lost our sense of paradise in Paradise. This would not be the quiet mountain town where we would raise our kids and regularly point to the bed that they were born in. This would not be the lot where we would plop down tiny homes for friends and relatives to visit us in. It would not be the forever home that I had dreamed it would be when we first saw the house sitting there beckoning us in.
We decided that we would not be going back and Colorado seemed like the most likely place for us to start looking for our next refuge. We were refugees, what a strange situation to find ourselves in. Before leaving California, I got the thermostat replaced in the RAV-4 and hoped that would be all that it needed to make the final push. I promised the car that if it could get us to Colorado Springs, it would have earned its retirement.
It made it to Delta, Utah. Upon leaving the hotel, the check engine light came on and the RAV began to lose power. As luck would have it, there was a garage nearby so I stopped there to see if this was the end of the road. The mechanic suspected that the error was caused by fire/heat/smoke damage to the catalytic converter and we decided to disable that error in the hope that the car would be able to make it the rest of the way. With little choice, we were back on the road.
For the next several hours, things went pretty well. Additional warning lights kept turning on and sometimes turning back off, but the truck felt solid. Then it got dark, not from smoke but just from the lack of sunlight. I knew this in my brain. I also knew that the red and yellow lights I was seeing were running lights and brake lights. I knew that the cars around me weren't actually closing in on me, but I couldn't convince whatever primitive section of my brain that was screaming and making me feel like it was a race between heart explosion, heart failure, and the crushing semi-trucks to finish me off the way that the fire failed to. I have never felt such an irrational terror and there was no where to pull off. I was losing my mind in Vail Pass, Colorado. When the traffic allowed, I would pull over, try to convince myself that I was okay and get going again, only to repeat this ritual another few miles down the road. There is such a fragility to the mind and while I had experienced panic attacks before, I could just wait them out without being stuck behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.
As I made the final stretch from Monument to Colorado Springs on I-25, every warning light was on, the ventilation fans stopped working, cruise control gave up the ghost, and the windows wouldn't work anymore, but I somehow knew I would make it. For the first time in hours, I knew I wasn't going to die.
Survivor's guilt is a real things and it was the second specter of the fire to visit me. We all have a picture in our mind of who we are, a dreamscape in which we are strong, heroic, and honorable. I had this in spades. I remember back in my early vegan days sure of my conviction that I would gladly give my life to save an animal's. I was sure that this was the righteous things and that the person I saw in the mirror was righteous. In the hours and days to come, that mirror would morph into a distorted funhouse mirror before exploding into a million pieces on the floor of my ego. It turned out I wasn't strong, heroic, or honorable. Ever since that day, it has been much harder to take a really long look at myself.
I don't know if it is shame, profound loss, or something else, but I find myself drawn back into Paradise, poring over blog posts, Reddit articles, anything that brings me back. The other day I made the mistake of looking at a post that looked like it could have been from our neighborhood before it was cleaned up and it viciously removed the festering scab from my recovery. The post included a video shot by a resident as they went back to see what was left of their home. There are things that your brain struggles to recognize. An example of this would be the time I went diving with sharks. There we were with the stated goal of seeing sharks but when one finally came along, it had practically disappeared again before my brain registered what it was. This video was like that except for one key difference; it could be paused and you could go back to the horrific images of burned up bodies on the road and in the car. It's one of those things where you convince yourself that special effects are an awesome representation of real life, but when you see the real thing it is immediately obvious.
It's very hard not to imagine this car or the others that I drove past on the way out of town, the ones who never made it out. The last official death count I saw was 85, but this is based on the number of people who were unaccounted for along with the remains that were found. Paradise was a place where many people went to be forgotten, whether as retirees or just as people who had forsaken the appeals of the consumer america that the rest of us live in. How does one get a good count of those who don't necessarily want to be counted? This is my long way of saying, I think 85 is probably an undercount. At least 85 lives were suddenly snuffed out that day and many more would pass due to complications of the fire and the inevitable suicides that come with the loss of literally everything.
Before that day, I would have struggled to find the words for someone who had lost their home to a fire. I would have grasped at straws for what to say to someone who had lost everything they had. What words would have brought any measure of solace to someone who had lost a pet, friend, or family member with no chance to say goodbye. I still don't have the faintest Idea what to say to someone who has lost their home, everything they own, their community, and their very sense of security and belonging. The best I can muster would be to tell them that it is okay to cry because sometimes there are no words. I want to tell them that after enough tears, things will start to fade and the will feel whole again. I want to believe this myself.
We see tragedy on the news in five minute clips and montages and then it passe sand we forget and move on to the next horrific situation plastered on our Facebook feed, local news, etc. It is hard to fathom that the suffering continues beyond the news cycle, far beyond. As it passes from our minds and we move on, we expect others to do so as well. We are told we are the lucky ones because we made it out okay. And in time the emotions turn toward rage at every reassurance. Who are you to deny my grief. Who made you the mayor of getting back to normal.
Normally I feel like I know how to end a story, but in this case I don't. This story is a year and a half old for me today as I am putting the "finishing touches" on this post, but even driving through a Dutch Bros drive through can bring everything flooding back and make me wonder when I will really feel okay.
