PARADISE , Calif. — Paradise is a township of negative space , a looking chicken feed projecting what was and what will be .
A year ago this workweek , the Camp Firereduced the legal age of the Ithiel Town to rubble in a few short hours . It spurred thegreatest debris cleanup in Californiasince the 1906 San Francisco earthquake . It ’s still going on today , contractor pickups plaster with various acronyms lurch the Ithiel Town ; crews still restoring ability and cable , ensuring there ’s clean water , hauling detritus , and otherwise trying to lay the foundation for a next Paradise that may bear little resemblance to the one that vanished a year ago .
Paradise is a microcosm of the wide West . The landscape has become more flammable due to climate change and human developing , and now we bear the incumbrance of the consequences . For other towns , for millions of citizenry , it ’s meantrolling blackoutsto stave off power grid - sparked fires . And for California ’s governance , it ’s meantturning to prison house laborto battle increasingly intense brilliance . These are on - the - rainfly experiments for living in a present no longer at balance with the past or future as the mood crisis worsens . Paradise , though , is perhaps the bountiful experimentation inwhat a residential area can look likeagainst this shift baseline .
Lots graded at the Ridgewood Mobile Home Park.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
There are still the great unwashed live here . Food trucks have sprung up where restaurants stood , and some stores like the CVS are clear downtown . ( If you catch a burrito at the temporary wetback truck next door , you may even habituate their restroom ) . Yetjust 10 percentage of Paradise ’s residentshave returned in the backwash of the fire , for the most part due to the fact that there ’s simply nowhere to be .
It is this void of civilization that creates the feeling of negative space . Paradise is n’t a trace townsfolk consanguine to the foregone Wild West orChernobyl . There are still people here , to be sure . But there ’s an odd intuitive feeling of abandonment that ’s hard to shake when stare across an empty baseball game baseball field , a few singed trees mark the outfield where the fire blazed through Ithiel Town . Or when looking at full neighborhoods argufy down to the land , bisect by an arrow - straight route . There are also hundreds of flame - marred tree marked for final destruction , enrobed in flagging tape , waiting to be cut down and drag aside .
Quiet memories still disperse the landscape painting , statues , crossbreed , signs . Their accurate signification is unknowable to an outsider beyond the fact that they just come through the most destructive fervidness in California ’s history . But to the people that may someday return to Paradise , they take hoi polloi .
The baseball diamond near Ponderosa Elementary School. Scorched trees show where the Camp Fire hopped through the outfield.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
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“Reflections of Serenity” mural by Shame Grammer, an artist who spray painted murals around Paradise to honor survivors and victims of the Camp Fire.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
A Virgin Mary statue sits in front of a graded lot and burned forest.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
Crosses dot the highway leading into Paradise from Chico as a memorial to those who lost their lives in the Camp Fire.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
A tree marked for removal along with mailbox and former sign nailed to it.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
A wall of pets found in the wake of the fire stuck to the side of Ponderosa Elementary School. The school remains closed due to damage from the Camp Fire.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
A burned out car still sits at a gas station.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
Kristina Peregoy is one of the thousands of residents still cleaning up Camp Fire.Photo: Brian Kahn (G/O Media)
