A month after the canceled trial, there is still no word from the Ninth Circuit about whether it will let the Juliana trial go forward. As the waiting continues, wildfire is still burning in California, killing scores and decimating the town of Paradise. And because disaster is the low-hanging fruit of the news industry, and I am unemployed now that the trial is canceled, I head south for the work of covering the aftermath for Reuters.
In homes reduced to ash, tree trunks singed black, grasslands wiped out by flame, I will get a look at the apocalyptic world Isaac foretold. I will also come face-to-face with Ryan Zinke and Sonny Perdue, secretaries of the interior and of agriculture, respectively, and the only defendants in the Juliana case I will ever stand in the same room with. I will be able to ask Zinke, in person, if in the face of such devastation, America can change. It will be a profound moment, one that alters my perception of the climate fight for good.
Though climate breakdown created the conditions for this fire, mostly through extended heat and drought, the discussion about its role was reduced to political joust in the first days of the burning. On Twitter, Trump blamed poor forest management—ignorant, it would seem, that the flames were mostly carried by wind and by grass understory, before burning house to house. On social media, red-state friends picked up the thread of “forest mismanagement” and began jabbing it like a poker off hot coals.
Days later, when Trump stood with California governor Jerry Brown and governor-elect Gavin Newsom at a press briefing and made absurd, indefensible remarks about how the president of Finland had told him that nation prevents forest fires by raking the forest floor, he made a smooth, soothing side-to-side motion with his hand, as though combing dirt is really all it takes. Beside him, Newsom suppressed a reaction that first looked like laughter but then more like a stifled scream.
What followed was a week of ironies. On Monday, the IPCC released its report cautioning that humans have only twelve years to take the steps to halt climate change, with UN scientists sternly warning that without urgent, drastic action, the world would see mass die-offs of coral, insects, fish, and plants, a combination of events that would spell food shortages, disease, and worsening disasters as sea level rise threatened ten million people. The next day, the Trump administration announced plans to expand logging and thinning on federal land, despite countervailing science showing trees would be critical to sequestering enough carbon to avert climate breakdown.
Then on Thursday, for Thanksgiving, volunteers made fifteen thousand Thanksgiving dinners for people displaced by the Camp Fire. On Black Friday, a strategic date, the federal government quietly released—aka buried—its Fourth National Climate Assessment, acknowledging the increasingly worrisome realities of climate change. And that day, I drove to Paradise to see for myself how the West will look when it is ravaged by flame.
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On the drive south from Oregon, NPR reports that the burn area around the Camp Fire is bigger than Chicago. Rain is hitting California as a fresh relief and by the time I arrive the fire is out. Once I reach Chico, it takes me two full days to get a grip on the size of this disaster, which is my job, that and reporting on the recovery. It isn’t easy.
There are thirty-four thousand evacuees—those from Paradise, and Magalia to the north, and other mountain dwellers who were outside city limits. Now, the ones who haven’t left the region have combined with rescuers to overrun every hotel within roughly 30 miles of Chico, plus most of the campgrounds. Every apartment or room for rent that can be found in a county with a 2-percent vacancy rate for rentals has been had. Evacuees have also dried up the market for houses for sale, and trailers and RVs, too, buying whatever they can drive or tow and park, then live in.
The recovery effort is immense, dizzying in its scope. It includes the National Guard, the Red Cross, and FEMA, plus local agencies and charities too numerous to count. The fairgrounds that are used for staging operations and for shelters are spread over three towns, each a half-hour drive from the next, making even the geography of reporting on it challenging.
Command central for disaster response is set up in Chico at a fairground known as the Silver Dollar, where the marquee is still advertising whatever gun or fashion show was the most exciting thing happening here a few weeks ago. The parking lot is awash in official-looking vehicles. There are police cars and fire trucks that look sturdy enough to drive over the moon. Several rugged ambulances are equipped for search and rescue, belonging to the teams from five states that have come to help. There is every type of monstrous-looking machine that has utility in a situation where roads have been buried under abandoned cars, downed utility lines, trees, and rubble. These include vehicles from the National Guard, whose canvas and crescent-roofed pop-ups are assembled in a field outside the fairground’s gates. From the street, it looks like a set from the film Arrival, a place where one makes contact with another world. And in a way it is.
In the final tally, 153,000 acres around Paradise have burned. The western edge of the scar traces the road that runs from Chico south to Oroville, speed limit 60 miles an hour. Still, it takes seven minutes to drive the border of the burn at that speed—it is that large. Its size is otherworldly, almost incomprehensible. And it extends east from the road as far as the eye can see. When I look at it for the first time, I nearly veer off the road just gawking. People stop, take pictures, try to take in the enormous dimensions of it. But it is impossible. The few strands of grassland and the deep tractor-tire marks along the edge are all there is to indicate that this is no freshly plowed field, that what’s happened here is a blaze barely contained. In a few places, the fire jumped the highway for a few acres to the west and nearly made a getaway toward more towns. Amazingly, the trees still stand on the ridges that roll toward Paradise.
For now, the town is officially closed, with 18,744 structures burned, 13,965 of them people’s homes; search and rescue teams are looking for hundreds of people still missing. Twice a week, Butte County officials hold press conferences in the main hall at the fairground, called Harvest Hall, a flat-looking building with a utilitarian floor that can be piled up with folding chairs and TV cameras and a podium to create some kind of order. By Thanksgiving weekend, it is clear that the people associated with this effort have worked nonstop and are exhausted. Like the press, they rearrange their shifts and duties after the holiday, sending in the reserves, so many people arriving turn out to be people like me—people who have just begun to wander these encampments of crews in imposing uniforms, safety orange and hard hats, trying to get a grip on whatever it is they are supposed to be doing.
Officials from Butte County have mostly taken charge of the efforts under way: looking for bodies, figuring out when and where school will resume, taking stock of what buildings still stand, where people will live, cleaning up the debris, and going about the business of restoring utilities—power, phones, water, natural gas. It falls to the county sheriff to oversee the search and rescue, and to find all of the people who are unaccounted for. Just days ago, that number was topping twelve hundred, but every day it falls—through a combination of recovered bones and a desk-and-shoe-leather effort that finds people who are staying with relatives, in campgrounds, or elsewhere and didn’t yet know they had been reported missing. To grasp the number of people still not found is staggering, stultifying. Unsettling. And day by day, the sheriff’s reports to the press are followed by a parade of other experts, in charge of all the other parts of recovery, reporting on their own next steps. Some are shelter officials, offering head counts and details on which shelters remain open and where, weathering their own outsized efforts.
Not everyone is comfortable with this officialdom. Just down the road is a Walmart parking lot where people resistant to shelters have set up a camp. Some are camping in cars and others in tents and tarps that first converted a trapezoid of grass between the store and the highway and has since slowly swelled into a tent city for refugees. By now, Black Friday is over and there are security vehicles, SUVs driven by official-looking sorts whose job, it seems, is to cast cool but stinky eyes in the direction of the campers who remain while alternatives are on offer. Norovirus has hit the shelters as hard as it hit Paradise before the fire, and some of the campers say they would rather take their chances with the rain than the germs. Plus, the location of the Walmart is hard to beat.
The Walmart, like a lot of Walmarts, is a barge in a sea of pavement, surrounded by other barges. Lowe’s and Kohl’s and the Chico Mall, the parking lots of which also fill up with disaster aftermath. Insurance companies set up mobile claim centers—MCCs for short—in RVs, trailers, even air tents, in the parking lots of the big box stores, serving hot beverages and cookies to displaced people who turn up to begin dealing with insurance, if they have it. Evangelicals—initially with help from the secular set—have taken over a vacant Toys “R” Us building and are using it as a clearinghouse for supplies. Camping gear and bottled water. Religion-themed disaster kits and clothes. Food, blankets. And gift cards—lots of gift cards. They are calling it Miracle City, but the guy who runs it says it’s more like running a grocery store in hell. The staff wear red armbands to distinguish themselves from the survivors, whose arms are taped with blue. As I talk with the boss about operations here, a staffer passes carrying a cloth-wrapped container filled with gift cards to the safety of the primary-colored checkout counters. A man in a neck brace has been given a table at which to examine people’s eyes, then fit them with replacement glasses.
FEMA is across the road, set up in the old Sears anchor store on the east end of the Chico Mall, which has quickly filled with one-stop shopping for the disaster ravaged. Besides running its own programs, offering shelters and other housing aid, FEMA offers space to donors like St. Vincent de Paul and the Red Cross, along with a lot of other entities. They offer medical equipment, therapy dogs, directed play for traumatized kids, and various loan programs designed to get people and businesses back on their feet. This is where the sheriff’s office is collecting DNA from the relatives of the people still missing, and where the state’s vital records department is reissuing things like birth certificates to those people who no longer have them. The DMV is there, too, to make licenses from the vital records. And when lines get long, the place works just like a DMV: people take numbers and sit in neat rows wearing glazed expressions. Many carry dogs and suitcases, random donations and water. There is blue tape on the floor to route the ones who can no longer pick up their heads.
———
To be clear, I have never seen anything like this. And after two decades in journalism, I didn’t think there was much I hadn’t seen. My assignments have included all manner of death and destruction: landslides and floods, active shooter incidents (three of them), and the kinds of random accidents and crimes that befall people who don’t expect these things to happen to them. Disaster on this scale, however, is something new. To say that any of the rest has prepared me for it would be a lie, though I thought it would have. As I write stories of escape, of Pepsi trucks commandeered by police and parents driving children helplessly through backcountry roads, chased by flame, I find myself, in moments alone in the car, blasting some of the worst pop music of our time just to convince myself that I am in a better mood than I actually am. Right now the days are just adrenaline—too much to do and not enough of me. But later, after the job is over, I will notice new reflexes: eyes darting to dark patches in grass; gaze lingering on parking lots, the neat rows of cars still wearing their paint; inexplicable weeping at unscarred trees. But for now there is just the work.
When I stop at a campground in Gridley, which FEMA has converted to a shelter, a woman with long white hair approaches me from behind, carrying what looks like charcoal briquettes, and remarks that at least the ground here is flat. She says she’s been to two other campgrounds so far and both had hills. Then she says: “I’ve been burned out of my house. It was scary. There was a big fireball coming for us,” and keeps walking.
It is like this everywhere. It’s been two weeks, but even simple questions about daily routine, about services and recovery, quickly drift backward, like wormholes through time to the day of the fire. Simple conversations about insurance, mail—the practicalities of uprooted lives—pivot on the words “I was just . . .” or “I was at . . .,” and what follows are tales of escape, of near death. They are the detached narratives of people still coping, still making sense of what is behind them.
Soon, a language develops. In a Safeway restroom, a woman tells me, “I’m burned out.” It does not mean what it used to mean. She follows by explaining where she is living and how far that is from where she used to live. I wish her luck. And in this way, the pleasantries of disaster take form. They are more than polite exchanges. They are a way to communicate one’s relationship to collective tragedy, a form of navigation. A kind of Marco Polo. Is anyone here with me?
The Chico post office becomes a kind of waiting room, a place to anticipate contact from the outside world. I stand in line and talk with people as they snake their way down the sidewalk, up the stairs, and into the building to collect their mail. Some are still living in shelters, still trying to find housing; others are attempting to understand next steps from the insurance companies who have yet to be let into town to survey the damage and issue claim checks.
“I kind of feel like a turtle on its back, looking for a rock,” says Ed Riddle, fifty-three, who had the loss of his home confirmed by drone images and by a friend who works for PG&E.
Christopher Gregg, forty-two, is living with his wife and two children in an RV park that placed them adjacent to the facility’s burn pile, a choice he resents. He hasn’t had time to mourn the loss of his home or his neighbors, whose bodies had been discovered in theirs. He says he misses walking to his mailbox.
Thirteen-year-old twins Makenzie and Bradlee Shaw and their mother, Roberta Talley, are searching animal shelters for one of their three dogs. Their house is gone, incinerated, they say. Their other two dogs were in their kennels when it burned. When their mother shares this detail, both twins look away.
———
This is the context in which, at the federal press event, I find it hard to behave myself. I am used to this: to scripted conversations masquerading as discussion, the dog-and-pony and the pomp-and-hold-your-questions. But it is Monday and it is daylight, finally. The rain is not falling and the smoke has cleared, the fire gone, and today is one of the first days to take stock of the state of the town in the light and clear air, while reporters are among the few still allowed in.
When I drive into Paradise, climbing the road from Chico for the first time, much of it is still covered in ash, though its tree canopy still stands, the bases of the trees singed by flame. The roads have been cleared of wrecked cars, but many still line the shoulders. The paint and tires have been burned off so that they are a kind of uniform color—ruined metal—and the aluminum rims are melted, warped. It is hard to describe the ash. It is less like ash as I know it—a dusting of dried embers—and more like filthy snowdrifts. It piles around the still-standing chimneys, forms a thick understory to the twisted metal of onetime roofs and footings, or just strikes the shape of the thing it used to be: ash in shape of house, ash in shape of garage.
Without a map by which to follow the signs, I find it hard to stay oriented, to maintain a sense of direction. I wonder how long it will take for anyone who knew this place to replace their visual cues—gas stations and restaurants, parks and homes—with the metal fragments and trees that are left. This is why I am here: to bear witness, to see. And instead, the Department of Agriculture closed the road today and I could not enter the town unless I RSVPed for the government stump speech and held my questions.
I go to the Paradise Alliance Church, which is still intact and where the required event is held, and watch the SUVs ferrying Zinke and Perdue to the show. These guests are important enough that there is a staff huddle outside the church, and a serious but stern countdown of the minutes until they arrive. Almost everyone is wearing woodsy, outdoorsy outfits—staff and appointees alike—though the layers of makeup and the boots that have never been dirty make it easy to tell the policy wonks from the locals. I run into an old colleague, sit beside him, and inquire about life since I saw him last. Then the inevitable “How long have you been here?”—which is code for the thing we do not ask: Are you wrecked yet? He tells me he is exhausted after eight days and that this is his last assignment before he can go. He says he found bones, that he just has to make it through this last briefing. And I say it is a good thing to find bones, to account for a person, but he gives me a look that tells me I am making things worse.
Then the show begins. I do as journalists do and quickly sort the camps. The federal camp. The state camp. The locals. I note the four placards quickly removed from the seats reserved for county officials—the people largely managing the disaster—who likely have too much to do to show up, my first clue that what I’m about to witness is a bunch of nonsense.
In short, the exchange goes like this: the feds want to thin more timber and the state reps say they have already done so and the locals are just trying to be real without getting crosswise with the rest because the rest control the money for the recovery. I can’t imagine how the mayor, Jody Jones, is doing this, sitting in a church in her decimated town and wearing a poker face while everyone else pretends to know what is good for the place. Still, there are hotshots in the room, the elite wildland firefighters, and they don’t give a fuck. I love this about firefighters, about police too—they have no filter, no talking points; they will tell you what is real.
Today, they say: “Forests are thick, but when it’s hot, windy, and dry, fire burns.” This is Leland Ratliff, thirty-six, who says the hotshots are understaffed to do the work that the federal government is prescribing. He’s had a thousand hours of overtime in six months just fighting the fires, and the deployments are long and hard. “Our families struggle and we struggle,” he says. Fire outside communities? He says we should let it burn.
“This fire, if it happens again, we’re not going to stop it,” Ken Pimlott, Cal Fire director, assures. He is the top firefighter for the state of California, a state that fights wildfire annually, and arguably twice a year now, in summer and fall. “When fire is burning like a blowtorch, our traditional tools are not going to work.”
And this: “Wildfires are not just forest and wildland problems anymore. They’ve become city problems,” says Jim Nelson, a state senator, in a nod to the effects a warmer, drier climate has added to the wildland interface, something experts will echo later. “Urban areas are suffering what we in rural areas have long suffered.”
This is supposed to be a community conversation, but the community isn’t here. The community isn’t even allowed here while the town is closed for safety. Really, it is just the press in a room, TV cameras looming over the heads of the print and radio people, while the various government types pretend to be saying more than they are really saying. After an hour, when the hotshots have said their piece, the one black man on the panel has been overlooked and becomes the only person to make no comment, and the federal appointees have dutifully imparted whatever messaging has been crafted by the people who wrote the messages, someone announces that the meeting is over and there won’t be any questions until after a tour that is, in effect, mandatory for those of us with questions.
All I can think is: What the ever-living fuck? Because we’ve been one hour in a room without anybody saying anything, the light is fading, we have work to do outside, and now they are telling us that protocol puts us an hour from any meaningful back-and-forth.
I am torn. Everything in my training tells me to behave as they wish. I have been to many a press briefing, endured many a nonsensical speech, and been bludgeoned with procedural inefficiency, exhausting timelines, and imaginary constraints (“We’re so sorry, but his plane leaves in forty minutes”) for long enough to know that this is just how it is done. Political pageantry is part of the daily practice of keeping the press at arm’s length, all while shilling one’s message. And always, eventually, I find my way in. But this particular situation is galling. At last count, eighty-seven people are dead and more than four hundred are still missing. While we wasted the last hour, search crews were combing the ash of more than eighteen thousand structures in search of remains—eighteen thousand—all while federal officials are stumping for plans to expand logging on federal land, something the head of Cal Fire, Ken Pimlott, who is four seats from Zinke, has just told us is funded, has already been done, and would not have had an effect on this situation.
There are more important things to write here: about how much longer until everyone is accounted for; how long before people can see where their homes used to be, until insurance companies can get drones in the air and start settling claims so that people can move on; and how the five thousand schoolkids who’ve been displaced from the thirteen schools that burned, or partly burned, will be educated, and when and where.
The list goes on. And when I look around at the other members of the press, I think we are not behaving badly enough. Scuttling to our cars, instead, on some tour of a solution to a problem no one has. This was not a typical forest fire. It was a fire on the fringe between a town and forestland, one fueled by homes and backyard tinder as much as natural fuel. This is an entirely new problem, a growing one as humans build deeper into woodland and towns run into towns. And it is exacerbated by climate change. Worsening heat and drought make these spaces more dangerous than in the past, and we’ve yet to design exit routes or set standards for construction—like metal roofs, for example—that can mitigate these dangers. A few days ago, this very government released a report acknowledging these realities. And here we are, amid a climate catastrophe, politely allowing them to deny it.
I ambush Zinke. I have never done this before, broken protocol with a federal official. But I do it now. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago. As he is leaving, drifting out from behind the swath of tables and making polite banter with the people who are allowed to speak to him, I pick up his tail. I follow him out the back door, the one the press is not supposed to use, and onto a narrow staircase where his staff accidentally lets me pass and where he is now stuck with me. I ask him, “Secretary, do you have time for a quick question?” And he is a politician, so he says, “Sure.”
Now we are at the bottom of the stairs. He turns to face me outside the SUV he is being ferried in. And this is the exchange we have:
ME: “You mentioned lengthening seasons, increasing temperatures . . .”
ZINKE, interrupting: “The fire seasons are longer than they used to be. The temperatures are elevated.”
ME: “Sure, yeah. Moisture content’s lower. Beetle kill . . .”
ZINKE, interrupting: “And that’s a background to, then you have tree density and the density of trees.”
ME: “Sure. But is that a nod to the climate change report that came out Friday?”
Here the woman with the nice shoes tries to interrupt us. Her name is Faith, which strikes me as ironic. She has an iPhone and has turned on the recorder so she can catch what is coming out of Zinke’s mouth, presumably to correct me if I mishandle it later. But there’s no mishandling this. He is mishandling it just fine without me.
ZINKE: “I think you have to take everything into consideration based on science. There’s no doubt that temperatures are elevated, we’re in a drought period. So, to me, this is really not about climate change. This is a backdrop of something that could or could not be under our control. It’s indisputable that temperatures are higher, seasons are longer, the moisture content is there. That’s just basic science and metrics. Now given that, what do we do about it?”
Later I will Google this deflection. And I will find similar words uttered by Sheryl Corrigan, who holds the Orwellian title of Director of Environment, Health and Safety at Koch Industries. She spoke about Charles Koch’s climate beliefs at an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal in April 2016. And her conveyance of those beliefs sounds eerily dutiful, like a cult member parroting the language of a fringe, unseen leader. Here’s what she said: “Charles has said the climate is changing. So, the climate is changing. . . . I think he’s also said, and we believe, that humans have a part in that. I think what the real question is . . . what are we going to do about it?”
I won’t know this until the day I think to Google Zinke’s comment. For now, I am just standing at the bottom of the stairs while Faith tries to shoo me away but I am close enough to really take him in. I learn that besides being good looking and affable, Zinke has another quality that winning politicians tend to have: a spotless, affected aura. In a politician’s arsenal of superpowers, it is one of the three that really matter. There’s the power to deliver a speech, the power to transform oneself in front of a camera, and then this: the power to stand next to people. So even though I have never met Zinke before and have ambushed him on the stairs, I instantly have the sense that we are friends, that I have known him forever, and that maybe he isn’t such a bad guy, even though he is the subject of a disturbingly high number of ethics investigations and has just gone off on a tear about how logging and cattle grazing reduce fires. He’s like a drug. So while he’s talking, I nod at him, even while what he’s saying makes no sense for the situation we are in. You can’t graze cattle in a woodland town, and the Camp Fire burned house to house in Paradise, not tree to tree, something evident from the fact that there are trees still standing all around us this very moment while the houses are ash.
Still, I have got him off script and it is all I need. Whether I quote him or I don’t, all I want is a moment to understand whether this crap that comes out of his mouth is something he believes or something he is required to say. And I think I see, in these few moments of unscripted babble, that Ryan Zinke knows we have arrived at the zenith of ridiculous. And that what is passing for leadership these days in America is just political theater, a carnival of convenience run by people whose agenda will be unchanged by this calamity.
But I can’t know that, really. And next they are whisking him away.
Later, after I skip much of the tour to file Zinke’s comments and see, finally, the ruin of the town, I catch him at the Q&A. There, my colleagues push him hard on climate change and whether it is related to this fire. By then, Zinke has shored up his talking points and repeats his earlier comments, somewhat more eloquently, saying he believes in science and how there are conditions of rising temperatures and drought that are a backdrop to this fire, but whether climate change matters to it all is a “debate.” But there is no debate. Just three days ago the Fourth National Climate Assessment, compiled by roughly three hundred experts and overseen by Trump’s own administration, confirmed that climate change is real, its effects devastating, and those impacts, if not already upon us, are imminent. The only people still avoiding that truth here today are the two federal appointees at the podium.
No one uses the term ecoterrorist, but Doug LaMalfa, the Republican congressman representing California’s northern interior, lets loose some sort of war cry about the environmentalists who are disrupting fire recovery by standing in the way of timber salvage.
By now, we are standing at an intersection near what used to be a glass shop. The glass is melted in sheets in the rubble. It is art glass, the kind of glass people shape with a blowtorch, and I know this only because a friend who sells blown glass told me that a client lost a forty-year-old shop here a few days earlier. To see the blue plates standing like stalagmites on the concrete, steel girders in a knot, drives home exactly how hot it was here while the fire burned. Blowtorch hot. Aluminum-melting hot. Twelve-hundred-degree hot. Nearby PG&E is reposting the telephone poles, stringing new electrical wire where the old wire hangs in the trees. Meanwhile, the most damaged of these have been marked for clearing with orange Xs. Cleanup crews have been clearing trees for days now, and they are otherwise discernible targets, obvious even to me: their bark is charred and flaky like mica and they are clearly too unstable to be left standing. No environmentalists are in the way. LaMalfa ignores a follow-up question about whether these standoffs over salvage timber have actually occurred. And again, there is no more time for questions.
The mayor is next to me and turns away when it is over. She has incredible poise but when I am close to her, I can see that she is exhausted, steeling herself. She’s been giving her community a thing it needs lately, something that must be unfathomably hard to provide: assurance that someone is in charge, plus certain words about how Paradise will survive it all, that home is still here. Responding to plays on “Paradise Lost,” which the press and a lot of other people find impossible to resist now, she earlier listed all the things Paradise has not lost: its town hall, two of three fire stations, the library, two of three grocery stores, the post office, the banks. She even worked in a quip about the Starbucks and the Dutch Bros.
She has lost her home too. All of the town council did, along with 90 percent of the rest of Paradise’s residents. I wonder then what thankless job Mayor Jody Jones has lucked into, and for how many years. I wonder if anyone pays her, if she will hate it, if she hates it already. Then I wonder what nobler or more important thing she could do, maybe ever.
It strikes me then that leadership is often foisted on people by circumstance, not a thing achieved. That true leaders are people like her, people who step to need. And that there is no one here from the federal government who fits that description.