The compounding tragedies levied a heavy emotional toll even on those who were out of the fires’ path. For many on the West Coast, the blood-orange skies that blanketed California, Oregon, and Washington last week looked like a warning about a coming climatological apocalypse. In Butte County, the hue appeared no less ominous, but there it also pointed to the past, a reminder of the trauma from which the area was still working to recover.
I grew up in Chico, a rural college town just down the hill from Paradise. On Saturday, when the area’s air quality ranked third worst in the country, I traded texts with a friend whose family was pushed out of their house for nearly a month by the Camp Fire. They live in a canyon west of Paradise, and have had to evacuate twice in the past two weeks, because of the smoke and a lack of power, which the local utility had cut off to prevent further fires. “With no power, that means no A.C., no water,” my friend wrote. “Can’t open a window because of the smoke. Ash is everywhere covering everything. I am in town right now trying to buy an air purifier. Chico is sold out. It’s the toilet paper all over again.” Another friend, who lives in Chico, told me that “exhaustion and disbelief” were the dominant moods around town. “During COVID the outside was all we had left and now that’s gone too,” he said in a text message. “It’s just an unbelievable reckoning of all we’ve done wrong. The list is long and the loss is deep.”
When the Camp Fire ignited, on November 8th, 2018, shortly after 6 A.M., Kalina and Olen Eagler and their two children were living in an apartment in Magalia, up the ridge from Paradise. The Eaglers noticed smoke in the air while dropping their son at his school-bus stop that morning, and, when Olen drove to a nearby outlook, he saw thick billows rolling up the canyon walls. He collected his son and went back to the apartment, where Kalina and their daughter, then twelve, had already started packing their Honda Prelude. By 8 A.M., they were driving south, into Paradise. Along the way, Kalina looked down a stretch of road that headed toward Noble Orchards. Through the trees, she could see flames taller than houses. “I realized this was incredibly serious,” she said. “We started calling everybody we knew and encouraging them to leave.”
After spending a few months in Amador County, a few hours south, where Olen’s mother lived, the Eaglers moved to Reno, Nevada. Kalina had briefly lived in Reno before. It was, she said, “a place I could relate to. I felt like maybe we’d be comfortable there, and the job market was really excellent.” Once they moved, Olen, who had been a d.j. and stay-at-home dad in Magalia, took delivery jobs with DoorDash and Grubhub, and arranged his schedule so that he could take care of the kids after school. Kalina, who worked for a short time in behavioral therapy, found herself, for the first time in her life, sunk in a deep depression. “I kind of stared at a wall for a year,” she said. The children started having a hard time at school, something that had never happened before.
This March, during the children’s spring break, the Eaglers were visiting family in Magalia, to celebrate Kalina’s thirty-eighth birthday, when the coronavirus caused Butte County to impose a stay-at-home order. They were still on lockdown in Magalia a few weeks later when they got a call from the owner of a farm in nearby Berry Creek, where they’d worked during the summer of 2018. The farm had been unoccupied for a year, and the owner asked if Kalina and Olen would care for the property in exchange for rent. By then, the children’s school had shut down because of the pandemic, and, with Reno’s tourist economy in free fall, there was little reason to return to Nevada. “The opportunity to be back in Butte County, with the people we love, was too much to pass up,” Kalina said.
On the farm in Berry Creek, a mountain town of about twelve hundred people, the Eaglers moved into a three-bedroom house with a wraparound porch and a stained-glass window that refracted the morning light. Huge Ponderosa pines surrounded the farm; the property itself featured Japanese maples, peach and plum trees, strawberry and blackberry bushes, and a small apple orchard supposedly planted by moonshiners a hundred years ago. At least ten varieties of roses grew in planter boxes milled from trees that had fallen around the farm. The house was off the electrical grid, which made it difficult to manage remote learning, so the Eaglers’ kids shuttled back and forth to their grandmother’s, in Amador County, for most of the summer. Still, it was exactly the sort of place where Kalina and Olen wanted to be. “It was just big and beautiful, really an opportunity to be able to provide everything for your family,” Kalina said.
Kalina and Olen both grew up in Paradise, where they learned at a young age to pay close attention to fires burning in the Sierra Nevada foothills. During the last weeks of August, they kept a close watch on the North Complex Fire, checking the Internet regularly for news of its path. Last week, on Tuesday morning, they woke to find the farm swaddled in thick white smoke, but when Kalina checked her phone she did not see any evacuation notices. “And then the sky started to clear,” she said. “The sky was blue—there was no smoke anymore. We saw that the wind had changed, and we were good.” The kids were staying with their grandmother, so Kalina and Olen took advantage of the smokeless air to prune branches and collect fruit from their apple trees.
Around three-thirty that afternoon, Kalina got a call from her brother-in-law. He was in Paradise, and, like Laurie Noble, had spotted the ash cloud. “He was very concerned,” Kalina said. “ ‘Are you guys O.K.? The cloud that I’m seeing looks really bad.’ I’m, like, ‘No, I can’t see any clouds.’ It was really blue and clear over here, you know? And then, within a half an hour, we received the emergency order that we needed to evacuate.”
The Eaglers wasted no time getting out of Berry Creek. “We were not going to mess around,” Kalina said. “We’ve been through this. There was no way we were going to wait on anything.” Earlier in the summer, during another fire, they had packed a few boxes with photographs and documents. Now they grabbed their pets and stuffed some clothes in a duffel bag. On her way out, Kalina took with her a handcrafted hood that Olen had given her as a gift. “For whatever reason, during the Camp Fire, when we were evacuating, it was the last thing I saw before I left. And I thought, Well, that’s kind of a frivolous thing, but I love it, so I’m going to grab it. I had that exact moment when we were leaving Berry Creek.”
