One morning, as the Humboldt Fire approached from the east, the town ordered more than 9,000 people to evacuate as a precaution, Cindy among them. ![]() In fact, she’d spent every summer and fall fixated on fire since the “fire siege” of 2008, when Paradise was threatened by two blazes, one in each of the canyons alongside it. “WTF is happening,” she wrote.Ĭindy knew about wildfires. She took a picture and texted it to her sister Cindy Christensen. Bits of it crumbled in her palm like charcoal. But then the wind gusted sharply and a three-inch piece of burned bark floated lazily toward her through the air like a demonic moth. Small wildfires erupted in the canyons on either side of Paradise every year. “I’ve been here so long, it didn’t even faze me,” Fisher said. The sky overhead was still faintly blue in spots, but a brown fog, forced in by a hard wind, was rapidly smothering it. She stepped out in her slippers and the oversize sweatshirt she slept in. early for her - energetically and without resentment, to take her two miniature schnauzers and Andy’s lumbering old mutt into the yard to pee. It was odd to say the word, but it must have been true because there she was, getting out of bed at 8 a.m. Fisher was feeling grounded again: happy. ![]() And just recently, she got together with Andy, a big-hearted baker for the Chico public-school system, who slipped out of her bed earlier that Thursday morning to drive down the hill to work. She’d tried community college for a semester. “What I thought was love,” she said, “was me trying to buy love and him stealing from me.” But now, a fuller, bigger life seemed possible. Then again, who knew? That fall, Fisher was suspended in a wide-open and recuperative limbo, having finally ended a five-year relationship with a man who, she said, conned her financially, isolated her from her family and seized on her diagnoses of depression and a mood disorder to make her feel crazy and sick and insist that she go on disability. There had been too many tribulations and not enough money. But as the years wore on, she worried that she’d missed her chance. All her life, she dreamed of leaving and seeing other parts of the world, not to escape Paradise but so that she could return with renewed appreciation for it. Like many people who grow up in small communities, Fisher regarded her hometown with affection but also exhaustion. The trees of Paradise made for perfect matchsticks. The initial settlement was poor and minuscule - “Poverty Ridge,” some called it - until a new logging railroad was built through the town in 1904 by a company felling timber farther uphill. It still brimmed with the towering pine trees that first made the community viable more than a century ago. ![]() The town was quiet and affordable, free of the big-box stores and traffic that addled the city of Chico in the valley below. Paradise had attracted working-class retirees from around California since the 1970s and was beginning to draw in younger families for the same reasons. Fisher moved to the Ridge as a child, married at 16, then raised four children of her own, working 70-hour-plus weeks caring for disabled adults and the elderly. She was 49 and had spent almost all of those years on the Ridge - the sweeping incline, in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, on which Paradise and several tinier, unincorporated communities sit. The fire was already growing at a rate of one football field per second when Tamra Fisher woke up on the edge of Paradise, Calif., feeling that her life was no longer insurmountably strenuous or unpleasant and that she might be up to the challenge of living it again.
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