San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Teen, once eager to leave, misses Paradise dearly
PARADISE, Butte County — This town of about 27,000 people was small enough to feel stifling for a teenager craving freedom.
Sometimes when Faith Brown, 17, went on a date at a restaurant, the waitress would text her father that she was out with a boy.
“Give him a hard time,” Roger Brown, 53, would reply, because he didn’t want his daughter to date until she was older, until she had a college degree and he was in a nursing home.
But teenagers don’t understand that kind of love, and it was another reason Faith wanted to leave for somewhere bigger. Many of her classmates were planning to go to Butte College — which everyone shortens to just Butte — in nearby Oroville. But she was eyeing Oregon or Colorado, where no one knew her and there were bigger universities.
Before everything changed, before the town was destroyed from end to end, Faith was a
senior at Paradise High, and the fall semester was ending on a good note. At 5 feet 9, she was petite for an outside hitter, but she could jump and helped her volleyball team go to the playoffs.
After school, she worked at the Boys and Girls Club helping younger students with homework. She was smart — she skipped kindergarten — and received mostly A’s and B’s.
The second week of November was going to be busy. Faith had memorized every bone in the human body for an anatomy test and her senior portfolio with a resume and cover letter was due. She was applying to colleges and for scholarships.
It was overwhelming and exciting, all at once. She was finally on the verge of leaving. And soon she would be far away from Paradise — but not in the way she had expected.
Faith’s family moved to Paradise from Redondo Beach in Los Angeles County when she was 4.
Lindy Brown, 59, wanted her only daughter to experience a childhood similar to her own. As a teenager, Lindy and her friends would “kidnap” each other on their birthdays and watch the sunrise at the beach, then get brunch. But Southern California was changing. The city installed parking meters by the beach and tore down historic houses for condos. Traffic snarled. So the Browns moved to Paradise, which had four seasons and was perched at a 1,700-foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Neither Roger nor Lindy realized the magnitude of the move until they had settled in their new home on June Way next to a Christmas tree farm. Businesses tended to close at 10 p.m., and many residents were retired.
They considered returning to Redondo Beach, but stayed and raised Faith under night skies so dark that she could see every constellation. In the summer, ponderosa pines cast the town in cool shade. Lindy worked as a project manager at an energy efficiency company, Roger as a heating and air conditioning technician. They had wanted more children, but struggled with infertility, and it never worked out.
Faith was enough. She is social and wants to study human resources to help people. There’s a smattering of freckles across her nose, and she has long brown hair, which she often wraps in a messy bun that she fiddles with as she talks. She is articulate, only an occasional ‘oh my gosh’ and ‘so weird’ betraying her youth.
She and her friends knew every hiking spot and swimming hole in Paradise. They walked on the railroad tracks near the Flumes, narrow catwalks paralleling the Feather River, and watched sunsets from Lake Oroville. When they got bored, they piled into Faith’s green Subaru Outback and drove around looking for unexplored roads.
They had only one semester left together, and it was to be bittersweet.
Faith will always remember the details of Nov. 8, partly because she was home alone. Her mother had flown to Spokane to help her sister after knee replacement surgery. Her father had left for work. At 7:45 a.m., a huge cloud of smoke unfurled in the sky outside her bedroom window. To Faith, it looked like a strange fog.
Roger called from his job in Chico to say a 10-acre fire had ignited near Pulga, a tiny place 9 miles northeast of Paradise that Faith had never heard of. Fires were always breaking out near Paradise, so he told her not to worry and to keep her cell phone nearby, as if a teenager needed such advice.
She drove to the high school. Posters for the next football game were taped to the outer walls: “Red Bluff! 7 P.M.! Ultimate Pride!”
In the parking lot, her phone pinged. East Pentz Road, near Faith’s home, was being evacuated, a friend said. It was 8:10 a.m., and she decided to make the two-minute drive back to grab a few things. She saw a line of flames in a nearby field, but a firefighter was nearby. Must be a controlled blaze, she thought, even though she knew an evacuation was under way. She was too stressed to think clearly.
By the time she arrived, the neighbor’s house was ablaze. So was Ridgewood Mobile Home Park nearby. Faith didn’t know what to do, so she grabbed one of her dad’s favorite T-shirts from the dryer, along with their two dogs, Lil Bit and Bella, and the cat, Cassie. She nabbed her parent’s safe, too.
Driving out, the field she’d passed was now engulfed, the firefighter gone. She was able to meet up with her father in the middle of Paradise. But in the chaos of bumper-to-bumper traffic, a police officer directed Faith to one side of the main route out of town, called Skyway, and Roger to the other. Cell service dropped.
Ash blew through the car’s vents and fire danced across its hood, melting the paint. People sped by in the turn lane. Tires exploded. The husks of abandoned cars lined the shoulder of the road.
She wondered if bodies were in the cars, and whether she should make a run for it, with or without her animals. She found herself repeating words of self-encouragement: Stay positive. That won’t be me. Keep your head up. Just get out.
It wasn’t until Faith was near Chico, 15 miles west of Paradise, that the oppressive black sky turned blue. She couldn’t process what she had just been through — a fire that would become the worst in state history, destroying 14,000 homes, including her own, and killing 86 people. The Camp Fire made adults of teenagers. This was now Faith’s senior year, defined by disaster.
The Browns moved to the DoubleTree hotel in Sacramento. Lindy didn’t want to stay in Chico because of the traffic congestion, the smoke