Camp Fire Poem
cars, trucks crowd
three wide
on both lanes
an entire town burns down
in a wildfire
smoke for weeks
months of rain
a strange house
a hotel with a waffle bar
#rvlife
rivers beyond their banks
roads flood
parks flood
smoke clears
waters recede
it gets hot, bright
we wade into the river
and look around,
still here
I wrote this poem about nine months after the 2018 Camp Fire, which devastated my town of Paradise, CA, and surrounding communities, collectively known as the Ridge. Seven years later, I still have much to unpack with regard to the fire and the impact it has had on my life.
Taking the Next Easy Step
After the fire, I didn’t know what to do. We bought a travel trailer. Friends helped us find somewhere to park it. We kept taking the next easy step. Everything felt different, and yet for most of the world, things continued on much the same. I attempted some poems, sketched lots of landscapes and portraits of my cats, and thought about how I wanted to spend my time.
I also made playlists—the first one was called “Memento Mori”—remember death. It’s dark, hard-hitting. There’s a song on it that accompanied my surreal drive home, plume looming ahead, me following CalFire into this unprecedented experience, not knowing what to expect when I got there. Not understanding the scale of what was happening. That song makes that playlist radioactive. I made another playlist, “Disaster Recovery,” a few months after the fire (honestly, the timeline gets fuzzy). It acknowledges the need to process the grief and the anger, but it doesn’t offer answers. Those answers didn’t exist yet. We just kept going, day to day, and didn’t try to look too far into the future.
Everything is urgent and immediate in the days after disaster. Immediate—unmediated, without medium–lacking context. Taking the next easy step is necessary when you are too discombobulated to properly formulate a long-term vision.
Turning Inward
At some point, the next easy step wasn’t satisfying anymore. As I muddled through the first year post-Camp Fire, I had the strong feeling that I should respond with an equally cataclysmic shift in myself. The fire had sent my already somewhat disorganized life into panic mode.
Until then, I did not have the slightest notion that I might be neurodivergent. Things were stable enough. I got things done well enough. I had a master’s degree and prestigious-sounding job title. It was a facade. Established habits stopped working; I had to turn inward and learn more about myself. I filled notebooks with complaints and ideas, things I wanted and didn’t want. I grew dissatisfied with my job—not because it was a bad job, but because I could see, suddenly, that it would not take me where I wanted to go.
What Emerges from the Ashes
The utter rupture caused by the Camp Fire became an opportunity to reorient. I developed new ways of being, thinking, and getting anything done. As I interrogated the haphazard structures that had been holding my life together, I was also carving much needed definition into my vision for the future. With this, my capacity to create and uphold boundaries increased. I elbowed out more space for myself, and I found, as I stepped back, that my vision for my life was much bigger and less urgent than the frame in which I had been operating. I became more self-directed. I experienced more agency because I was making real choices and moving in a specific direction.
Still, it took two years and a global pandemic for me to quit my job as a magazine editor. That was the processing time I needed to let go of the old narrative and make room for what’s next. Now, I am working toward the vision that emerged from the ashes with a clarity only possible when everything else has burned away.
Seeing Across the Valley
The Camp Fire burned away long-neglected debris and cleared our view. You can see straight across the valley now, a perspective once obscured by dense pine trees. Perhaps now we can also see more clearly into the future we want for ourselves and our community.
How do you build a community vision? It’s a question that still burns bright in my mind at every meeting and event. Who is here? Why? Who is not here? Why not? Early on in the recovery process, community groups convened across the Ridge to co-create a vision for our collective future. The Town of Paradise led the creation of our Long-Term Recovery Plan, which continues to be updated periodically. The arts community came together to find out what each group needed and what each could offer. Regenerating Paradise gathered folks to process, grieve, and envision a more regenerative future. Different groups implemented different strategies for one purpose: discover what the Ridge wants to become. Now, we’re working together to manifest the community vision that emerged from those conversations.
A strong vision provides a direction around which to orient. If you’re always taking the next easy step without direction or intention, you don’t have control over where you end up. Disaster destroys the expected path—do we rebuild the same path or head in a different direction?
Long-term recovery doesn’t happen in a straight line. It’s a long, arduous path that we have to create one stepping stone at a time. External factors push and pull, pressuring us to refine and reimagine the way forward. Having a shared community vision gives you something to point at to say, “That is where we’re going together.” The exact path taken can flex according to community capacity.
When disaster burns everything away, what remains is the clarity to build the life—and the community—you actually want.
Lighten Up
My third and most recent playlist is called “Lighten up :)” and it’s full of dreamy, easy lofi and electronica for returning to a state of softness. It’s soothing without being saccharine. Comforting without leaning too heavily on nostalgia. It’s the soundtrack of the vision I hold for my future.
The Camp Fire was a catalyst. It put pressure on me to figure out what I really wanted and needed. In learning about my neurodivergence, I unlocked a contentedness that was not previously possible, even before the fire. All of this gave me a clarity of vision that keeps me putting effort into a life—and a community—that I know I can love.
This is the opportunity every individual and every community must grapple with after such rupture. My advice: Take time to develop your vision, and go slow. It’s a long way. And that’s fine with me.
