Camp Fire: How do you rebuild Paradise when all seems lost?

Nov. 18--PARADISE -- Her singsong name and fairy-tale address once seemed like a perfect fit for her mostly ceremonial duties: riding in a convertible during the Gold Nugget Days parade and giving speeches, like the one two months ago for a new bike trail honoring pioneer Yellowstone Kelly.

Now, 10 days after the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history tore through the heart of this place, she carries the weight of a town searching for its soul. What is left when a community of 26,000 is virtually wiped off the map? How can you bring people back when there's almost nothing to come home to?

With the remains of 76 people uncovered so far -- and the death count soaring every day -- the loss is unfathomable, the trauma immense and the prospect of rebuilding monumental, and perhaps too soon.

"It's overwhelming if you try to look at the whole thing. It's just overwhelming," said Jones, 62, who grew up in San Jose, worked for years as a Caltrans district director and moved to Paradise when she married. "My strategy so far has been one day at a time, one foot in front of the other."

Ninety percent of the homes in Paradise are leveled. More than half the downtown is destroyed. And nearly everyone she knows lost everything they own. Jones and every member of the town council lost their homes. So did the police chief, the county supervisor and the entire public works crew. More than a dozen homes belonging to Town Councilman Greg Bolin and his extended family burned to the ground, including his mother's, his sister's, two cousins', an uncle's, an aunt's. The list keeps going.

Who will return? What are the odds that the senior citizens on fixed incomes will rebuild or that the poor people in trailers will be drawn back or that the families with children settled into new schools will come back?

"Is it worth it to go back to a community when there's nothing for the children?" asked Luke Doris, 47, who has raised his two kids, 10 and 14, in Paradise. "Most of the people we know lost their homes. Some didn't have insurance. They won't come back."

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For many of those who fled, contemplating the future of Paradise is not a priority right now. It is finding a place to live, filling out insurance forms, buying a car, finding pants that fit that consume their days. Some are having panic attacks stuck at traffic lights in downtown Chico, obsessing about the grandmother's ring or the baby pictures they should have grabbed before they fled, or grieving over loved ones who didn't make it out.

Robert Fillmore, 71, was lucky to get a hotel room in Chico but feels lost about his next move.

"My nephew called and he lives in L.A. He said you have to look for opportunity in tragedy, so that's what we've been trying to do," said Fillmore who lost the home he shares with his wife. "But it's like you're in the smoke and you can't see your way through the smoke, which direction to go."

Jones understands the uncertainty, the bewilderment. Her two-story farmhouse at the end of Lighty Lane burned to the ground.

Wearing the same pair of jeans and purple sweater she's been wearing for days, Jones is doing the best she can. She was re-elected to her second term on the council two days before the fire. As mayor -- a one-year rotating position among the council -- she doesn't have the community stature of Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea, whose steadfast leadership beginning with the Oroville Dam crisis last year made him a folk hero who gets standing ovations at community meetings filled with evacuees. When Jones held her first public council meeting in borrowed space in Chico days after the fire, one Paradise resident angry over the chaotic, gridlocked evacuation demanded she resign.

"We could have done better," she says.

But still, Jones, who is paid $300 a month as mayor, thinks of herself as a practical optimist.

Not all, she says, is lost. On a tour through town last week, smoke still thick in the air, she looked out the car window and pointed to the building blocks of a new Paradise.

The Safeway is gone, but not the Holiday Market. Ponderosa Elementary is gone, but Paradise High is intact. One fire station was destroyed, but two survived. The Gold Nugget Museum is gone, but the library was spared. The pink-painted Joy Lyn candy shop, a local institution with "Heavenly candies made in Paradise" is destroyed, but the Old Barn that makes cheese blintzes survived.

The town hall, the police department, the irrigation district office are all still standing. Part of the Feather River Hospital can be salvaged. The Kmart shopping center and the Ace Hardware, the Dutch Bros. and Starbucks remain.

"So many have said, well, there's nothing left of Paradise," Jones said, but "there's really a core to build on."

Paradise has the ignoble distinction of being the largest municipality west of the Mississippi that runs on a septic system. But she knows -- from her experience with disasters and big projects at Caltrans -- that with federal money and grants, there's an opportunity to bring a sewer system, at least to the downtown corridors that could allow for bigger businesses, hotels and apartment buildings. The downtown was built up in the 1950s, and many of the ruined cinder block buildings could be replaced by attractive modern structures. Perhaps more sidewalks and street lights can be installed.

In the meantime, as speculators are poised to buy up tracts of land surely to be sold, some are trying to be visionary, dreaming up a new Paradise with more parks and public transportation and employment hubs.

"There's an opportunity to be thoughtful and design something special," said Phillip Dawe, who grew up in Paradise and whose mother -- who once ran "Picture Perfect Pet Parlour in Paradise" -- lost her home. "When do you get a whole town as a blank slate?"

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At the same time, how can you reweave the fabric of a town that goes back to the Gold Rush, when a donkey carrying a 54-pound gold nugget walked into a bar, or so the story goes?

Jones is hopeful the "builders and doers" will return. She wants to see the cultural stalwarts such as 65-year-old Dave Greslie, who organizes the "Donkey Derby" every year during Gold Nugget Days, when the stubborn animals are weighted down with 54-pound sacks and pulled through an obstacle course. And teenagers such as Pride Harvey, 16, who has always dreamed of being the Gold Nugget queen.

Councilman Bolin, a general contractor, promises he'll return.

"We're going to build and make it better than before," said Bolin. "I'm encouraged that people are saying, 'That's home, we're going back.' "

But Bill and Pam Hartley, owners of Joy Lyn candies, are wavering. They saved the chocolate recipes but lost the copper kettles and cream beaters and enrobing machines that made their old-fashioned chocolates special. They hope their son and daughter-in-law will keep making candy in Chico, but their Paradise home, and those of most of their extended family, is gone.

"I'm 70. I think it will take 10 years for it to start looking like a community again," said Bill Hartley, who was on the board at the museum and raised $50,000 for the Yosemite Kelly trail and interpretive signs. "I don't know if we have that left in us."

Forward is the only way Jones wants to look. The last time she looked back -- in her rearview mirror as she fled Paradise -- her town was burning down.

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A few days after the fire, for Veterans Day, Town Councilman Mike Zuccolillo and a group of volunteers were allowed through the roadblock to stake American flags along the entrance to downtown, "just to show we're still here and our traditions aren't gone," Jones said.

She's confident a new Paradise will emerge, holding on to the best of the past and building something better. It won't be a year. It could be five.

"I know what I'm in for," she said. "I'm not naive."

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