Fire in Paradise by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

For twenty hours, Bubba Shipman had, like Sedwick, been fighting to save his Old Magalia neighborhood—the homes next to his, the old church—unaware of how the rest of the Ridge was faring. For the last four, he’d been in the dense forest behind his home, using his chainsaw to cut through the trees and dry brush to create a fire line.

He toiled away, covered in sweat, with a gash on his left eyelid where a sharp piece of charred bark had cut him. A flap of skin hung over his eye. He expected that the wind would shift in the morning and he wanted to get rid of any fuel near his house.

But fire came hours sooner than he expected. Trudging up the steep gravel incline to his house on Magalia Cemetery Road, Shipman could feel the heat at his back, and abandoned the chainsaw. The air felt too hot to breathe. “You gotta move,” he told himself.

Trees behind him popped with a screech that sounded demonic. Knees buckling, he fell to the ground in front of the house of a neighbor who had asked Shipman to rescue his dog. Shipman rallied himself and kicked in the door, picked up the Australian shepherd, and carried it out.

Reaching his home next to the old graveyard, he went for his other chainsaw and started cutting down more brush. The chain fell off and a nearby house went up. Shipman got down on his knees in tears: “God, I just worked all day long for everybody else. Now you’re going to take mine?”

His neighbor’s propane tank, just 10 feet away, started venting, sending streams of flames 50 feet into the air and directly toward his home, and his massive cedar.

It was an elegant, 100-foot tree growing against his house. It offered good shade in the summer. But looking at it now, all he could think was how it would spell the end of the life he’d built. Many of its limbs were dead and brittle, and woodpeckers had drilled holes that dried it out from the inside.

The tree was an unwieldy 4 feet wide at the base, but Shipman hoped he could get it to fall on his carport, away from the cemetery. Embers fell onto his hands as he cut and melted the plastic of the chainsaw. Finally, Shipman heard a snap, and the cedar started to fall.

But it came down the wrong way. Instead of collapsing over his carport, it went east, toward the cemetery, filled with the remains of the Paradise Ridge’s earliest settlers. There was the grave of Peter Woolever, a Scotsman who came to California in the 1850s and built a hotel in Magalia that served the gold miners who flocked to the area. Or another that only listed the name Ada, with a dedication to a mother and child who died together in 1892.

The cedar brought down a section of chain link fence and crashed over several of the headstones. There was an almighty bang, and one cracked down the middle.

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