Lizzie Johnson

“Soon Carr would join a search-and-recovery team tasked with looking for the dead. The team would comb the streets, hunt through ruined homes and cars, explore ditches and gullies. It was unrelentingly sad work, but it brought some fulfillment and meaning to the disaster. Tragedy, Carr knew, turned the human experience inside out and forced people to confront realities they never had to in times of prosperity. Trauma eventually came to everyone, in greater or lesser degrees. The trick was to notice the sings of distress: when a normally upbeat person shut down. When an introvert talked too much. When a leader drank to excess. How were first responders going to deal with this tragedy? What story were they going to tell themselves?”
― Lizzie Johnson, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire

“They thought about all the things they had lost: the Gold Nugget Museum, the Elks Lodge, Mendon's Nursery. The old Paradise sign topped by the bandsaw halo. The sound of children on playgrounds, the bustle of downtown. Eighty-five seconds of slice for how much it had hurt, and still hurt. Silence, too, for the things that they held on to: Johnny Appleseed Days and Gold Nugget Days; trick-or-treating for full-size candy bars on Lancaster Loop; balmy summer evenings at the drive-in movie theater, a mattress thrown in the truck bed; the red dirt that stained their clothing; how every phone number began with 877 and directions were simply "upper", "middle", or "lower" Paradise - no explanation needed; the cool waters of the Feather River; the air that smelled like heaven after the first winter rain or the first warm day of summer. Somehow it all felt holy.

If a town was only houses and buildings, would they still be gathered here?”
― Lizzie Johnson, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire