Paradise, Recycled by Margaret “Charley” Burlock

I was eating brunch the first time I saw the drifts of slow white fall from the sky. It was July in San Francisco. A fat flake settled atop my hollandaise, too light to dent the shiny yellow fat. I can only fear what I can recognize. I was curious. I leaned close and prodded the delicate mass with the very tip of my fork’s prong. It didn’t melt or sink; it dissolved, collapsing into a descent of dark dust which settled and blended into my drooling egg. Not white, grey. Not snow, ash.

In the Bay Area, we are unaccustomed to the daily reckoning with the natural world. We do not have seasons. We rarely have weather. We are not used to cushioning our schedules to account for buried cars or felled power lines. But we do have disasters and these disasters are coming with increasing regularity and severity. We are growing accustomed to them. When COVID reached San Francisco, many of us already had N-95s in our garages left over from last fire season. We recycle better and more than any other city in the world. 

California lifts its name from a failed sequel. Amadís de Gaul was the most popular romance in Europe at the time of its publication in the late sixteenth century. One Huguenot captain claimed that the tale induced a “spirit of vertigo” in his entire generation. It set the standard for chivalry, or at least for its idealization. Amadís de Gaul was the book that drove Don Quixote mad. It was also a translation, its original author unknown. Rodriquez later continued the story with The Adventures of Esplandian, the Legitimate Son of Amadís de Gaul, an original work and a literary flop. In it, he tells of an island, wedged somewhere between the Indies and Eden, “populated by black women without a single man among them.” California was an island of gold and violence; the warrior women killed men and their own infant sons. They nurtured only their daughters and the “small number” of men (Rodriguez later and inexplicably grants them a small number) needed to produce them. They wore leather and gold. Leather to protect themselves from their domesticated griffins, creatures pulled by Rodríguez from Levantine mythology and by the Californians from their mothers’ breasts at birth. Gold because no other metal existed. This California was described as a paradise. 

In 2018, Paradise burned. Images of the slender bones of burned-out cars, the blackened footprints of homes, and grizzled cul-de-sacs littered our timelines and worried our phone conversations, for a few weeks. The town of just over 26,000 people lost ninety percent of its population; eighty-five died in the inferno itself, another fifty from complications after the fact, and the rest evacuated and never returned. Fewer than five percent of the town’s structures were left standing. It was the worst fire in California history, for a short time. 

Wildfires, like novel diseases, are often named for their birthplaces, not necessarily the areas they devastate the deepest. Zika got its name from the Ziika forest of Uganda, Ebola from the Congolese river along which cases were first “discovered” and documented by a team of international scientists. The West Nile Virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, the Lassa Virus follow a similar pattern. These names can be misleading; by definition, illnesses spread, but these names tether the diseases to their geographic origin, staining certain locations with an air of sickness long after the outbreak is contained or has centralized elsewhere. This stain may help to explain why diseases that originate in places of wealth and political power seem to rarely follow this trend, Lyme being the notable exception. “Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined,” Toni Morrison insists. In the cases of wildfires, this geographic naming practice serves as a practicality more than an indictment. Naming fires for their origins leads firefighters to the flame and inspires public interest. “If a fire was known as LAFD-1961-57,” explains former firefighter and fire historian Stephen Pyne, “nobody would care.” 

The fire that consumed Paradise got its name from a 5.7-mile spit of backroad. Sparks from an outdated electric transmission line on Camp Creek Road ignited some dead leaves which ignited 153,336 acres, burning, at some points, a football field of land every second. The fire was called Camp for short. Dispatchers are advised to stick to a single word when naming a fire. They are also advised, according to a 2012 memo from the National Interagency Fire Center, to avoid naming fires after people, businesses, private property, or “using cute or funny fire names.” Slang is “unprofessional” as are religious, ethnic, and political slurs. The only words that the memo explicitly bans by name are “dead man” and “deadman.” 

Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the rules were looser. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the West itself was looser. “We named after girlfriends,” Payne explains. “We indulged in wordplay- all of which made us feel more attached to the fires and their stories.” 

“Paradise” made for a dazzling story. Headlines like “Paradise Lost,” and “Forced from Paradise” abound. Its destruction sounded mythic, like an act of god rather than an act of boring and bloody negligence: cracking power lines, overdried earth, and blistered flesh. 

Two days after ash snowed on my brunch, Derick Almena and Max Harris pled guilty to thirty-six counts of involuntary manslaughter. The sky over the Alameda County Courthouse had already regained its blue. A reporter’s creased brows glistened under the newly unobstructed sun as he explained that the two men deemed legally responsible for the Ghost Ship Warehouse fire two years before would go straight to prison rather than to trial. The reporter said that the men’s lawyers said that the men were “remorseful.” The plea was later discarded. 

I had never been to the Ghost Ship Warehouse. I had never even heard of it before its name became a hashtag, a public tragedy. This lack of awareness embarrasses me. Looking at the “before” photos online, I feel a bitter wave of childish envy; the place is impossibly cool. The ribs of industrial steel beams enclose an unaccountably harmonious collage of nestled vintage wooden speakers, worn leather armchairs, piles of plush patterned pillows—none of them matching—and several instruments that I cannot identify by name —all of it bathed under syrupy, amber light of paper lanterns. Cataloging these items now feels cheaply ominous, almost vindictive. But these images of the unburned warehouse stir a phantom limb, a deep longing for a home that no longer exists, a home I never even knew but felt the echo of in my childhood and the absence of in my adolescence. Headlines described the warehouse as an “artist’s utopia.” The Bay Area itself was once described in similar terms. In this way and in retrospect, the warehouse seems like an anachronism, a material reiteration of the city that was after it wasn’t. 

It is the rag-tag, raucous, and slightly dangerous form of intimacy captured in these images that my peers and I fumbled after for years. We bought tickets to concerts billed as “raves” and arrived at auditoriums as open and frictionless as ice rinks. We left smelling like fog machines and no one else’s sweat. We packed ourselves into the Sutro caves on the quivering lip of the Pacific. We lit rat’s nests of colored string lights and played old music from new speakers and tried to forget that we were partying on ruins, that these caves used to be swimming pools big enough to hold ten-thousand splashing bodies at once— before the developers bought and burned the property, realizing that insurance claims were more lucrative than the luxury-high rise apartments they originally intended. We danced anyway, pressed between the cold, dead rocks and each other’s bodies, danced until the speakers gave out and the tides came in, danced beneath the sleek chrome skyscrapers and new high-rises and plumes of smoke blending into the grey night’s fog. 

And so I envied the plush and crowded images of “before,” forgetting—for an instant— that there was an “after.” I forgot that all of the color and texture of that warehouse is now waterlogged black charcoal. I forgot about the footage of the fire lapping desperately out of the boarded up and excessively curtained windows, flicking its slender tongues over the screaming skull emblazoned on the building’s chest, its graffiti eyes bulging and hair streaming back into the wall of indiscriminate flame. And then I remembered. 

The news coverage snaps from the footage of the fire to a grid of victims’ faces, grinning and young. It looks like a yearbook page. Maybe this association is particular to me as I’ve actually seen one of the victims, Cash Askew, in a yearbook; she was a year ahead of my brother in high school. I don’t know if they were friends. Having died young himself, I cannot ask him. I know her primarily because her image hung on every printer in our school for years after she graduated: a grainy black and white image of her face over the caption ‘Something Askew? Call printing services!” followed by a phone number. After Ghost Ship burned, these posters were quietly taken down. What may be funny to one person or group may not be to another, the National Interagency Fire Center’s memo warns. 

Fires often repeat themselves. In this case, they are numbered. If you try to search for information on the 2016 Canyon Fire, you are immediately redirected to information on its sequel. Canyon Fire 2 is not actually the second but the twenty-sixth at least. We are Californians. Our memories can be short. 

Redundancy means disposability. In Don Quixote, town members ransack the mad knight’s library searching for a myth to explain Quixote’s inexplicable reality. The first book they reach for is the original Amadis of Gaul but determine that “being singular in its art it must be spared.” They burn the sequel instead. The book that first names California becomes the “beginning to the pile for the intended bonfire.” 

Although The Adventures of Esplandian, the Legitimate Son of Amadis of Gaul was generally considered a stylistic failure, delegated to the trash bins of history and the pyre of Don Quixote, the sliver about California lodged itself somewhere deep and irretrievable. Numerous voyages set out to discover this hostile, terrestrial paradise. In 1533 one man did. As the legend predicted, he did not live to tell the tale; he was killed by native people, but his men returned with California on their lips and gold in their pockets. The name persisted despite the absence of griffins and the presence of men. It persisted even after 1539, when Francisco de Ulloa stumbled upon land that jointed the thumb of California to a vast and meaty hand, proving definitively that it was not an island but a peninsula. Despite this evidence, California appeared on maps as an island well into the seventeenth century. The Spanish believed the myth over the very earth beneath their boots. They clung desperately to the idea of California as a heaven without history, a place of material abundance, violent retribution, and golden horizons. Many of us in California are clinging to it still, but our grip is growing slippery. 

I had not noticed the smoke in the sky until I noticed the ash in my meal. San Franciscan skies are generally white, especially in the summer. I finished my eggs anyway. I finished my day. I awoke to blue skies. When California burns, San Francisco gets the smoke. It is inconvenient and alarming, but not generally very disruptive, especially to those of us who can work and sleep indoors. California requires of its inhabitants a certain level of disassociation; a baseline of abstract, existential dread comes with living on land pregnant with its own destruction. We have known for over a century that the Big One is coming. We know that it will catch us by surprise. We can see the stretch marks of our growing devastation: mismatched sidewalk lines, hairline fractures along our plaster walls, asphalt puckering over fault lines. None of these releases are sufficient enough to relieve the pressure building up beneath our feet. We are overdue. 

But the land itself is mostly quiet. We step over the cracks in the sidewalk and replaster our walls. We scrape ash out of our egg yolks. We raise housing prices, the landlords knowing that for every family evicted or burned out of a rent-controlled apartment, there is another young techie eager to replace them, searching for that mythic Californian paradise— with money enough to secure it. 

But this year, the land refused to comply with its own idealization. It made itself too loud to ignore. Or rather, we finally made it scream. September tainted our sky the violent and artificial red of butcher paper: refrigerated blood. Our dogs yapped at our ankles, herding us to our bedrooms before noon, our windows blackened against the smoked-out sun. My mother’s home is stained an oily charcoal from the weeks it spent soaking in the thick and poisoned air. Reporters debated the cigarette equivalent to spending an afternoon outside. Rent prices fell faster than anywhere else in the country, faster than anywhere else on record. Those acquisitive men in boots are finally seeing the land beneath their feet, the sinews of earth connecting this paradise to the rest of the world, the smoke on the horizon. 

San Francisco history is a history of exodus. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Fillmore district was not the Fillmore but the “Harlem of the West.” The first known use of the term “jazz” appeared in a March 6th, 1913 article on the neighborhood’s clubs. The city pulled at and held many of the most prominent Black writers, artists, and entertainers of the era from Billie Holiday to Maya Angelou to John Coltrane to Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and Charlie Parker. Ordinary Black Americans flocked to the peninsula too, following rumors of liberal attitudes, good fun, and shipyard jobs. They took up residence in ornate, blooming Victorians left cheap and empty by the Japanese internment. Next came the lost children with windy feet. The very same year that masses of freckles and fray flooded the city for the Summer of Love, Black and Japanese community organizers sued the city of San Francisco for razing of hundreds of city blocks deemed “slums,” closing 883 businesses and displacing what eventually amounted to 4,729 families in the predominately Black neighborhood to make room for “the beauty and restfulness of the suburbs, combined with all of the advantages of the City.” The flower children, too, were soon lured into cults or heroin or back to their parents’ cul-de-sacs leaving space for Google buses and Salesforce towers. My city is small. There have been many San Franciscos on this peninsula, under many names. There have been many false paradises lost and many real homes repainted. 

It’s in vogue to bemoan the fall of our city. San Francisco is dead seems best exhaled with a full mouth of smoke—if smoking wasn’t out of vogue itself. Sometimes it seems like the only communal force uniting the ever-alternating population of this astronomically expensive and periodically toxic peninsula is our collective disdain for the smoke, for the prices, for the peninsula itself. But today, the sky is clear and I am homesick despite myself. In her essay “Relations,” Eula Biss cites a 2005 British study that found that “girls between seven and eleven harbor strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls,” often preferring to microwave, burn, cut or otherwise maim the smiling plastic teenager over “other ways of playing with the doll.” Biss sees this as evidence that rather than “teaching young girls to hate themselves” the doll does the opposite; little girls mutilate Barbie because they see through the lie of her impossibly slender legs, her shiny mounded tits. They do not believe in Barbie’s perfection, and so they go at it with a straight razor. But maybe these seven-to-eleven-year-olds torture Barbie precisely because they do believe in her mythologized version of femininity. It feels more like a crime of passion than a crime of disbelief; it takes a lot of love to hate something so much you want to see it microwaved into molten and noxious formlessness. These girls have to believe in the myth, at least a little, to try so desperately to make it bleed. 

There’s a whiff of this burned plastic in the critiques of San Francisco we lob over our heavy burritos and watered-down gin. There’s a whiff of it in this essay. I want to pull at the seams of San Francisco’s mythology and rub the strands between my fingers into tight and dirty balls. It gives me something to do with my hands. I am often asked if I want to return to the city. Over the years I’ve watched my answer blacken and dissolve, shivering from an emphatic “yes” to a “yes, if I can afford it” to a smoldering silence. I want to say, “I do not know if there is a San Francisco to return to.” I want to say, “I no longer recognize the skyline.” I want to say, “I no longer recognize the sky.” 

More than any of that, I want to say “yes.” 

Margaret “Charley” Burlock is recent graduate of Middlebury College and an incoming creative nonfiction MFA student at NYU. Her work has appeared in Narrative, where she worked as an editorial intern and submission reader. She has also interned and read for the New England Review and Autumn House Press. 

27 January 2022