PARADISE, Calif. _ After the Camp fire took their homes, three Paradise High School seniors _ Sofia DiBenedetto, Bailey Grover and Gage Shields _ are finding community and resilience in their choir class.
Rain was falling as evacuees returned to their beloved town in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Traffic slowed as drivers beheld the devastation.
Five weeks earlier, an inferno swept through these wooded neighborhoods, exacting a terrible toll. Of the 86 people killed in the Camp fire, most lived here. Of the more than 14,000 structures lost, 12,000 were from here. Ninety percent of the town was lost, officials say.
Block after block, homes sit crumbled atop foundations and footings, ashy-white landmarks in a landscape of charred trees and soot-blackened soil.
The business districts fared no better, a grim catalog of destruction: restaurants collapsed around tables and chairs, a supermarket reduced to shelving and rubble, a liquor store with rows of shattered fifths, an antique mart where the face of a porcelain doll stares at the open sky.
Residents and business owners say they will return and rebuild _ Paradise Strong _ and an army of utility workers has already swept through the city, felling trees, raising power poles, and stringing utilities.
But the first reflex in the face of catastrophe is easy: hard work and resolve, as much a part of the American character as the impulse to raise a flag over the most unrecognizable ruins.
But what comes next?
Paradise wonders. It is a city of many unanswered questions, not the least of which is how the future can be imagined when the past and present have been so thoroughly erased.
