CHICO, Calif. _ The hills that stretch above this grassy pasture were once ablaze, an apocalyptic fire consuming their homes, disrupting their families, melting their childhoods.
Now, six months later, on a makeshift practice field with no yard lines or end zones, the Paradise High football team smolders.
The several dozen teenagers get dressed in the front seats of their dusty trucks and rickety sedans because there is no locker room. Some are wearing second-hand cleats. Others are wearing borrowed shorts.
Their young faces are consumed by yawns because they spent the night sleeping on a couch. Or they spent the last three months sleeping on the floor of a trailer. Or they awoke at 5 a.m. after sleeping on an air mattress 90 minutes away.
They are overwhelmingly tired. They feel like they are homeless. They shuffle their feet across a concrete parking lot and step wearily through an opening in a fence.
But once their toes touch the grass on this soft spring afternoon, they run. Oh, how they run, together in their green Paradise Football T-shirts adorned with the giant face of a bobcat, running from their aborted season, running from disrupted lives, running through their pain.
They bounce off one another with screams. They jump around one another with joy. They huddle together and place their arms on top of one another and erupt in purpose.
"Brothers to the bone!" they shout.
In these first days of Paradise High's spring practice, their first official workouts since the historically hellish Camp fire on Nov. 8 destroyed their town and caused 85 fatalities, the Bobcats are searching for normal.
"Being out there on that field is the only thing that feels right," says Taylor Brady, a sophomore receiver.
Although all 104 players in the Bobcats program survived the deadliest fire in California history, 95 of them lost their homes. With the fire leading many to move elsewhere to find housing, the team also lost many of its players to relocation. One running back moved to Oregon. Another one is in Pennsylvania. Another one is in San Diego. A 76-person varsity squad has been whittled to 36. The junior varsity will now include freshmen because the freshman team has been eliminated.
The fire occurred on the eve of the team's first-round playoff game, so it was the only one of the 15 Paradise High sports teams that also lost its season, suddenly ending an 8-2 campaign that some felt could have ended in a championship.
The players miraculously didn't lose their school, or their beloved Om Wraith Field, but for health and safety reasons they have been banned from playing there until this summer. When they come back, they will find a scoreboard that has been partially melted and stumps of dozens of trees that once shadowed the goal posts. Also gone is the shipping container that housed much of their equipment, its contents reduced to ashes.
"I don't know if anybody outside of our town can understand what we've gone through," says Spencer Kiefer, a junior linebacker. "Just getting a chance to play football again is amazing."
They lost so much, yet they still have one another, so on this spring afternoon they play through every whistle, smother every blocking bag, climb over one another in every scrum, awash in the joy of being together again and the hope of an autumn reborn.
"I lined up and looked to my left and saw my buddy Ray, I looked to my right and saw my buddy Nate, and I finally felt at home," says Riley Hopper, a freshman center. "It made me forget, and it reminded me, all at the same time."
They lost so much, but they still have their coach, the venerable Rick Prinz, a 60-year-old with a quiet stare and a white goatee.
He has 30 years invested in the school, 20 as the head coach, and last season was going to be his finale. He was going to retire, but that plan literally went up in flames. The fire was still burning when he decided to stay because that's what leaders do.
"Now that we've had this catastrophe, I can't walk away, I can't just leave the kids like this," Prinz says. "I feel like I have a responsibility to help our school and the football program get back on its feet, whatever that's going to take, I've got to try to do it."
They lost so much, but they still have an upcoming season awaiting them, although their smaller size _ enrollment is expected to drop from about 1,000 to 350 _ forced them to leave their division and play an entirely new and odd 10-game independent schedule cobbled together by athletic director Anne Stearns.
They will play at least three schools that are twice their size. They will play a game 2{ hours north at Mount Shasta High _ even though they have no idea how they will get there because Paradise also lost most of its bus drivers to post-fire relocation. Stearns had to make dozens of calls and play the sympathy card dozens of times just to find those 10 teams, and yes, she is considering acquiring a special license so she can drive the bus herself.
"Nobody wanted to play us because they were in a no-win situation," Stearns says. "If you lose to Paradise, it doesn't look good for you to lose to a team that lost half of its student body. If you beat Paradise, then you beat the team from the town that burned down."
They have one another, their coach, their schedule and, above all, their mission. It is a mission fashioned from the moment those boys were chased down the hill on that nightmarish Thursday morning in November, some sitting in smoke-surrounded cars weeping in fear, one of them even stuck alone outside in a parking lot, crying into the phone to his parents that he was going to die.
They all have different escape stories, they all have different tales of landing in trailers or hotels or on floors, but their mission is the same, one you can hear in spring shouts filled with equal parts joy and revenge.
"That fire picked a fight with the town of Paradise," says Greg Kiefer, father of Spencer. "When these kids come back, they're going to smoke people."
