Dear Friends,
I haven’t shared this type of writing in a bit. I’m calling these ‘Travel Essays,’ but they’re really more place-specific personal essays - often a kind of glimpse of Americana.
Best,
Sam
530: ROAD TRIP IN PARADISE
I’m coming in on year four of a four-year project about forest fires in Northern California — it will go to be named by The New York Times as one of the top five films of the year, but, man, it doesn’t feel like it at that time.
The film had started as a short about a forest fire near L.A. Then there had been a mudslide and the film took that in as well. Then there were two major record-shattering fires in different parts of the state on the same day — one that cut a swathe through Malibu and one that absolutely decimated a town, Paradise, in the northern part of the state, killing 85 people. Caroline, the director, had started filming at the same time as the news crews in the immediate aftermath of the fire. She had most of what she needed — all kinds of cell phone and dashboard cam footage of the traffic jam from hell, the people from Paradise stuck in their cars on the Skyway (the one road leading out of town) while the fire bore down on them, and she had really powerful interviews with residents and first responders done soon after the fire. So she had most of it — and the first forty minutes of the film is, by common consent, gripping. But then, not surprisingly, it tapers off. In the cuts I’ve seen, there are scientific discussions of whether global climate change or local fire suppression practices are more to blame for the rise of megafires in the Western United States. There’s an investigation of logging practices by Sierra Pacific which may have led to the rapid spread of the fire that destroyed Paradise. There’s discussion of land use practices among indigenous peoples. There’s a thicket of shooting about town halls in Paradise — people voting on whether to adopt stringent fire-safety codes or make the same mistakes all over again. And so far the inclination is to make the same mistakes all over again — Paradise is poor and crotchety and has a libertarian streak and, on the whole, would rather burn down a second time than pay anything more in taxes than they have to. And, in the current cut, the town halls and council meetings occupy a very significant chunk of filmic real estate, which is fine, and it’s very interesting in its own way, but does seem to be less than movie gold.
All in all, a very reasonable place for a movie to have gotten to. There seem to be no fewer than six documentary crews circulating in and out of Paradise at this time making their film on the fire. Netflix has been the first off the block — with a 30-minute film that, as Caroline notes astringently, is just under the threshold to qualify for her domain, the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. There’s a Ron Howard film floating around, which has everybody very nervous — the crew is spotted sometimes with their perfect posture, their fancy equipment and gleaming physiques. And Caroline, her own Oscars notwithstanding, is putting on a master class of everything not to do in documentary filmmaking. There’s the problem of her inability to shoot selectively — as in usual directive on what to shoot: “All of it” — a strategy that has resulted in her already burning through the money she’s raised many times over. There’s the problem of running crew down. “We’ve had a couple of Clif Bar dinners, haven’t we?” she says jestingly to Eduard, the DP, which gets a hard stare from him. But there’s more to it than that — everybody I meet working on the project has like a thousand-yard stare. Annie, my predecessor, was so upset by a shoot in which Caroline just drove aimlessly around Paradise, screaming at everybody the whole time, that she declined to get on the same plane with Caroline heading back to Los Angeles, instead said she had something in San Francisco, although she didn’t, just drove there, crashed with a friend, and spent several days staring into the water. And the problem of alienating the local ‘talent.’ Caroline’s move is to turn five-minute ‘pick-up’ interviews into these four hour marathons — usually without letting the crew know, so that the DP doesn’t have time to set up a tripod and shoulder-carries the entire time — and around the halfway mark she starts using her favorite trick, which is to say ‘last question!’ so that the interviewee internally relaxes, although there are, in fact, many more questions to come. People in this part of the country are very polite and respectful and are helpless against this move — Eduard loves to tell the story of the man who really did need to pick his kids up from school, who kept getting hotter and hotter under the collar but couldn’t figure out how to extricate himself from Caroline’s questions and who made the tires screech on his car when he finally drove away. The only interviewee who cracked the code was the blind octogenarian mother of our main character. Eventually, captive audience though she may have appeared, she said, “If you say ‘last question’ one more time I’m going to climb out of this bed and beat the living crap out of you,” and that made Caroline cut off the interview and tiptoe out of the bedroom.
What I’m doing is a string of disparate — and desperate — shoots meant to bolster the film’s second half. It’s readily understood that the vast majority of these will end up on the cutting room floor. Typical is to be given a list of names — tribal elders, burn experts, conservationists, etc., to interview. Sometimes it’s to catch up with the film’s characters. Sometimes it’s an event — a controlled burn run by the state or a tribe, sometimes it’s a wildfire and I’m tagging along with a firefighting crew.
This lasts, in Caroline’s style, for a number of months. And, on the whole, this period is one of my more pleasant memories. With these ‘travel essays,’ I’m used to writing about a compressed period of time, a single shoot in which a whole bunch of things happen at once. But these trips upstate were a dog’s breakfast of shoots — each one fulfilling some mild objective, none, of course, giving the second half of the film the same lift as the disaster movie first half, which is what we were all secretly hoping for. Often, Caroline — who was buried under a different project — wouldn’t even bother to review the footage.
Still, for me, there was almost nothing that could have been better. I felt I’d been bottlenecked as an Associate Producer for a long time. And then I’d made it as a Field Producer for an Oscar-winning director — and who trusted me enough, and this was apparently a very new thing for her, to let me run a bunch of her shoots. For the crew as well it was very relaxing to have me doing the shoot rather than Caroline. I remembered to stop for meals. I kept the interviews to a trim hour or two hours. I give the crew time to put their cameras on tripods and boom poles on stands.
More than anything else, we’re like a traveling debate society. Eduard is French and from the European social democratic system. He’s shocked at things like the fact that the former head of Cal Fire, whom we interview, was clearly once a rank-and-file firefighter. In France, he says, there is no way that that person would become the head of any agency, the head would be somebody with an expensive watch and narrow glasses. And he is completely appalled at the fact that nobody in government has taken it upon themselves to keep people from going back to Paradise, which is very obviously a fire hazard of a town. In an interview with a reinsurance executive, whom he thinks will be sympathetic, he says, “My child wants to put her hand on the stove but I don’t let her — why is this any different?” At which point the reinsurance executive gets suddenly patriotic and tells him, “I think you’re being rude” — and defends the right of Paradise’s town government to put together any ordinance they want, however insane. Meanwhile, Nolan the soundman is one of these libertarian-for-Bernie types and we have some very long car rides to try and piece together how all of that might work. And I’m pretty excited to be, I guess, management, to be wearing a blazer on a shoot, to be making fast-and-loose decisions about who to hire and how long a shoot should run — and, on behalf of management, I start getting offended by things like the way that a state government office will just empty at the stroke of 5. The sweet spot for our arguments is about California’s new law treating car app drivers as labor rather than as independent contractors, which will mean the end of car apps as we know them. And in our long-haul drives through these endlessly beautiful woods, in our desultory meals at the few restaurants in Paradise that survived both the fire and subsequent health inspections, we debate — with very little data — this bill and each formulate our very divergent political philosophies on it.
Sometimes we even rope our characters into these debates. We have two characters in Northern California whom we think of as counterparts. There’s Nick, who’s a silver-tongued firefighter for Cal Fire. And there’s Ezra who’s a sort of loose cannon fire expert. Nick always seems very happy to see us, although, unfortunately, we can’t use him too much — Netflix discovered him as well and he’s all over their film. His story is that he was from a very poor inland community, and from an early age he’d fantasized about attending Annapolis and joining the Navy. And he’d done everything right, excelled in school, etc. The deal with Annapolis, though, was that you needed to be recommended by your congressman, and he’d met with the congressman, had a strong meeting, and then was called back a week or two later and told that there had been a misunderstanding, the recommendation had already been promised to the son of a major donor. The congressman knew that Nick had been looking at the fire academy as a backup and he said to him as consolation, “Well, you’ll be the smartest firefighter there ever was.” And Nick, as far as I could tell, was exactly that. The stereotype in wildland firefighting world was that the federal Hotshots were all bearded cowboys and Cal Fire were clean-shaven hipsters, the kinds of people who would show up at a fire sipping their Starbucks lattes. Nick embodied that. Cal Fire had developed this whole new approach to firefighting — they were badly outgunned by the rise of megafires and they’d leveraged just about every possible resource they had at their disposal, they deployed all these crowd-sourced apps to identify fire sources, made use of interstate agreements to distribute firefighters all over the state, learned which fires they could allow to burn out, made firefighting about brains as opposed to brawn. And at the key moment of the fire that engulfed Paradise, with the fire sweeping across the traffic jam from hell, Nick had had the brilliant idea of breaking into a Walmart and using that as defensible space, funneling everybody fleeing the fire into it and having his firefighters guard the parking lot. That was not a move that was taught in any sort of firefighting textbook but Nick had figured it out on the spot and probably saved a whole bunch of people. Still, there’s something so wounded about him every time you talk to him. The ‘smartest firefighter that ever was’ story comes up more than once. Every so often, after we finish an interview with him, he turns the tables on us — starts asking us, Eduard especially, about all of our shoots, all the places we’ve been.
And there’s Ezra, who’s a different sort of wounded. He was really a remarkable discovery early in the project — a genuine fire expert just living nearby Paradise and willing to speak his mind. But by the time I’ve joined the project, he’s a bit had it with all the documentary crews. We go to a beautiful field at magic hour with a view of some of Sierra Pacific’s logging clearcuts. It couldn’t be better, and Ezra’s answers are oddly disjointed. “I don’t know,” he says, “I feel like I’ve just given a pound of flesh to everybody. And I don’t want to keep badmouthing Sierra Pacific. At some point the fire gravy train is going to run out and I’ll need to have some logging guy I didn’t piss off.” So: fine. We go back to his metal shop, have a beer from his cooler. And as soon as he has the beer he starts to really chat. He gives the tour of the metal shop. “Blacksmithing is my art,” he says. And the place is just littered with work he’s made. And then he stands on a couch and manages to hook down a scale model he’s made of the area around Paradise with a view to fire risks. “Paradise was always a tinderbox but it’s hard to tell people the whole truth of it,” he says. “I always thought it would be a northeast wind that would get Paradise, I was a little surprised that it was an east wind instead.” And gestures to all of it on his model. Apparently, the map had been here the whole time — he’d just forgotten about it or something or didn’t bother to show us. And after a while he gets bored again, takes another beer out of the cooler. “These are expensive hobbies,” he says. “Most of the time I come here and sit in my chair and just think.”
It really is hard to know what to make of him. It’s nice to picture him as this lonely genius somehow stuck in the small town — he describes himself at one point as ‘fire expert, blacksmith, cartographer, parent…” and the feeling is that he’s probably forgetting something. But then, as he’s talking, there will be the wish-he-hadn’t-said-that comments. His wife is working on her own hobby —a novel about fugitive slaves in Eastern Canada. And Ezra, who has so many hobbies, is completely contemptuous of his wife’s — and of her chosen topic. “I didn’t know there were blacks in Canada,” he unfortunately says, “I thought it would be too cold for them.” And of a Jewish friend of his who got into trouble and moved to Israel, Ezra says, “He went home.” And he tells also the unsettling story of having fooled around with a backyard fire which got a bit out of hand and then, fire expert that he is, recognizing the danger of it, promptly drove away in his truck. And a great deal of the art of producing, as I’ve learned it, is to absolutely be on the side of the person you’re with, which pretty much means agreeing with whatever they say, and accepting the vantage-point of the pyromaniac-turned fire expert-turned arsonist that the occasional self-inflicted wildfire is basically part of the fun.
When we leave Ezra, there’s a lengthy debate about whether he’s a Jew or an anti-Semite. The crew is very divided. The name, the glasses, all point one way. The sense is that he’s tortured like a Jew but wields a blowtorch like an anti-Semite. Anyway. This debate, like all the others, never leads anywhere — and so much the better. We just drive around, scrape the barrel. Have our debates about Uber in California, about the holes in Nolan’s political philosophy, about Caroline of course — why it is that directors are always such narcissists, why it is that of all people on the planet we’ve ended up working for her. “It’s because I’m a pussy,” Eduard says. “I need the money.” And it really is a relief when we have a shoot, do our interview, then chat with our character — and they can introduce a fresh topic for debate, the kind of thing we would not have come up with ourselves: Nick vigorously defending the current firefighting practice of having incarcerated criminals do much of the grunt work, ‘cutting line,’ in fighting wildland fires; Ezra contending that virtually all fire suppression is a blunder, that it’s much better in the long run to just let fires do their thing.
There are other characters we meet as well, each of them slotted (hopefully) into a very distinct place in the film, each of them with their own whole world. There’s Aurelie, of the Mountain Maidu, a petite, put-together suburban kind of woman, who is full of stories about the ways that her ancestors sculpted this land, how the settlers believed it to be all natural but how it was essentially terraformed by indigenous people — a constant process of burning to keep the forest fresh. And tells the stories of shamans standing on mountaintops and having psychic duels with one another, competing to change the weather and so on. And Bob, legendary conservationist in his mountain hideaway who completely throws off our shoot schedule — as we realize when he starts an answer to a perfectly straightforward question by saying, “Well, to understand that you really have to go back to World War II” — and Bob’s sort of handyman who is pointed out a bit reverentially to us as having been lost in the woods for two weeks and who still seems a bit confused, a bit in a fog, when he starts to tell the story of how he escaped alive. And Nancy, who was fighting a lonely court battle against Sierra Pacific — which is interesting for our story except that she doesn’t have time for us. She runs a bald eagle sanctuary and has just gotten a call about a downed eagle, and we follow her there, film instead the process by which she gingerly approaches the eagle, earns its trust, eventually takes it into her grasp. While she’s there, there’s a guy standing in the road with arms upraised — he had seen the eagle fall and got out of his truck to support its ascending spirit. After the eagle had been rescued, he tends to Eduard, standing with him forehead to forehead and then locking eyes.
Nancy’s story is that she had lived in L.A. most of her life, then her husband decided to move to Manton in Northern California to start a business for long-range rock hauling. “What kind of a business is that?” she says. The marriage broke up in less than a year. A rock-hauling opportunity took him to Idaho, but Manton worked for her. “It was much more interesting than he was,” she says. And now, when we meet her, she just seems to be of the place, has her old beautiful farm, her old cats, her old horses, has her long-running feud with Sierra Pacific, has her non-profit picking up wounded birds by the side of the road. And really, herself, looks like a sad hawk — the long features, the stringy hair, and, when we meet her, a gash across her face delivered by one of her not-quite-tame raptors. Eduard, who may very much be under the influence of the hippie tapping foreheads, is very taken with her. “The world survives on people like her,” he says. “It’s all such a disaster. Without her, it’s complete catastrophe.”
The problem — in this piece, in the film itself — is finding any kind of structure. The advice I come up with to Caroline is to have a chorus of voices — don’t try, as several cuts have it, to wrap everything around a single character or narrative arc. The fire in Paradise was a mass event — affected people there indiscriminately and, to a degree, equally. The right way to treat it is to let the volume of footage speak for itself — have many voices, let the similarities between different experiences kind of organically drive the narrative forward. It’s a somewhat heterodox style of filmmaking — the documentary approach I was taught is all about carefully selecting a character and then following their story ‘beats’ — and Eduard, when he sees the most recent cut pushing in the mass direction, is miserable, like catatonic.
He watches it in a hotel — as we’re preparing for a shoot on the one-year anniversary of the fire. And his depression carries through for the rest of the shoot. As far he’s concerned, it’s all been an abysmal waste — years of his life, so many Clif Bar dinners, so much of Caroline’s abuse. The mood he’s in, he’d like to just follow Annie’s route to San Francisco and stare off into the sea.
But there’s a shoot to do, and a common consensus that it has to end here — even in this sort of open-ended, open checkbook shooting, there has to be a wrap sooner or later. There’s a major event downtown. A very cool, very butch artist has won a contest to make a piece of art commemorating the fire. She has decided to make a phoenix and to hang as many house keys from it as possible — keys from all the houses that have burned down. She keeps her tears in as she describes the hours upon hours she spent at her boyfriend’s mother’s working on the sculpture, the trips she took — the pain of pooling together gas money for it — to collect keys from the disparate residents of Paradise off in their scattered new homes. But she breaks down completely when she is handed a set of keys to the burned-down town and she waves them triumphantly over her head because she’s incapable of speaking any more. The sculpture, when we’re ushered in to see it, is really hideously ugly — a bedraggled, goggle-eyed bird weighted down with smelted keys. But no matter. It’s a beautiful event — everybody is there, so many of our characters, the whole town council crowd, and Ron Howard’s crew with their perfect posture, and barely a dry eye to go around, a year after a cataclysm and everybody just moving forward.
Our main characters, though, wouldn’t be caught dead at any event involving Town Hall. “There are some wild motherfuckers up here,” Eduard had told me on one of my first shoots in Paradise. One of the wild ones is Derrick. Caroline and Eduard had discovered him very shortly after the fire. The town had turned into a world-famous catastrophe — it was overrun with emergency personnel, with people sifting through the damage to identify bodies. Caroline and Eduard had been driving at the end of one of their Clif Bar-dinner shoot days and had come across a house blasting ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. They went to investigate and found a party on in full force — just like nothing at all had happened to the rest of Paradise. This was Derrick’s place, and it turned out that — while everybody else was in the traffic jam from hell on the Skyway — Derrick had chosen to stay and defend and, together with the small bandit army living in his house at the time, had managed to beat off the fire with garden hoses.
He was a great character, as was his mother — the blind old woman who had threatened to kick Caroline’s ass. And he really was the anchor for the film. In the aftermath of the fire he had become acquainted with a neighbor whose house had burned down — the absence of walls made it easier to get to know her — and their wedding was really the film’s natural endpoint. But in Caroline style we’re seeing if we can get anything more there — and Derrick is throwing a great house party for the one-year anniversary.
An outstanding character but there are some problems with him. One is that we aren’t the only documentary film to have been wandering around post-inferno Paradise and been taken by ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. There’s a young couple, both documentary filmmakers, who have chosen to make their film entirely about Derrick — so much so that there’s a room in Derrick’s house that’s set aside for them. They’re first-time filmmakers with no money, it’s very unlikely that their film will go anywhere, but to Eduard, in his disconsolate mood, everybody is doing everything better than we are — and the couple represent a ‘master class’ in follow documentaries. And the other problem is that Derrick gets very repetitive. It’s like, I find myself saying, he has two modes — loving everything and everyone; and angry at the government.
And we do our interview with him and he hits both of those points. And do our interview with Charlie who I haven’t met before but who, Eduard assures me, is the wildest of all the motherfuckers. As I start to get drunk I become convinced that he might be a great American beat poet — his stories are just so dirty and rough and he has such a great way of putting words together. “I’m broke as a joke,” he says when he’s asked how he’s doing. And launches, unprompted, into the whole saga of his finances. “I had $20,000 in my pocket at the time of the fire,” he says. “I could have just walked away, chased hookers in Reno. I don’t know why I didn’t do that — still don’t know,” he says with a really artful sigh.
For some reason he attaches himself to us as we put the camera down and join the party. He’s very anxious that Eduard drink — but Eduard is nervous about it getting back to Caroline or his not being able to shoot later on. “Just tell her you’re sick,” says Charlie. “If she doubts you tell her you’re fucking your sister and say ‘is that sick or what?’” He’s very pleased with himself but I’m a bit losing confidence that he’s a great beat poet. The feeling is of the party getting a bit out of control. There’s a very tough side to this part of the country. Nancy, when we’d met her, had warned us about the ‘militia,’ this whole Cliven Bundy-esque crew not far from where she lived who were busy stockpiling weapons and preparing for the great insurrection. And I’d stumbled across an aspect of that — the gas station from hell near the Oregon border, proudly flying the flag of the Free State of Jefferson, determined to escape the tyranny of Dianne Feinstein and create a rump state out of the conservative parts of California and Oregon with this gas station apparently as its capital, and Eduard had actually gotten very nervous when he googled a few of the many bumper stickers on the truck parked next to ours and found them all to be from white supremacist organizations and we’d felt like we were getting a privileged glimpse of what the Free State of Jefferson would actually be like, waiting in line behind a guy trying to pay for his chewing tobacco entirely in quarters. The party at Derrick’s has an element of that. There’s the guy with the confederate flag on his hat although we are, you know, very far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and there’s the way that the party seems to demarcate itself out, the older people in the house smoking weed, the younger people out by the parking lot dipping into crack. That was why Eduard hadn’t wanted to drink — he knew this was coming and was worried about his gear. And that’s probably why Charlie has attached himself to us, the feeling of the party turning and wanting to see how we’ll react, the way he pushes drinks, the way he starts to matchmake. “I thought you’d have culled one from the herd by now,” he tells me.
But nothing much happens. We don’t get too drunk, nobody breaks into our car. There’s an ear-splitting band, Ridge Strong, and they do their concert in the backyard. Eduard thinks that’s the stupidest thing in the world — ‘Ridge Strong’ means never leave the ridge, rebuild, do it all again, no lessons at all learned from the cataclysmic fire. But, as the reinsurance executive reminded him, it’s not for him to judge. This is a wild place. Everybody who came here came, pretty much, to get away from something. They like their guns, they like their drugs — “what is there in Paradise besides pot and crack” the reinsurance executive had mused as soon as she was off camera — and they like not being told what to do. And, basically, nothing is going to change any of those things. You can have the worst thing anybody can imagine — a fire obliterating a town in a matter of minutes, 85 people killed, many millions of dollars of property damage — and it makes no difference at all, the Ridge Strong band blasting out its music, the party in full force.
All names are changed for this essay.