This is the story of how Heather opened the town. Because it's kind of like a Christmas story.

The day after the town burned down, the authorities announced the town was closed. And it would remain closed, indefinitely. Because all over, everywhere, the town, it was still smoldering. Across from the police station, a couple blocks from here—can you see?—an infernal fumarole, smoking five days. And where the fire got deep into the roots of the trees, it flickered, dark, snickering, for weeks. All of the infrastructure, it was gone. The town: burned back to the 18th Century. Roads impassable—strewn with downed power poles, trees; blocked, snarls, hundreds, cars, abandoned, burnt, black, exodus.

And the dead: they were here. The only question: how many. And where. The fire so savage it reduced human beings to remains cremated. And beyond. The dead needed to be honored: found, brought out. Before the living, they could return.

And any living, who were not working, to bring the town back: they would be in the way. So they would be kept out. Only first responders, recovery workers, the press, were allowed, in the town, that was burned down. Closed.

There were very few of us, who had stayed in the town, as it burned, and remained, after the fire had passed. We few, it was announced, could remain. (For there is no law, save martial law, that commands a person must leave their property, in a disaster, or after.) But we couldn’t leave. If we did, if we ventured down into the unburned lands, we could not come back. This I understood. For the authorities did not want to have to clog up the recovery accommodating burnt coots traveling to and fro the town burned down. And so, I was marooned up here. Castaway. As Melissa Daugherty, correctly, called me. There, in her CN&R column.

And so, castaway, marooned, I was privileged to witness magic. As tens of thousands of human beings, from all over the country—Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico included—came here to shroud, to heal, and to renew: cleaning up the burned, bringing out the dead, returning the 21st Century. And they—all of them—became a part of the town. I remember, about three weeks in, talking with a group of PG&E workers, out front the house here, and one of them, he said: “You know, I’d never heard of Paradise, before this. But now, I think I’d like to live here.” Mind you, the town was then still uninhabitable. It had suffered the worst fire disaster to strike an American town since the 19th Century. They were still bringing out the dead. Yet none of the other workers, who heard his words, thought this man mental, laughed, called him names. Because: they felt it, too.

Meanwhile, down in the unburned lands, people who had lived here, Paradise people, impatient to come back. Some had homes, businesses, still standing. Most didn’t. But they wanted to return. Just the same. And all were at the mercy of the man Melissa and I had come, quickly, to call The Oracle, also The Honea Oracle. For through process whatever, Kory Honea, sheriff of Butte County, had become he from whom all wisdom would flow, in re what was, and was not, happening, in the town burned down. And, as with oracles of old, people would petition him for answers, but he would remain mum, mute; until, suddenly, and at a time only of his choosing, he would emit a wisdom. Here: a wisdom, announcing a Change.

And, as the year calendared into December, the Change all were awaiting, was his oracular pronouncement that the town, it would reopen.

Finally, in early December, the Honea Oracle, one dawn’s early light, announced that a small sliver of far southern Paradise, it had, and in that moment, become opened.

He further oracled, that a much larger swath, including where I live, would reopen, and very soon. And he gave a date certain.

But then, a couple days later, he took it back.

For more rains, they had come, and the waters, they had flowed, throughout the town, the town burned down. And thereby mucked up the recovery. So any further reopenings, of the town, the Oracle pronounced, they had been, and indefinitely, postponed.

It didn’t really bother me, being castaway, all those weeks. Until the Honea Oracle pronounced that: soon: I could leave. And then: took it back. Because, then, that was like a prisoner, given a release date, and then, some days on, told: oh, so sorry, guess you can’t go till later; and also, we don’t know when that is. Meanwhile, have a nice lunch!

Also, I was running out of blood-pressure medication. I have been very lucky, knock wood, healthwise, in this life, and am, even at this advanced age, medicined only with a lightweight medication for high blood pressure, and also, now, an associate medication, that the Shalom guy tacked on a few years back, when he decided my heart rate needed to get more of a grip.

Before came the heart associate, my GP, for a decade or so, said I wouldn’t even need to take the BP medicine, if I would just give up smoking. But who would want to do that?

But then he went away. Because he did not want to have any more insurance incubi in his life. And so he went to Vietnam, to work there offshore on a hospital boat, where nobody would bother him about money, and he could just heal people, and for free. And, with his loss, I drifted free, of medical professionals. Until I washed up upon the Shalom Free Clinic bodhisattvas.

If I slack off the BP medication, it is interesting: because there is then the heart a-pounding, and not in a good way, like, you know the good way, like, with the Luv, and also the blood racing around the body, you can feel it, and at top speed, it feels like it’s pushing to burst out your fingertips, until, sullen, it says, okay, guess not this time, and then races back around and in, but says, hold on, hoss, maybe, next time, I’ll burst out, next go-round!

These BP medications, before the fire, I had received at the Paradise Safeway, but that Safeway was burned down now, and so was not dispensing any medicine, or anything else. And I am now suddenly baking in a madeleine moment, remembering the little birds at the Safeway. Sparrow-type people. They would forage the sidewalk and the parking lot. I felt bad for them. “Come live at my house,” I would say. “Less than a mile: right over there. Fresh seed; all day, every day.” But, because this was Paradise, the little Safeway birds, they lived on more, more than cheeto splints and pizza dust. Like the woman in the check-out line with the flat of organic blueberries that she spills all over the floor. And the checker woman says: don’t worry about it, go get some more; these spilled ones, we will take, and we will take outside, and with them, we will feed the little birds.

Where is that checker woman. Where is the woman who spilled. Where are the little birds.

Can you see them.

To post-fire obtain my BP medicine I would be where is the East Avenue Safeway, in Chico, where, I would come to learn, there are no little birds. When the Honea Oracle had said my town-part would be reopening, I had stationed the cross of the Safeway phone maze to learn that there, on East Avenue, is where all, we all, burned down, would, now, pick up the little pills, littler even than the little Safeway birds, that would work, like little birds, to arrest my aorta from blowing, my brain from stroking. Except now I couldn’t get there. To the Forbidden Zone of the East Avenue Safeway. Because the Honea Oracle. He would not, now, open the town.

And so I started titrating. Everybody with medicines but without money knows what that is. You take the pills and you slice and dice them and then only take, at each appointed time, a variable fraction, of what, you’re Supposed To.

But then, as the town-still-Oracle-closed days rolled by, it became clear, that even the titrating, it was coming, to The End. And I was not going to leave here to go down to the East Avenue Safeway to get any more little bird pills; I was not going to have castawayed for five freaking weeks only to have to limp on down there for some BP and then be Honea-Jehovah-refused entry back into the town burned down Eden. No. That could not be. So I rang up a woman, a Paradise woman, diaspored down in the unburned lands, a woman I’d known for decades, who was intimately aware of the BP situation, and who had a pass to get up here; I figured she could pop on by the East Avenue little bird pill emporium, get my stroke-stoppers, then motor them on up here. Except she had burned in the fire, and was no longer herself; she was Joe Ben, and she was drowning; and she said she could not see her way clear to do that, because she was designing a choir program. Well, yeah—sure! After the fire, I would encounter a lot of this. Boats beat not back into the past but upside down and sideways and straight up corkscrewed into the great wide open and sho nuff shitting some howdy.

The next morning, came the ritual check-in with Heather. At this time she and I would raise each other each morning, to make sure in the night the fire hadn’t realized it’d bonered, in not taking us, and so had come back, some time, there in the wee hours, to flame right out, one, or more: of us. She, burned of everything, was on her sister's couch, in Chico. I was up here. Marooned. Castaway.

Heather and I, we had a fire thing.

Before the fire, she worked at the feed store across from here, where they were always making me buy—or at least feed—animals, many animals, an ever-increasing number of animals, until whatever money I received from the lawyers, basically just sluiced right over to them: I became a wholly owned subsidiary, of the feed store.

She was working there, Heather, but not, really, some of the times, part of the Plot. And she and I: became friends. Because: we just did.

And, the morning of the day of the fire, when I knew it was coming in on the east side, and felt smugly and insanely safe where I was, over on the west side, I rang her up, to make sure she was not doing what I knew she was doing: trying to bring out all the horses in Paradise.

And she confirmed that that was exactly what she was doing. And before I could tell her to leave off, please get herself out: the power went out. And that. Was that.

Because I was then cellphoneless, only the land line, which went through electrical tubes, which were now burned and gone; this was long before the fire angels Crispin Barker and Melissa Daugherty, they brought me this iPhone.

And so, for ten days after, I didn’t know if Heather lived, or died. Though, in my heart, I knew: she lived. But had no proof. Until the day she drove up here with Becky. Another feed store woman. That day when I understood, at last, for good, and forever, what is really important. Because the day before, the president had come by. Rolled right by, there in his motorcade, just down there on the Skyway. Can you see it? Can you hear, on the radio, he call the town Pleasure, and say we all burned because we didn’t rake our forests? Saying this, standing in front, of the trailer park, where Heather, she had lived? Before, of all and everything, she burned? Every day, for two-plus years, this man had hurt my heart. Because he is so cruel. But, this day, I could feel nothing. People were in uproar, all over the radio. But I couldn’t be there. That’s just how he is, I thought. That’s just how he is. And his presence, here, in the town burned down, it meant nothing. Nothing. The next day: meant everything. When Heather and Becky, they drove in. Breaking through the Honea Oracle’s Maginot Line, to bring the birds out of the feed store, and to bestow upon me, marooned, castaway, a truly embarrassing bounty of supplies. This: this is what is important. They lived. All the feed store people did. They lived. Most all burned, lost everything, and yet: they lived. And I understood, why, so many decades ago, I had cleaved to these words, of Kenneth Patchen:

Don’t you understand? I have arisen not from the dead but from the living. I am not a voice crying in the wilderness. There is no winter here. No dark. No despair. The lights are going on in my house. I shall not allow the President of the United States to enter here. There is no darkness anywhere. I have all my lights on. And it is my own face I see in the blazing windows of all the houses on earth.

And Heather, morning of the fire, to get to her horse, she had driven in a mad fast blaze, right by my house. And, after, she was mortified, that she hadn’t stopped, to bring me out. Did no good, to tell her I would not have gone. She said she would have made me. I said that would not have been happening. She said it surely would have. Immovable object. Unstoppable force. Etc. And, anyway, as it developed, she got out, with those horses, only seconds, before the fire closed in. She had no time, that morning, to stop to tug on some “stubborn old man,” as, correctly, she calls me. But that didn’t matter. To her. Because she was still. In. The: but still.

So, that morning, December 14 of last year, during the ritual morning check-in, I black-humored Heather about Joe Ben and the choir program, and the unceasing town closement of The Oracle, and my stubborn old man refusal to Moses down off the mountain to secure the little bird pills.

And she commences to Vesuvius Warp 11. Which is anyway her usual eruptive speed. And she gets on the horn to the Paradise Police Department, and she tells them she is going to the East Avenue Safeway in Chico, and there she would secure my BP medicine, and then she would drive into the town, even though the town was closed, and she had no pass, and their job, that of the Paradise PD, was to stay, and all the way, out of her way.

The Paradise PD people, they caved immediately. And asked only that she please consent to be met with a Paradise PD escort, there at the Maginot Line, who would strive mightily to prevent her from injuring any National Guard.

And so it was done. She swooped in and secured the medicine and then arrived up here. With her escort. Who said she could spend fifteen minutes, or so, with me, inside. Those fifteen minutes, became hours. And they were good hours. We became acquainted, she and I, with being alive, again. When, in her time, she was ready, she summoned her escort. And drove back down the hill.

The next morning, at dawn, the Honea Oracle, with no warning, announced he was opening the whole of the town. The man was clearly defeated. He could not keep Heather out. So why bother? It was over. He was no longer The Ruler. Heather was.

That was December 15. Last year.

That photo there, that is of Heather, snapped a couple nights later, when she had returned, in triumph, having opened the town. Pirouetting with a bird. A little bit bigger. Sassier. Than the little Safeway birds.

Now, in the usual course of things, in the histories, Heather, she would not be credited, with opening the town.

But this time: I am writing the history.

And Heather. She opened the town.

So let it be written. Because it was done.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pvi4uKuawk]