When Laurie Noble was growing up, in Fort Bragg, California, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, her family’s home doubled as a government weather station. The house was equipped with rain and wind-speed gauges, thermometers, a barometer, and a recording barograph, and the family belonged to a network of part-time observers paid by the federal Weather Bureau, the forerunner of the National Weather Service, to fill in gaps between its professionally staffed stations. By the time Noble was a teen-ager, she was earning a dollar and thirty-five cents to read the instruments every six hours, write down measurements in their handwritten logs, and call the information in, using the appropriate codes, to the San Francisco airport. Noble credits her early apprenticeship in meteorology with helping her spot, around two o’clock on Tuesday of last week, a terrifying column of smoke that appeared several canyons away from the apple orchard she owns with her husband, Jim, in Paradise, California. “I’ve always had my eyes to the sky,” she told me last week.

The smoke emerged from an offshoot of the so-called North Complex Fire, a conglomeration of several smaller fires that had started in mid-August, in Plumas County, more than sixty miles to the northeast. Around noon, the complex made what officials described as a “historic run” through the crowns of the area’s Ponderosa pines, and launched itself down into Butte County, where Paradise is situated. “When I saw that smoke, I knew it could be over here within hours,” Noble said. “It was very evident that that was a roiling fire that was just ripping.”

Noble appreciated the threat better than most. In November, 2018, the Nobles’ orchard was overrun, along with most of Paradise, by the Camp Fire, a conflagration that caused $8.4 billion in damage and killed eighty-five people. The fire largely spared the Nobles’ apple trees, but it destroyed eleven buildings on their farm, including their ninety-year-old home. For the past year, the Nobles have been living in an R.V. trailer on their property. A new house that they’ve been building is just weeks from completion, but Noble told me that her biggest fear, when she contemplated another evacuation, was what would happen to the stacks of legal and insurance paperwork that she has been working through since the Camp Fire. “It is kind of a monumental task to figure out what was in eleven buildings and try to write it all down,” she said.

Of the eleven thousand houses in Paradise that were destroyed in the Camp Fire, only around four hundred residential structures have been rebuilt. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the town’s recovery was slowed by the time it took to remove nearly four million tons of contaminated soil, ash, and debris, and by the lingering threat of damaged trees, which sway lethally over the recovery effort. The same day that Noble saw the smoke cloud, she heard a huge Ponderosa crash while she was working outside. “I found out that it was one that had fallen on somebody’s motor home, maybe ten parcels up from here,” she said. “It was dead and hadn’t been removed.”

Noble suggested that it would be “a generous estimate” to say that around three thousand people are living in Paradise now, down from a pre-fire population of twenty-seven thousand. She knows plenty of people who will never come back. “There are lots of terrible stories of people having felt trapped, or being alone and scared to death. You don’t forget those things,” she said. The Nobles’ decision to return was motivated largely by history. Noble Orchards was originally planted ninety-nine years ago, by Jim’s grandfather; when they saw that the trees had survived the fire, she told me, “that kind of made the decision.” Still, the smoke she spotted last week took her right back to November, 2018. “It was very frightening to watch all that, because I knew what it meant,” she said. “Just talking about it now, I can feel my head and body tensing up. It was a horrific feeling.”

The Camp Fire remains, for now, the deadliest and most destructive California wildfire on record. But, even in 2018, it was clear that there was nothing special about the circumstances that caused it to pummel Paradise and the surrounding areas with such explosive force. The same conditions—the effects of climate change, the development of communities in forested areas, and particularly an abundance of fuel, the result of a century-long forest-management regime that took fire suppression as its watchword—were present in much of the state. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before another fire tried to outdo the Camp Fire’s awful accomplishments. As Noble told me, “Fire is part of our lives now.”

Six of California’s twenty largest recorded fires have occurred this year, and the Butte County fire—which has been renamed, somewhat clumsily, the North Complex West Zone Fire—has already killed fifteen people. If the Camp Fire opened this new phase in California’s age-old relationship with fire, the events in Butte County over the past week suggest a new mode of living with catastrophe more generally, one in which Americans are forced to contend with multiple acute community-scale disasters all at once. In the seven days leading up to last week’s fire, the county saw its highest weekly COVID-19 caseload, and the coincidence of the two disasters has made each more difficult to manage. The pandemic, for instance, prevented the county from setting up traditional evacuation centers. Instead, people fleeing the fire were directed to drive to “Temporary Evacuation Points” and asked to remain in their cars there until relief workers could help them. The fire, in turn, has hindered efforts to cope with the pandemic. For one day last week, officials rescinded some of the county’s restrictions on indoor dining, because the smoke outside was deemed a greater health risk than the virus that was potentially lurking indoors. (The restrictions were reimposed on Friday.)

The compounding tragedies levied a heavy emotional toll even on those who were out of the fires’ path. For many on the West Coast, the blood-orange skies that blanketed California, Oregon, and Washington last week looked like a warning about a coming climatological apocalypse. In Butte County, the hue appeared no less ominous, but there it also pointed to the past, a reminder of the trauma from which the area was still working to recover.

I grew up in Chico, a rural college town just down the hill from Paradise. On Saturday, when the area’s air quality ranked third worst in the country, I traded texts with a friend whose family was pushed out of their house for nearly a month by the Camp Fire. They live in a canyon west of Paradise, and have had to evacuate twice in the past two weeks, because of the smoke and a lack of power, which the local utility had cut off to prevent further fires. “With no power, that means no A.C., no water,” my friend wrote. “Can’t open a window because of the smoke. Ash is everywhere covering everything. I am in town right now trying to buy an air purifier. Chico is sold out. It’s the toilet paper all over again.” Another friend, who lives in Chico, told me that “exhaustion and disbelief” were the dominant moods around town. “During COVID the outside was all we had left and now that’s gone too,” he said in a text message. “It’s just an unbelievable reckoning of all we’ve done wrong. The list is long and the loss is deep.”

When the Camp Fire ignited, on November 8th, 2018, shortly after 6 A.M., Kalina and Olen Eagler and their two children were living in an apartment in Magalia, up the ridge from Paradise. The Eaglers noticed smoke in the air while dropping their son at his school-bus stop that morning, and, when Olen drove to a nearby outlook, he saw thick billows rolling up the canyon walls. He collected his son and went back to the apartment, where Kalina and their daughter, then twelve, had already started packing their Honda Prelude. By 8 A.M., they were driving south, into Paradise. Along the way, Kalina looked down a stretch of road that headed toward Noble Orchards. Through the trees, she could see flames taller than houses. “I realized this was incredibly serious,” she said. “We started calling everybody we knew and encouraging them to leave.”

After spending a few months in Amador County, a few hours south, where Olen’s mother lived, the Eaglers moved to Reno, Nevada. Kalina had briefly lived in Reno before. It was, she said, “a place I could relate to. I felt like maybe we’d be comfortable there, and the job market was really excellent.” Once they moved, Olen, who had been a d.j. and stay-at-home dad in Magalia, took delivery jobs with DoorDash and Grubhub, and arranged his schedule so that he could take care of the kids after school. Kalina, who worked for a short time in behavioral therapy, found herself, for the first time in her life, sunk in a deep depression. “I kind of stared at a wall for a year,” she said. The children started having a hard time at school, something that had never happened before.

This March, during the children’s spring break, the Eaglers were visiting family in Magalia, to celebrate Kalina’s thirty-eighth birthday, when the coronavirus caused Butte County to impose a stay-at-home order. They were still on lockdown in Magalia a few weeks later when they got a call from the owner of a farm in nearby Berry Creek, where they’d worked during the summer of 2018. The farm had been unoccupied for a year, and the owner asked if Kalina and Olen would care for the property in exchange for rent. By then, the children’s school had shut down because of the pandemic, and, with Reno’s tourist economy in free fall, there was little reason to return to Nevada. “The opportunity to be back in Butte County, with the people we love, was too much to pass up,” Kalina said.

On the farm in Berry Creek, a mountain town of about twelve hundred people, the Eaglers moved into a three-bedroom house with a wraparound porch and a stained-glass window that refracted the morning light. Huge Ponderosa pines surrounded the farm; the property itself featured Japanese maples, peach and plum trees, strawberry and blackberry bushes, and a small apple orchard supposedly planted by moonshiners a hundred years ago. At least ten varieties of roses grew in planter boxes milled from trees that had fallen around the farm. The house was off the electrical grid, which made it difficult to manage remote learning, so the Eaglers’ kids shuttled back and forth to their grandmother’s, in Amador County, for most of the summer. Still, it was exactly the sort of place where Kalina and Olen wanted to be. “It was just big and beautiful, really an opportunity to be able to provide everything for your family,” Kalina said.

Kalina and Olen both grew up in Paradise, where they learned at a young age to pay close attention to fires burning in the Sierra Nevada foothills. During the last weeks of August, they kept a close watch on the North Complex Fire, checking the Internet regularly for news of its path. Last week, on Tuesday morning, they woke to find the farm swaddled in thick white smoke, but when Kalina checked her phone she did not see any evacuation notices. “And then the sky started to clear,” she said. “The sky was blue—there was no smoke anymore. We saw that the wind had changed, and we were good.” The kids were staying with their grandmother, so Kalina and Olen took advantage of the smokeless air to prune branches and collect fruit from their apple trees.

Around three-thirty that afternoon, Kalina got a call from her brother-in-law. He was in Paradise, and, like Laurie Noble, had spotted the ash cloud. “He was very concerned,” Kalina said. “ ‘Are you guys O.K.? The cloud that I’m seeing looks really bad.’ I’m, like, ‘No, I can’t see any clouds.’ It was really blue and clear over here, you know? And then, within a half an hour, we received the emergency order that we needed to evacuate.”

The Eaglers wasted no time getting out of Berry Creek. “We were not going to mess around,” Kalina said. “We’ve been through this. There was no way we were going to wait on anything.” Earlier in the summer, during another fire, they had packed a few boxes with photographs and documents. Now they grabbed their pets and stuffed some clothes in a duffel bag. On her way out, Kalina took with her a handcrafted hood that Olen had given her as a gift. “For whatever reason, during the Camp Fire, when we were evacuating, it was the last thing I saw before I left. And I thought, Well, that’s kind of a frivolous thing, but I love it, so I’m going to grab it. I had that exact moment when we were leaving Berry Creek.”

By the time they got to the highway, three miles from the farm, the Eaglers could see the smoke rising up over the trees. A few minutes later, they saw an orange glow on top of a ridge to the east. Just before they reached Bidwell Bar—a green suspension bridge that was captured, backlit by an infernal landscape, in a slow-exposure photograph that made front pages around the country last week—the atmosphere underwent a familiar, sickening change. “It got dark, almost black,” Kalina told me. “Any light coming through looked flat. The change in the air felt like being in a vacuum.” Her body started to shake, and she heard herself whispering “Don’t panic” as she drove. There was, she said, a “mix of fear and panic and certainty that comes from doing it a second time. It’s almost like hope is not an option, because we had already seen this scenario play out.”

As of Tuesday, the North Complex West Zone Fire had spread to nearly seventy-seven thousand acres and was only twenty-five-per-cent contained. But, since last week, it has not pushed much farther toward Paradise. At Noble Orchards, Laurie watched the head of the fire move south, away from her property. “I thought, O.K., we’re probably O.K.,” she told me. “And that’s when I said, ‘Maybe we’ll get some sleep tonight.’ ”

For the past week, the Eaglers have been staying with friends in Chico. They’ve spent much of their time helping Berry Creek evacuees find food, clothing, shelter, and gift cards. For all their manifest bad luck, they count themselves fortunate, Kalina told me, to have places to stay and a community of friends and family to take care of them. She is even more grateful that their children were with their grandmother when the fire hit. “I hated online school at first,” she said, “but they’re doing a week of online school at grandma’s, and that’s what’s saving them now. I feel blessed for that.”

During the Camp Fire, Kalina said, it took three weeks to receive official word that their apartment had burned down, and she had believed right up to the last minute that it had somehow survived. “That’s something that I can relate to with the people in Berry Creek right now,” she said. “Even if you see that all of these other ones have burned, you have that hope that maybe it wasn’t yours. Until you see that actual, concrete evidence, it’s hard to let go of.” This time, she told me on Friday, “I’m going in the opposite direction.” (On Monday, Olen drove into Berry Creek and confirmed that the farm had burned.) Kalina said that she wasn’t ready to start thinking about the massive effort required to start over again. “I feel like we’re probably still in shock,” she told me. “Right now, the ability to comfort people is keeping me from overwhelming myself with these other thoughts. I never want to be in a stage of depression that I was in before. I’m trying to stay ahead of it, to be aware of what grief is, to move through it, and then move on.”