Blog Posts
Nothing left of Paradise
By DARRELL SMITH
When people hear about the large Camp fire that recently engulfed Paradise, California, they shake their heads in disbelief. For a Fayette County couple, the fire is more meaningful.
Mike and Jenny Sparks are friends with a family in Paradise who lost nearly everything when the quick-moving fire raced up the mountain and through the scenic city of more than 26,000. Mike and Sharon Kemp lost everything but a restored 1957 Chevrolet pickup truck.
In 2016, the Sparkses took a vacation to the area to purchase truck parts being sold by the Kemps.
The Camp Fire spread so quickly people who escaped did so with few belongings. Some did not make it out before the fire took over the area.
Sparks got to know the Kemp family because he needed parts for his Diamond T trucks.
Paradise is located on a small mountain in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
“As we went up the mountain we had noticed for two or three hours, everything on the lower level and up the mountainside ... it was the color of our straw because it was dead, because it was so hot and dry that summer (2016),” he said. “We remarked that one spark from anything and the whole countryside would have exploded.”
The beautiful two-storey house had a big iron gate and several tall pine trees around the property, he said. Pine needles and pine cones were everywhere: dry tender everywhere on the ground.
“We spent the evening at Mike and Sharon’s house and more gracious people we could not have found anywhere,” he said. “This house we were in, Mike and Sharon built it about 40 years ago by themselves when Paradise was not very big. Everything we saw, their hands had been on it.”
Mike Kemp had several interests and one is restoring antique vehicles. He had a 1957 Chevrolet truck and a Diamond T truck they were customizing with a stainless steel bed and new Cummins diesel engine. His wife had a 1954 Chevrolet Bel-Air she had purchased new. They had a pristine 1950s-era camper and a Dodge diesel pickup.
Sparks said the families have stayed in contact since and they have been included in family mailings from the Kemps.
When he first heard news of a fire in Paradise, he had a feeling of dread.
“I felt sure I would find out it had involved them,” he said. “I thought of the super dry conditions with the grass, pine needles and pine cones. I shot off an email not knowing if I would get a response. Not very long, I got a response that they were safe and they were at their daughter’s house, I think in Chico.”
They had lost everything and got out with only one change of clothing, he said.
“When they sent the email, they didn’t know about their son’s house a few miles away. At that time they had not been back to their house because there is a prohibition against it,” he said. “She sent pictures someone else took. One shot is so telling. It shows the gate, our first view of the property, and all that property is nothing but piles of rubble.”
That highly customized Diamond T is just rubble.
The only bright spot beside them surviving is the 1957 Chevrolet truck. As he fled the property, Mike Kemp pulled that truck into an open gravel lot near the house. The paint is bubbled, the parking light lenses are melted and a front license plate melted.
The fire and memories of their trip and newfound friends has made this fire anything but Paradise.
He said it would be great to see some kind of plan come together to help those people. Even if someone went there, where would they begin: The Kemps have nothing to go back except ashes.
He said, “If we knew what to do or what we could be doing, I would probably be out there now, maybe Jenny too, because we feel so bad for the people we know and that whole area.”
