The Camp fire destroyed their town. Now the Paradise High football team is trying to save themselves
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
