EVACUEES GIVE THANKS FOR FOOD, FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Thousands who lost homes and loved ones grapple with loss on tough holiday
“I figured we wouldn’t have a Thanksgiving. But with everyone here having been through the same thing, I feel a sense of community.” — Whitney Massae, 25, who had come back from Washington to help her mother, Vicki Hoggins, who lost her home inthe Camp Fire
CHICO » Vicki Hoggins normally helps cook a feast for her family on Thanksgiving. There is the traditional turkey that her daughters’ father cooks, but also the unique sides — a salmon spread to put on crackers, a spinach casserole recipe passed down through the family, and a unique recipe for pumpkin pie that involves Cool Whip mixed in with pumpkin and put in a graham cracker crust.
But after California’s most destructive wildfire ever swept through their town of Paradise earlier this month, destroying Hoggins’ home and the homes of her familymembers, there won’t be any of the normal holiday traditions this week.
Hoggins, 66, is just grateful to be alive. Still, as she reminisced about her family’s holiday traditions on Thanksgiving as she sat with her daughter, Whitney Massae, 25, who had come back on a break fromher teaching job in Washington to help her family, she couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for the coziness of their past holidays.
“I figured we wouldn’t have a Thanksgiving,” said Massae, sitting at a table with her mom next to some friends from Paradise at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s Chico taproom and brewery, which was hosting a dinner put on by volunteers for the evacuees of the destructive Camp Fire. “But with everyone here having been through the same thing, I feel a sense of community.”
Thousands of fire survivors are in a similar situation. The Camp Fire, which fire officials said was 95 percent contained on Thursday, had burned through 153,336 acres so far, killing at least 84 people and wiping out 13,906 homes
and 4,747 other structures, including businesses. More than 560 people remain on the Butte County Sheriff’s Office’s list of unaccounted for people, and recovery teams were expected to continue to work through the rainy Thanksgiving holiday in their search for human remains.
Meanwhile on Thanksgiving, volunteers — many of them evacuees or first responders themselves — pitched in to host dinners at shelters and elsewhere for Thanksgiving.
World Central Kitchen, an organization founded by chef José Andrés that coordinates and cooks meals for people in crises, organized dinners at the CSU Chico campus and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. event, drawing hundreds of volunteers, in addition to providing meals for Red Cross shelters, which it had done for days before Thanksgiving.
“When normalcy disappears, food keeps you connected with the humanity we aim for,” Andrés said, sitting down at a table at CSU Chico’s Butte Memorial Union Hall on Thanksgiving near some of his volunteers.
Other well-known chefs were on hand to help, including Food Network star Guy Fieri and Bay Areabased Tyler Florence.
Unfortunately, Florence said, the scene of fire refu- gees wasn’t new to him. He was disturbed by the fires in California Wine Country last year, and then again in Shasta County’s Carr Fire. “It’s becoming the new normal,” he said of the state’s destructive wildfires.
Those who lost their homes, pets and belongings in the still- burning Camp Fire this month will have to find a new “normal,” but that still seems so out of reach, many said, especially on Thanksgiving
he situation sti l l seemed surreal, said John and Marianne Deurloo as they dined at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico on Thursday.
For John, 57, Sierra Ne- vada wasn’t an unfamiliar place — he worked at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. when he was 19 as a bottling supervisor and brewer. But it was a far cry from their normal Thanksgiving tradition, which typically included visiting family in Truckee or elsewhere in Northern California.
The Deurloos are sticking around Chico to settle their affairs. They lost their home near Bille Park and all six of their cats — “our babies,” John Deurloo said. He also took a hit to his business, Miner John Designs, which he operated mostly out of his home and online, selling parts for gold detector machines.
But after their har- rowing escape on a fourwheeler out of Paradise, they said they feel thankful to have made it out alive. The morning the fire ignited in the nearby canyon, Deurloo said, he thought it was raining at one point. It turned out to be ash and chunks of charcoal. They had started packing up their belongings and loaded their cats into the car, but gridlocked streets proved impossible to navigate.
“A neighbor came out saying ‘ There’s no way out — run for your lives,’ ” Deurloo recounted during his Thanksgiving meal. They put the cats back in the house and left the packedup car in the driveway, hop- ing the fire would spare the clearing where their house stood, and they hopped on the four-wheeler with just the clothes on their backs, escaping down Skyway to Chico as flames licked near their ankles.
They learned later that their cats and home didn’t survive the devastation.
Families across the dining rooms and shelters exchanged their own stories of escape, many of them sharing frighteningly similar experiences of being trapped in gridlock and wondering if they would make it out alive. They lost everything, people would say during the dinner, but at least they were alive.
Debbie Edgmon had called her husband, Mike, as she tried to drive down Pearson Road from her home off Pentz Road in Paradise on the day of the fire to tell him that she wasn’t sure she would make it. One of her daughters found her and they were able to escape, but just barely.
The Edgmons and their two daughters, Erica and Michelle, were able to gather on Thursday all together for the first time since the fire, since they had been split up in different cities — Willows, Oroville and Sacramento — to stay with friends and family. All four of them, plus Erica and Michelle’s fiance and boyfriend, had lived in Paradise and were displaced.
Normally on Thanksgiving, they’d watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV and cook their Thanksgiving feast all day, Michelle said. And while the food at Sierra Nevada on Thursday was “excellent,” they said — complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, and various desserts and pies, among other treats — it was disconcerting to be without a home to gather in on the holiday.
Debbie also couldn’t help but envision the approaching Christmas holiday, when their typical Christmas Eve gathering of almost 30 people — Debbie’s sisters and brother also live in Paradise — will look much different than years past. They hope soon to rent a home in time to gather together for Christmas.
Part of what struck Hoggins — a friend of the Edgmons — as she dined on Thursday with her daughter and friends, was how the typical quibbles of the holidays — fights over politics, especially — seem so petty after a disaster like the Camp Fire.
Like so many holiday tables, hers was filled with family on either side of the political spectrum. She had occasionally dreaded those dinners fraught with political fights, she said.
Looking around at the evacuees, firefighters and volunteers roaming around Sierra Nevada’s dining room, many with weary smiles, Hoggins said, “It just shows how unimportant that all is. People are basically good.”