Chico, Calif.
For some of those evacuees, the holiday known for gathering with family in a warm home will be spent in a shelter with strangers or in a tent in the rain.
“It doesn’t really feel like (a) holiday that much,” said Kevin Alcott, whose home was destroyed when the fire flattened the town of Paradise, Calif.
He and his wife are luckier than many; they found and secured long-term shelter in the form of two rooms that they will rent in a local woman’s house. They’ll be spending Thanksgiving with her, cooking a turkey donated by their church.
The day before Thanksgiving, Alcott sat with his wife, Arin, at a Starbucks in the city’s downtown, listing the worries that are piling up: When will they be able to get back to work? Will they be able to pay the bills? How will they restart their lives? Where will they find a new home?
But amid the devastation the fire wrought, many said that it has brought the meaning of the holiday into stark relief, even as it has removed its more festive trappings.
“It’s probably the best Thanksgiving of my life,” said Liza Johnson, a Paradise evacuee who is staying with her husband and son in a trailer on loan from a friend. “Being alive — and my family being alive — it makes you realize.”
It was a sentiment shared by Paradise resident Deborah Laughlin, 63.
“I’m thankful because I now have a place I can go to, someplace where I can rest my head,” Laughlin said, as she stood outside one of the several shelters set up to help evacuees here.
Though her trailer home was destroyed in the fire, Laughlin said she was filled with hope. Two volunteers helped her get set up with a new place to live, in a mobile home on another volunteer’s property.
“She’s already offered for me to get a small dog,” Laughlin said.
The Camp Fire has burned more than 150,000 acres, destroying more than 14,000 buildings — 13,500 homes — in hillside towns like Paradise and Magalia. And it continues to burn, with at least 80 percent containment, the thick smell of smoke in the air in Chico persisting even through a heavy rain. At least 81 people were killed by the fire, though hundreds more remain missing.
Sitting outside the shelter at the Neighborhood Church of Chico, Cynthia Johnson, 54, said she doesn’t know the fate of her mobile home in Paradise. Still, she listed off her blessings.
“I’m thankful for everything,” she said, beaming. “Most of all, I’m thankful that the one thing I love the most, my service dog, is safe and she’s with me. Because she gives me strength to do everything. I made a promise I’d never leave her. And I’m a woman of my word.”
At that moment, a woman drove up in a truck and handed her a new blanket.
Last year, Johnson cooked a big Thanksgiving meal for nine people in her trailer park; this year, she’ll go to her daughter-in-law’s aunt’s house outside the fire zone.
Across this town of 90,000, people were coming together to help others.
In two bustling buildings at California State University at Chico, dozens of volunteers helped workers from chef Jose Andres’ nonprofit World Central Kitchen plan for a massive Thanksgiving meal for evacuees and emergency workers today.
They unfurled long white table clothes in the Bell Memorial Union auditorium, as workers outside wheeled in carts with hundreds of turkeys waiting to be cooked. Whispers about visits by chefs like Andres, Guy Fieri and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger filled the auditorium.
Representatives for World Central Kitchen said they were preparing to feed some 15,000 people.