“How do you spell the word pow wow?” the guy next to me on the
airplane asked. “Umm…urrh… P O W W O W.”
I guessed.
“Is that one word or 2? Or
does it have a hyphen?” he asked.
“I have no idea.” I admitted.
Google finally popped up the answer on his phone and we both
learned:
Pow wow is spelled pow wow, powwow or pow-wow.
“Isn’t it nice when a word is correct when spelled so many
different ways.” I said with a chuckle. The guy did not respond and kept working.
“I wonder why he needs to spell the word pow-wow.” I thought to
myself.
As the plane began to descend into San Francisco something shocked
me even more than this new found revelation that pow-wow has so many spellings.
Brown, Thick Smoke for Miles
“Is this brown smoke from the Paradise,
California fire?” I asked the guy with the spelling question.
“Yes.” He responded. He explained that the
schools had been shut down since the fire.
My heart sank.
The thing that made this even more shocking is
Paradise is an hour and a half from Sacramento and it had been a week since the
Paradise fire.
Masks
As the plane came to a stop at the gate, I
noticed that all of the airport workers out my window were wearing masks. It makes total sense, but I was still
surprised by the sight.
As I met Dan and traveled around Sacramento
and other areas around Paradise, it was common to see a person wearing masks
while they did their normal activities like walking the dog, entering a store
or going to church.
There was something jarring to my sense of
wellbeing to see people everywhere wearing masks.
Paying for Bags
After Dan picked me up from the airport, we
went into Walmart to look for something and he said “You know what has
surprised me here in California?”
I replied, “What?”
“You have to pay for plastic bags here.”
“Really?” I exclaimed.
Sure enough, we were asked if we wanted to buy
a bag. We declined since our item was
little and I noticed most of the people around us declined the bags as
well.
Less plastic bags in the landfills seems like
a good thing to me. It was still strange
to get used too.
No Postcards in Chico
Most of the time I was in California was spent
in Chico, a city about 20 minutes from Paradise. Chico will never be the same because it is
the closest city in proximity to Paradise.
I heard people saying that the fires in that area displaced 55,000
people and a huge number fled to Chico.
For some reason, I had it in my head that I
would love to send a postcard from California to our kids and our team of
financial partners who made it possible for us to pour out to the people who
had lost so much.
Apparently, no one sells postcards in Chico
that I could find. Dan was so sweet to
take me to Walmart in Chico before he drove me to the airport just to make one
last attempt.
No luck.
But what we passed by surprised me even more
then the lack of postcards in Chico.
Tent Cities
Along the side of the Chico Walmart was a
field full of tents. We saw news
stations interviewing some of the people who had made this tent city their
home. Piles of clothes littered the
sidewalk. There were shelters all over
the city, one being at a Sears not far from here.
I had heard that the norovirus and lice were
spreading through the shelters. Maybe
that is why these people decided to live out in the cold in tents. I really am not sure.
There was trash all over the ground and was a
sad sight.
In the parking lot, a few booths were set up with
hand made signs that wrote “Free BBQ” and other words of encouragement.
A Few Take-Aways
The combination of the thick brown smoke, the
masks, tent cities were constant reminders of the trauma the people of
California had and are still enduring.
No person was unaffected. Even people who did not lose their home were
living with the impact of the fires in their daily lives.