The Half-Full Glass

I had a wonderful opportunity last week to look at my community through another’s eyes. What we saw together is that Lindsay is a half-full glass.

My friend Richard Harriman, an environmental attorney, was passing through town between meetings with clients in Bakersfield and Merced. He wanted me to show him the park redevelopment I’ve been describing for months. We started there, where Mitch Brown’s equipment has been silent all week after gobbling up the park’s interior roads, then circled the block past the two unfinished subdivisions, Wellness Center and golf course.

As our circle widened into the surrounding neighborhoods, then downtown, then past the Olive Bowl and out to the new west-side developments, Richard’s experienced eye saw what my gut-level reactions have been trying to verbalize: the authentic quality of Lindsay’s established residential districts is being replaced with ticky-tacky, the kind he finds in the Valley’s sprawl-based cities like Modesto. In trying to save the town, our leaders, seeing only the half-empty glass, have been killing off what makes us valuable: our real history here.

It’s not an especially pretty history. Built by Southern Pacific purely for the purpose of land speculation in a spot with no reliable water supply where not even Yokuts had villages, the best thing you can say about Lindsay’s origin is that it was unnatural. Early on we had to try stealing water from others in the Kaweah watershed who were (unfortunately for us) needy and wealthy enough to challenge that act and take it back. Then our pathetic artificial drought situation was used handily by the big boys in Kern County to get the federal government to build them the Friant-Kern Canal with its appurtenant dam, the environmental consequences of which we’ve been hearing about for three decades.

Yet with this compromised and compromising history, people managed to grow an economy here, first with wheat and cotton, then olives and oranges. The town grew as the crops stabilized; the crops stabilized as the water supply stabilized, which is why we have a chunk of drill core from the canal construction memorialized in the park. With that prosperity they built the Memorial Building, the Olive Bowl, the City Park (which Southern Pacific’s development company granted to the city in 1927 for a "free park") and the hospital.

They built businesses for themselves serving the farm community, and then they built businesses serving the town community. They built Lindsay Olive Co. and a host of packinghouses, where the community’s crops were processed and provided jobs for the townspeople. Most of our neighborhoods were developed in the agricultural prosperity of the 1940’s and 50’s, and they still reflect a kind of modest well-being and sense of optimism from that day. It’s what Richard finds attractive in our town, and it’s what drew me here.

People can find all the ticky-tacky they want elsewhere. What people are hungry for, however, is an authentic place to live. What if we built on what we have, rather than what we lack?