Thursday, December 26, 2013

Pepper's Market

Published in slightly edited form (sans photos) Dec. 18, 2013
in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Last week a woman stormed up to my cash register at RN Market where I work and burst into this sentence:  "I want to thank you for saving those two buildings!  I'm on your side."  She is someone who has served this community in various capacities for decades, so her support means a lot.  But even more important were her stories about what used to be in the oldest building the City wants demolished.

     I had thought it once held Nation's Grocery.  "I never heard it called that," she said.  "It was Pepper's Market.  Mr. Pepper ran it, and Mr. Jessup ran the meat counter, I think.  I traded there.  It was a wonderful store."  When I asked a friend about my name confusion, he said "Oh, no.  Nation's Grocery was on Honolulu near the Gazette building.  They left their produce out on the sidewalk at nights, had a grill they closed down over it...."

     It turns out his grandmother also traded at Pepper's Market.  "When I was just a little boy, she would take me with her.  Mr. Pepper - his name was Al, I think - was behind the meat counter.  He was always in a white apron and big white hat, and he would entertain me with magic tricks to keep me occupied while she shopped.  He had a two-sponge trick where he would put a sponge in each of our hands, and pretend to blow the one in his hand into mine.  And I'd say 'How'd you DO that?'"  My friend also remembered that Mr. Pepper's son Steve and daughter Anna worked in the store with him.

Pepper's Market behind the Lindsay Junior High School Band,
Orange Blossom Parade, early 1960's.
Wider street view showing relation to other downtown businesses.  Lindsay's
High School band is behind the palomino.
Also called Pepper's Cash Grocery, showing 7-Up ad on north wall and
Orange Blossom Court float.  Photos courtesy of the Bastady Family, Lindsay.

     He also said that it became Beverly's Bargains sometime in the 1970's.  It was run by Beverly Chapman, wife of Lester Chapman who owned Chapman's Welding and also the orange ranch where Roosevelt Elementary was built just a couple of years ago. When I moved to Lindsay in the early 1990's, the building was still occupied by various businesses trying to make a go of it at that important corner.  But then it became vacant and boarded up, used temporarily for the cyclists' mural in honor of the Amgen Tour flying by it through the roundabout.

     This building is the one the City has used to ridicule the issue of historic preservation we have raised in the lawsuit currently pending against them.  In meetings they show photos of broken doors and missing sections of roof and say "THIS is what they want to preserve," as if we were lunatics from beyond the fringe.  I have pointed out that what they are showing makes a good case for landowner neglect, and that if they had done the survey of historic resources 20+ years ago required by the general plan, there might have been funds to help maintain and restore the more valuable places in this community's memory bank.  The real issue is that many of the community's residents are part of the history of this place, whereas the City's administrators are not.  How to get them to protect what they don't know or appear to care about is the question.

Old Pepper's Market building with Amgen mural, May 2013.
 
     My attachment to the building is to learn its role in the town's development, but my attachment to the land beneath and around it is much greater.  The soil is sandy loam, delivered by Lewis Creek a century or more ago free of charge, precious and rare in this town built mostly on Tertiary clays.  It's a perfect site for a community garden.  The two-plus bare lots on that block could be growing fresh food for the Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council, or for the benefit of families in need of some extra income, plots which the organizer for the Dolores Huerta Foundation asked the City for help finding two years ago when the park plan was being finalized.
 
Empty lot next to Pepper's Market showing good soil tilth, May 2013.
 
Open ground behind Pepper's Market with good grass cover crop, May 2013.


Additional open lot half a block away, July 2013.

     The building could be used to store tools and garden supplies, hold meetings and hand out gardening information, and even to market the produce if that was the goal.  They could leave it out on the sidewalk at night and pull a grate down over the fresh lettuce and corn, melons and squash, tomatoes and peppers....  Perhaps it could become Pepper's Market once again, selling hot peppers this time.


Side of Pepper's Market with 7-Up advertising still visible, July 2013.
(Author's note:  In late Sept. 2013, California passed a new state law allowing municipalities to lower the assessed valuation on urban parcels under 3 acres for owners dedicating them to growing food for five years, for the purpose of stimulating community gardens and small-scale urban agriculture. See "Cultivating urban agriculture," Fresno Bee, Oct. 4, 2013.)
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Trudy Wischemann is a garden-variety dreamer with rural roots who can often be found with dirt under her fingernails.  You can send her your stories of Pepper's Market, Beverly's Bargains or other memories of Lindsay's places and times % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Monday, December 23, 2013

From Nazareth

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 11, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     This past week has me thinking of Bethlehem.  From dusk till past dawn, the whirr of the propellers on the wind machines put me in another place.  The cold, the danger of damage to the citrus crops, the vulnerability of people, animals and plants to this arctic air delivered free of charge by the jet stream's meanders overhead - it all just re-adjusted my priorities without warning.

     At the market where I work I see the cold's effects on the faces of the pickers when they come in at dusk for groceries.  They're working overtime to bring in the fruit before it gets frostbite.  I hear the sounds of congestion building in their voices, feel the roughness of their hands as I drop their change into them.  The women packing the fruit come in just before closing for tonight's dinner, tomorrow's lunch, determined to get through it.  A man who runs wind machines through the nights shared the prayer he offers each time he starts a machine, standing directly below the blades.

     Why Bethlehem? you ask.  The need for shelter on a cold night for people not from here, sojourning thanks to some imperial force, whether that be Herod or the free market - that's one reason.  But the Christ who was brought into this world, whose birth story is triggered by the name of that little town in countries around the globe, is another.

     He was brought into the world to upset the apple cart between rich and poor, where the rich put their apples into the cart and the poor haul them to the cider mill, where the fruit will be turned into juice for export.  At least that's what some people think.  Most people like to think he was brought into the world to save us all, which he was:  he came to tell us about the eye of the needle and the problem of getting through it if you're a camel.

     One author, Reza Aslan, in his new book Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, makes a pretty sound case for that point of view.  Unfortunately for me, he also suggests that the Bethlehem story was created by the writers of Matthew and Luke to cinch Jesus' identity as the Messiah to the Jewish prophesies in the Old Testament.  The Bethlehem story, where we get our notion of Christmas as being about the gifts of God doing the impossible in a world much in need of repair, may be like the creation myths of native peoples, where we explain as best we can what we believe but will never know.

     So Jesus was probably born in Nazareth, a village occupied by illiterate rural peasants and day laborers serving the construction cravings of the urban Jews and Romans.  As a place, Nazareth has a distinctly different feel than Bethlehem in our minds, as in "What good could come from...," disparagement earned by the low class and vulnerability of its residents.  Try replacing Nazareth with Poplar or Plainview or a hundred other little Valley settlements, and that all-too-human geographic prejudice won't be hard to recognize.

     It is against this prejudice that Christmas was born.  May we feel its true spirit this year.

(Author's note: This piece was written the morning after a night where I caught myself  being judgmental, arrogant and rude to a customer because of her new-immigrant appearance.)
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Trudy Wischemann is a soul-seeking writer in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on Christmas % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Back in the Saddle

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 4, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Juni Fisher sang for us last Wednesday night at the Lindsay Community theater.  I was there because I had to be, though I didn't know why other than that I love her music so much it hurts.  I love her songs, I love the way she sings them, the way she plays her guitar.  But mostly I love seeing her stand up on the stage all by herself and tell us, through songs and stories, why she does what she does.  Why these things are important.

     Partly I went to hear her new song, "Listen," which just won the Western Music Association 2013 Song of the Year award.  On stage there was a life-size photo of Juni in the saddle on the back of a beautiful bay horse with a white blaze down his face and nostrils flaring.  She is patting his neck with her left hand and holding the reins in her right, smiling approvingly.  After all these years of hearing about horses through her songs, it was really wonderful to see her actually astride one, confident.  It is the cover photo for her new album, Listen ... to the horse.  (Visit www.JuniFisher.com to learn more, see photos or order CDs.)



    As the concert progressed, I noticed something slightly different.  She was more herself, more relaxed and a little softer, more matured, perhaps, by these many years of performing solo onstage.  When something fell to the floor in the audience, clattering loudly during "I Will Miss Ireland," one of her most hauntingly beautiful ballads about Irish immigrants to America, she actually giggled with the rest of us who were laughing from embarrassment.  She broke into laughter several more times between singing the somber, serious phrases.  What balance.

     Early on she mentioned that she has a new horse named Silk, and that Silk has 7,000 friends on Facebook, while she herself has only 5,000, one of the charming jokes she likely has used in many concerts.  Later I noticed she had on jeans underneath her long coat and scarf, tucked into her custom cowboy boots, more authentic somehow, nearer to the Western heroes she was singing about.  And then the real reason I had to be there became clear.

     She's gone back to riding.  I didn't really know she'd left, or why, or how much being a horsewoman had been her lifelong goal and passion.  From the stories in previous concerts, I'd heard traces of it amidst the stories of how music had always been there. In 2006, when I wrote a long review of her three CDs, I titled it after one of the songs that pierced me most, "Silver Music," (on Cowgirlography,) which is about the vaquero horse training process and the relationship that develops from it between horse and rider.  I wrote that the song describes "a working partnership as real as any marriage and suggests that in these partnerships are where we become whole," ignorantly prophetic.

     And I think that's what's happened to Juni:  she's become whole.  She has the missing part of her life back.  We can pray that she won't give up music or get killed on the highway driving between music gigs and rodeo arenas.  We can praise God that music got her back to the life she loves, and that we have this model of a triumphant career to give us all encouragement and joy.  But at this moment I'm just grateful for every song she's ever written and every horse she's ever known.  I'll never again listen to "Who They Are," the song she wrote with cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell, and wonder what writing a poem and riding a horse have in common.
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Trudy Wischemann is a lifelong horse lover who writes.  You can send her your thoughts on Juni or horsewomen in general % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment here.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Blowin' in the Wind

Published in slightly edited form in The Foothills Sun-Gazette, Nov. 13, 2013

     VETERAN'S DAY, 2013.  The American flags pegged on porches and lawns are blowing in today's beautiful breeze.  Yesterday at church we asked the veterans to stand and saluted their sacrifices, their willingness to risk their lives for our sake.  My father would have stood with them if he were a church-goer, but instead today he will get a free dinner at Appleby's, a well-deserved salute from corporate America.

     As those three beloved men in our congregation who served rose to their feet, my heart went with them, then shrank back into the pew.  My brother Dave could have stood there, too, and pigged out with Dad at Appleby's if he had come back from Viet Nam.  I carry Dave's wounds in the back of my mind, but the shrapnel my family received is still felt.  The sacrifices of risking your life and losing it are not paid by you alone.

     The veterans themselves, of course, honor their fallen brothers every year; they know the sacrifices that were made better than we do.  That's the real opportunity of Veteran's Day:  to ask "What was it really like?" and hear the costs that are paid every time we think war is the answer.  The veterans' voices speak for the dead as well as the living.

     Veterans also speak for the educational aspect of war.  My father came back with stories not just of navigating mined waters and surviving a typhoon in the South China Sea (like one that swallowed two of Admiral Halsey's destroyers, crews and all,) but also of watching boat people at a harbor in North China skimming the water for food in the garbage dumped over the ships' sides.  I was raised to think about the poor people in China from his education:  never take more than I could eat or leave anything on my plate.


This is Dad's book. He spent several years writing it, and it's been a real gift to our family.  Any veteran who spent time on board ship would find company in these pages.  Published in 2006 by PublishAmerica, ISBN: 1-4241-4842-1


     Was  it this pre-kindergarten education around the dinner table that led to my education in land tenure and rural development, which turned me into a rural advocate?  I think so.  Revisit these words of Paul Taylor with me, written in Berkeley 34 years ago while I watched his dedicated mind at work:

     "Search for a congenial or at least tolerable relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relationship of man to man.  Societies can become homogeneous or polarized, depending mainly on whether landownership is distributed widely among the many or concentrated in the hands of a few.  Throughout time, wide distribution has brought stability, while sustained concentration has jeopardized the peace and fed the forces of revolt and revolution.  Our twentieth century is no exception.  On the contrary, it has witnessed the largest and most pervasive revolutions of all history in Europe, in Latin America, and in Asia."  (Paul S. Taylor, in the Introduction to Essays on Land, Water and the Law in California.  New York: Arno Press, 1979.)

     Paul told the story of an officer stationed in Viet Nam who recognized that land reform in the South was an alternative to fighting a losing battle with the North, and said so to his superiors.  When Paul asked him how far he got with that idea, the officer said "About three minutes at cocktail hour."

     It's not just wars that are caused by uneven land distribution, but also terrible poverty.  Our dilemmas about immigration are actually driven by land ownership and control problems in Mexico and points south created by American agribusiness firms and global traders.  The economic decline of the Valley's small towns is also driven by increasing inequality in land ownership.

     When will we get it?  Those flags blowing brilliantly in today's breeze prompted a song from the turbulent Viet Nam era:  "How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?  The answer, my friends, is blowin' in the wind.  The answer is blowin' in the wind."

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Trudy Wischemann is a Gold Star Sister who lives and writes in Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on Veteran's Day and land reform % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.



Wednesday, November 13, 2013

How Time Flies


Published in slightly edited form Nov. 6, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Fall Back.  We've re-set our clocks and our lives to the sun's shorter light.  It's the eleventh month of the year.  Now we get to watch the natural world prepare itself for the short slumber of California's winter.

     Looking back to this year's beginning, time has flown but not from having fun.  In January, I was begging the new mayor of Lindsay and reconstituted City Council to restore the language on public participation in council meetings that the city manager had removed from the agenda materials the year before without any action by the Council.  It seemed a no-brainer to me, but obviously I don't know everything.

     In the second month came the resolutions to approve two competing national chain stores, Family Dollar and Dollar General, which are actually more like mini-WalMarts than true dollar stores.  Both proposals were for new buildings at the edges of our two commercial centers (downtown and Olivewood Plaza) and would have subtracted trade from existing local businesses as well as adding some.  But the City never did that math and promoted both as boons to the community, not evaluating the costs in terms of jobs, goods and services, traffic impacts, or the loss of community landmarks, much less simple economics.  It was as if Scot Townsend had never left office:  same old song and dance.


The Central California Citrus Exchange Building, part of the giant Sunkist Growers Cooperative
that brought enormous economic well-being to the community of Lindsay and other towns in the citrus belt
of the San Joaquin Valley.  Designed and built by Southern California architect W.W. Ache in 1933,
the building qualifies for the national historic registry on all three criteria.  The building was in use
by the CCC Exchange through 2005.  It has been well maintained and little altered from its original design.

     Readers of this column know the wrestling match that followed:  our challenge over the historic value of the Central California Citrus Exchange building that would have been demolished by the Dollar General project; Dollar General's supposed withdrawal and the Council's failure to approve it, followed two months later by its sudden reappearance and slam-dunk approval after the Fourth of July weekend.  This time, instead of demolishing an historic, architecturally beautiful landmark, the project demolished a business, without warning to its owner or compensation for his loss, without recognition of the community integrity it represents or the community value of having it in that location.  Without respect.



The former "Ed's Auto," now M&J Auto Repair at the corner of Elmwood
and Hermosa in Lindsay.  This site has been an auto repair shop for nearly 40 years
serving all segments of the community.  Its location downtown is convenient for those
working in businesses there as well as for people living in the nearby neighborhoods. 

Miguel Chavez, owner of M&J Auto Repair, a great mechanic
and an even greater family man whose wife and son help him in this business.

     In the name of that blatant disrespect for the community's businesses as well as the laws governing cities, at the end of the ninth month we filed suit against the City for approving Dollar General II without adequate attention to economic impacts and traffic congestion. We included the 24-year failure to implement the historic resources section of the General Plan, and the fact that public participation in council meetings has been inordinately limited to the three minute public comment period.  The media reported that the threat of litigation caused Dollar General to withdraw its proposal, which may be correct.  But it didn't cause the City to reconsider its approval of DGII, or rethink their approach to public participation much less how to preserve our town's historic buildings.  Instead, they have chosen to go to court.


Miguel's window in the ninth month of 2013.

     And Miguel Chavez is moving his auto repair business to the old site of Martin's Tire, across from the former Lindsay Foods site which would have been perfect for Dollar General (or Family Dollar, for that matter, whose plans are currently stalled by the City's "conversation" with CalTrans over the relocation of Highway 65.)  "The city doesn't want me here," Miguel said when I told him about Dollar General's withdrawal.  "They told me the zoning doesn't permit me to work on cars outside," under the awning of the former Shell Station where Ed Schapansky worked on cars for 30 years before Miguel took over the business. "And they told me if I bought the place, I'd be liable for the contaminated soil beneath the blacktop.  So I'm going to move as soon as that place is ready," he said, no matter the costs.


The future home of M&J Auto Repair.  There is no comparison to the
 current site in terms of location, quality of facility or visual appeal.



     We can pray the new site works for him better than the old, that he can make up these moving costs without killing himself doing it.  We can do more than pray:  we can go support his business.  And we can start to lean on the City for the changes required to not let this happen again.

     But there's one more thing.  Twelve months from now we can elect two new council members, perhaps changing the balance of deciding votes.  Time flies regardless, so let's make it work for us.

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Trudy Wischemann is an untimely poet and prophet-seeker who writes in Lindsay.  You can write to her at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Two Bricks Shy

Published in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette Oct. 23, 2013

     "So, we're going to lose what we were trying to save....," Lindsay Councilman Danny Salinas essentially said the first time he heard city planner Bill Zigler's endorsement of the new Highway 65 realignment plan.

     The new plan proposed by Caltrans is in response to the City's opposition to the old one, which would have hampered access to the motel and the handful of businesses on the northeast corner of Hermosa and the highway.  The old realignment would have begun to veer westward from that intersection.  In the new plan, the westward veering will start at Lindmore on the south edge of town and bypass Lindsay completely.

     Danny was stating what anyone with eyes could see:  that those businesses would now lose the highly-important visibility factor of being along the highway, far more important than a tricky driveway entry.  What he didn't say is that now every business in the Olivewood Shopping Center on the south side of Hermosa is also at risk, not to mention those businesses along Fremont Trail on the west side of the highway, some of which will be sliced like a pie by the new route.  Last, and certainly not least in my mind, is the loss of acres of farmland and the farmability of 20-30 groves of oranges that now will be dissected.  Those farms are businesses, too.

     As I sat there listening to Mr. Zigler's advocacy for the new route, I felt incredulous, and sick.  I thought I was one brick shy of a load when we took on the Dollar General project, and now here was one even more damaging to the community.  We had just filed the lawsuit against the Dollar General II proposal, wanting the City to evaluate the economic impacts on businesses before going forward with the project, as well as to study the potential traffic problems at the roundabout. Those impacts would be small compared to this.

     "What can he be thinking?" my mind quizzed, when suddenly the answer came out of his mouth.  "It's a great opportunity for developing new highway commercial businesses," he said knowingly, not acknowledging the potential loss of our current highway businesses.  Then I saw it:  it's land development driving this thing, not community development.  That's what was behind the Dollar General project, too.

     For the moment, the threat to our existing businesses from Dollar General is gone:  Embree Group has pulled out of the project.  One of my biggest concerns for the community was the potential for losing Rite-Aid, whose product lines most closely resemble Dollar General's.  Rite-Aid has been our only pharmacy since the Monge's retired and closed Redwood.  The thought of all those people currently dependent on Rite-Aid for their prescriptions having to drive to Exeter or Porterville especially during flu season (talk about leaking retail sales!) made my head swim.  Fortunately, a new pharmacy opened last month in the Redwood building, so by Grace there may be another option should Rite-Aid throw in the towel.

     As I said in the public comment period at the Oct. 8th Council meeting, this re-realignment of Highway 65 was initiated by the City.  Caltrans proposed the new route in response to the formal letter signed by Mayor Padilla and approved in the consent calendar at the July 9th meeting.  If the City initiated it, the City can take it back.

     At the Oct. 8th meeting, many of the council members expressed concern about the possible impacts of this new route, including Mayor Padilla and Pam Kimball.  Now is the time for this community's residents, from town and countryside alike, to contact the Council members about these plans, before the city's staff and Caltrans set our future in concrete.
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Trudy Wischemann is a community researcher and writer who thinks this plan is a couple bricks shy.  You can send her your evaluations % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Birds of a Feather

                -- some thoughts on kindred spirits, turkey vultures and other scavengers

     I took a walk over to the park the other evening, straw hat on my head, camera in my overalls' pocket.  Mostly I went to soak up the day's last sunlight, but I also wanted to see the missing hedge.

     At the Lindsay City Council meeting Tuesday, Oct. 8th, we learned a lot of things.  The most important were what the City's planning director, Bill Zigler, has been trying to negotiate over the past month with Caltrans on the Highway 65 realignment.  As of this writing, there is still no map available to the public of the new route he is working to perfect (without public input, I might add.)

     Until last week, the Council didn't have one, either.  Although Councilwoman Kimball had requested materials to study a month earlier, and though Mr. Zigler promised to bring handouts to the Council at Tuesday night's meeting, the Councilmembers themselves still didn't have a map to look at, much less show their constituents.  "I forgot the handouts," he apologized as he opened his study session, saying he thought his Power Point would give them enough information to give him feedback.  Thursday I called to get a copy of the handout for the library's file of agenda packets.  "What handouts?" Carmen, our City Clerk who doubles as Bill's secretary, said.  "I don't know about any handouts."  When I reminded her of Bill's promise to deliver them, she said she'd get back to me.  I'm still waiting.

     Another thing we learned Tuesday was that the park's border hedge had been removed and the gravel walkway started around that curved edge.  I felt some alarm when I heard it, worried that yet another "improvement" to the park would increase the diminishments I feel when I walk through that place.  That's really what started my walk, camera in pocket.

     As I walked down my pot-holed street, Alameda, soon to be repaved, I noticed several turkey vultures flying the same route.  When I got to the once-grassy triangle on the east side of Parkside, I saw they were roosting in the tallest trees.  "Thank God they haven't killed off those trees yet," my heart sang.  Surprisingly, without the hedge the view of the park was open and inviting, and the traffic visibility on Parkside greatly improved.  It gave me hope.


     Then I decided to see where they have installed the swings.  Some of you may remember the last time I wrote about the park and the missing swings, and how, at the very next Council meeting, Chief Wilkinson, who is also our city manager, mentioned that the swings they'd ordered had just arrived and would be installed soon.  That was months ago, and I assumed it was a done deal.  But after circumnavigating the park, I have to report that I didn't find any swings.  Councilman Salinas's son Matt's skate board park is progressing, but I still don't see any swings.

     What I did find is that we have a new pharmacy in the old Redwood Pharmacy building across from what was once going to be the luxurious condo-complex Sequoia Villas but is now fast becoming a cluster of Section 8 units being built by the Tulare County Housing Authority.  I was so excited to see a business return to that site, and one we sorely need.  I spoke with the pharmacist, Dr. Edem Afaha, who says he's been there about a month and is looking forward to serving our community.  Please, friends, let's help this new business get established - just in case Rite Aid leaves town thanks to the Hwy 65 re-realignment.


     While we were talking, I found myself telling Dr. Afaha about the recent history of our town.  "It's like that everywhere," he said.  "I know," I said, "but it seems to me in a town this size we ought to be able to have a democracy," repeating a fond refrain.  He proceeded to tell me a story about a particularly arrogant city manager in Taft where he was the Rite-Aid pharmacist years ago.  "Big fish," we agreed - us little ponds attract wanna-be big fish sometimes.  But I felt like I'd met a kindred spirit.

     As the sun sank behind the Coast Range, I wandered back home through the nearly empty park.  There was a young woman studying at one of the small covered tables, her computer plugged into the electrical outlet.  I felt kinship with her, too - that's where I would have been at her age.  I noticed more turkey vultures roosting in the triangle's trees, and a stream of them flying both directions along Alameda.  "Where are they coming from?" I wondered.  Normally we don't see turkey vultures in town, except one or two circling high above.  But this was massive and right overhead - it was like the nightly flight of crows back in Davis who came in from the fields to sleep in the huge street trees there.  Then, a block from home, I saw the source:  an entire flock was roosting in my giant, overgrown Chinese Elms.


     The old saying "Birds of a feather flock together," came to mind, the truth of it swaying in the branches.  I stopped to talk with neighbors about the phenomenon, including Philip and Trish Gutierrez.  Philip was in awe, Trish slightly more apprehensive, but they confirmed they'd never seen this before, either, and both have spent most of their lives in this town.

     Later that night, I called friends in Sacramento, naturalists who would know why I was suddenly so honored with house-guests.  "They're on their way to Central and South America," my friend Steve Laymon said, and told me about counting thousands one year when they lived in Kern Valley along the vultures' migratory route.  "I didn't know they migrated," I replied.  "Some do, some don't," he answered, opening up the real mystery of the natural world we inhabit.


     They were still there in the morning, drying their wings before take-off, gone by the afternoon.  I loved having this view of community survival, a flock of sojourners responding to nature's call to do the impossible year after year.  It reminded me of the strength in numbers, the power of kindred spirits, the beauty of Community.  I'm glad I took that walk.

(For you ornithologists and other bird-lovers out there, this flock arrived October 10th and left on the 11th.  They or other migrating TVs may have flown over my friend Jim's house in Twenty-nine Palms the following day.)
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Trudy Wischemann is a normally solitary sojourner who too often forgets she belongs.  You can send her your turkey vulture sightings or other stories of community to P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Between Selma and Earlimart

Published October 9, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I had the privilege of taking a turn in the pulpit of the United Methodist Church in Lindsay a couple of weeks ago.  I had been wanting to tell the people in that congregation about the involvement of their church in a conference 21 years ago that was life-changing for me and many others.   But going through the old materials from that time, I discovered what brought me to Lindsay.  It was the 1990 Freeze.

     The conference was organized by a Methodist minister named John Pitney, who became a deep friend through the planning process and whose music I still sing whenever I get a chance.  The conference was called the Forum on Church and Land, one of many he had organized in the western states for 10 years.  The title for the one held in Fresno in February of 1992 was "Who is My Neighbor?  Agriculture, the Common Good, and the Role of the Church in Truthtelling and Reconciliation." 

     At the first planning meeting in early 1991, I met many of the people who  would contribute to the four-day event.  One of them was Rev. Dick Pitcher, the Methodist minister from Lindsay.  It was only a month or two after the crop-destroying, grove-killing, job-eliminating freeze of Dec. 1990.  Dick was in overdrive helping to organize relief efforts for the farmworkers, and his stories were vivid.  The  Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council was deluged.  The Shropshires were hauling food from LA food banks in their empty trucks.  The LoBues were storing the food in their empty packinghouses.  Family farmers were mortgaging their ranches to pay farmworkers to pick the frozen-dead oranges up from the ground instead of from the trees.  One month later, when I came to document these community efforts, church women were making lunches for the children in Tonyville during spring break who otherwise would have been missing their school lunches.  Another month later I photographed three busloads of people from Tulare County who arrived at the capitol in Sacramento with signs beseeching help, signs in Spanish and English held in the hands of family farmers and farmworkers alike, side by side with government officials from all levels.

     A year later at the conference we spent one of the four days on a bus ourselves, traveling across a divide wider than the Mississippi River:  the emotional/socio-political divide between farmers and farmworkers.  We started at a small-scale Mennonite farmer's tree-fruit orchards and vineyard to hear his stories of beauties and hardships from a lifetime on that land.  We ended at a small church in Earlimart to hear stories of the farmworker families with children who formed the cancer cluster there.  In between those two poles, which are much closer than most people imagine, we stopped for the afternoon in Lindsay.  This is what it was like.

     We got off the bus and ate sandwiches we'd ordered from Mr. G's Pizza and Subs in the Methodist Church's Maxwell Hall, while Rev. Pitcher told stories about the continuing relief efforts more than a year later.  We walked down to the new Coordinating Council office on Honolulu Street and listened to Sarah Rodriguez tell about their harrowing efforts to help people still out of work, still hungry.  And we bore witness to what a community can do when Mother Nature forces us to recognize how much we all really have in common.

     There were many aspects of the conference that converted people to the need for involvement of the church in the questions we struggle with in agriculture.  But it was the evidence of this bridge across the farmer-farmworker divide in Lindsay that brought me hopefully here.  If you have stories about that freeze or the relief efforts that you would like to share, please contact me at P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 3247 or leave a message below.
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Trudy Wischemann is a kindof wacko person who writes and sings in Lindsay.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Poetic Justice

       -- some thoughts on the work of Sylvia Ross



     It came in the mail, the second, expanded edition of Acorns and Abalone, a collection of poems, drawings and short stories by our beloved local author, Sylvia Ross.  First published in 2011 as "a collection of work" that she thought she put together mostly for her family, this 2013 edition is even more beautiful and more a gift to all of us who love truth and beauty in this natural world we inhabit and the long history of our relationship to this land.

     She's also finished a second edition of East of the Great Valley, a heart-breaking, mind-opening Civil War-era historical novel set in the Sierra foothills based on her Chukchansi great-grandmother's life.  Thinking about both works, I realized that what Sylvia accomplishes with her short poems, delicate drawings, and spare storytelling is justice:  she does justice to the truth of our complex lives and reveals the beauty of knowing it.

     Under the heading "Out of Sandy Loam and Red Clay," Sylvia has added 11 poems and three drawings to Acorns and Abalone.  In some, like "Reparation," she shows how the past lovingly cohabits the present:

 
a mother-in-law's
small even stitches mended
more than torn fabric
 
an elegant patch
where kind words sewn would soften
another's cruel
 
her sewing basket
with pins scattered out of place
waits for diligence
 
the fraying wicker
coaxes my complicity
in making repairs
 
     In others, she unravels the complexities of the food chain and our complicated place sort of at the top, from sea gulls eating shellfish resulting in beautiful shells on the beach to mosquitos sucking our blood.  In "The Hawk," she shows the painful reality of intercepting the eat-or-be-eaten cycle: 
 
          "....
           The hawk couldn't know her impulsive motive,
           how she intended the bird turned free to live,
           to fly, and how unable to loft the bird skyward,
           or let it go, she too was trapped.  In fear she heard
           a reedy high-pitched music screaming out
           filling the air, the shrill piercing noise of a shout
           going beyond the barn, a cry sent reaching
           to the sky - her own voice - a hawk's screeching."
 
     The new edition of Acorns also includes a short chapter from East of the Great Valley.  It is about the first Anglo heroine we meet in the book, Nancy McCreary, whose death early in the story left me bereft.  Nancy's truths carry on in her boys and eventually rescue the Indian girl Nancy saved as an orphaned infant, doing justice to the humanity of some people regardless of race.  But this chapter delicately lays out the human pecking order that masked the competition for land and the eat-or-be-eaten attitudes of those who came to dominate it.


     The new piece that took my breath away, however, is the poem "Frazier Valley," set against her drawing of the lone pair of palm trees there, a scene we here know by heart from driving the Frazier Valley Road:












 

     This 2013 Edition does more justice to the breadth of Sylvia's work.  I hope we will be seeing and hearing more from her in the future.  Both books are available locally at the Book Garden in Exeter, online at Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com, or directly from Sylvia herself at (559) 594-4743.
 
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Trudy Wischemann is a wanna-be poet with a photographic eye who loves what her mind sees in Sylvia's pages.  You can send her your favorite passages of Sylvia's work % P.O. Box 1374 or leave a message below.
 



One Brick Shy

Published Sept. 11, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     "Let it come in," said the pleasant man who's been sharing his thoughts with me the last few months on the Dollar General project in Lindsay.  "We need something downtown."

     That certainly would have been easier.  With this added, unpaid workload, the last few weeks I've wondered if I'm one brick shy of a load.  But in honor of the democratic process and all the people who stand to lose, instead we sued the City of Lindsay and all interested parties to stop the project until certain conditions are met.

     Broadly speaking, one of those conditions is to obey the laws governing cities, particularly the laws regarding planning and development, but also the conduct of open government.  Our city has been ignoring those laws so long they think they're exempt.  In the name of everyone in the past who has been harmed by this arrogant ignorance and everyone who will be harmed in the future if it's not stopped, this lawsuit is a tap on the shoulder suggesting those days are over.

     Another condition is that the potential losses from, and problems created by the project, be assessed before it is constructed.  The project proponents - the City, the developer, and the property sellers - only proclaim the benefits.  Self-interest naturally guides the property sellers.  The developer's job is to convince the City that the benefits outweigh the costs; that's what he gets paid the big bucks to do.  The City's job, however, is to assess the costs and ensure that the benefits truly do outweigh them, and to require mitigation for costs to the community as needed.  Our City has not done their job.

     A third condition is to step up to the plate and include historic preservation as part of the City's development toolbox.  The 1989 General Plan, created 7 years before we became a Charter City and adopted the "strong city manager" form of government, commits the City to doing this.  Unfortunately, historic preservation has been seen as an impediment to the City's development desires since Scot Townsend rose to the top.  The proposed demolition of the Citrus Exchange Building for the original Dollar General plan was the most recent public example of a long string of Lindsay landmarks that were slated for removal during the Redevelopment Agency era.  One look at Exeter and Reedley, two towns that have preserved older buildings and landmarks in their downtown core, shows what can be done to attract people hungry for more intimate environments, places with a history.

     We need something downtown, alright, and it's not more brick sidewalks and landscaped bulbouts.  We need people to invest in their existing buildings and encourage businesses that will attract more foot traffic, not subtract from what already exists.  We need City staff who care about helping the existing businesses, not harming them, and who want to bring residents into the planning process, not exclude them.  We need the Council to recognize when sleights of hand are occurring and call the cards.  And most of all, we need residents willing to pitch in and hold the Council's feet to the fire until they require the staff to uphold the laws and protect all the town's residents, not just a few property owners.

     When we start getting these things, Lindsay won't be missing any bricks.
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Trudy Wischemann is an open-eyed student of small farm towns who dreams of their renewal.  You can send her your observations and dreams % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Nameless No More

Published August 28, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Today, the date of this posting, is the celebration in Fresno of the restoration of the names of the farmworkers' bodies buried 65 years ago in Holy Cross Cemetery after the plane crashed that was taking them, courtesy of the U.S. government, back to their homeland in Mexico.  Seeing a newsclipping of the event, Woody Guthrie wrote the words that would later be put to music by Martin Hoffman and become the song "Plane Wreck over Los Gatos," or more simply "Deportee."  Sung by almost every American folksinger all these years, from Pete Seeger and Joan Baez to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and now Joel Rafael, the song is one I have known and loved most of my adult life.

     When I first heard of this name restoration project from Tim Z. Hernandez, the project's fountainhead, I began telling everyone I knew and wrote my first column on it in May.  What I discovered was that most of the people I live among did not know the story and had never heard the song.  That lacking is a reflection of the suppression of the conflict that arose when Cesar Chavez and the UFW began agitating for changes in farmworker conditions:  wages, rules and regulations, the right to organize, exposures to pesticides, housing conditions - you name it.  Unlike most places on the urban coastal shelf I inhabited at that time, the union's demands were being placed upon the people who had the most to lose, the folks on the next rung up on the agricultural ladder.  The conflicts were so painful that most memories of that time have been buried.  As one elderly Hispanic man in my town who was on the UFW's march to Sacramento put it, "I am ashamed of that time.  So much conflict, so much pain."

     As I've watched this project progress from hope to dream fulfilled and beyond, it has occurred to me that the time is ripe for healing.  In that spirit I sang "Deportee" to my Methodist congregation yesterday, most hearing it for the first time.  The Spirit moves when and where it will.  I'm just glad I'm here to see it.  Here is the piece that was published in Wednesday's paper as "Nameless No More."

"It's a simple act of courage,
planting garlic in the fall -
a harbinger of better things to come ..."
     -- John Pitney, "Blue Heron, Fly" in Keeping the Garden, 2004

    Today I want to write about the simple acts of courage of songwriters and poets.  Every song my friend John, a Methodist minister in Oregon, has ever written has been a simple act of courage.  He'll never see, much less gather all the harvests of his plantings, which have occurred across the country and even here, from Fresno to Earlimart.  But that doesn't stop him.

     "I haven't written any songs lately," he complained to me over the phone a few weeks ago after telling me about standing on the Columbia River Bridge with a large group of people protesting fracking and the plan to transport its products by rail down the Columbia River Gorge.  "Don't worry, you will," I told him, explaining my theory of writing cycles of intake and output.  "I don't know," he said, "it might be time to lay down across some tracks."  Yikes.  To me, just thinking about fracking and the power behind it is a simple act of courage.

     Woody Guthrie's writing the song "Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos" was a simple act of courage.  He took some facts from a newspaper article about a plane wreck in 1948 in which 28 Mexican workers were killed being "returned," (i.e., deported) to their country, merged them with years of knowledge about farm labor conditions, and painted a picture that still moves people to tears today.  He did not write the music; he never performed the song.  I don't know if he even heard it performed before he died.  But he left behind an indelible story that otherwise would have been lost, not knowing if it would ever bear fruit.

     Sixty-plus years later a young Valley poet comes along, Tim Z. Hernandez, who finds himself called to follow a leading (as Quakers call it) to find out who these workers were and locate their relatives.  The son of farm laborers who worked in the fields himself, Tim was moved by his own story to discover the unmarked, invisible stories of the 28 who were buried in a mass grave in Fresno's Holy Cross Cemetery.  Just starting that project was a simple act of courage.  But now, more than two years later, with support from thousands of people across the country and more serendipity (or Grace) than you can shake a stick at, the names and relatives have been found, along with the $10,000 it cost to have a new grave marker installed with those names engraved on it, to be dedicated in a blowout ceremony next Monday, Sept. 2, 2013 - Labor Day.

     These two simple acts of courage correct a sin of omission from before I was born.  But the larger issues - the treating of immigrants who come here to work, just trying to survive, as non-persons, faceless, nameless, dispensable - and the perilous journeys they make and consequences they incur in order to do so - these issues are still with us.  Hopefully this small correction will point the way toward the next simple acts required.

     Writing about the spirit of hope that arrived to his farming friends in the body of a Great Blue Heron who appeared to them after a fire destroyed their barn, their crop, and their old John Deere tractor, John concludes the song with this about himself:

"And I may plant my garlic
in the shadow of the moon;
the neighbors know I'm looney anyhow!
But if we stop believing, then
our future has no wings.
Blue Heron, Great Blue Heron,
don't you dare desert us now!

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Trudy Wischemann is a social scientist who appreciates the missionary work of birds and bards.  You can view other columns on this site and leave a comment below.


Monday, August 26, 2013

A Town This Size

Published in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette August 21, 2013

     "I just can't see why, in a town this size, we can't have a democracy..." I told a friend last week.  I meant it positively:  I think, in a town the size of Lindsay, or Exeter, Farmersville, or Woodlake for that matter, we can.  In fact, towns this size may be the only places where real democracy has a chance:  a government of, by, and for the people, a government that responds to its residents and operates on their behalf.

     In towns the size of Porterville, Tulare and Visalia, because of the fortunes to be made, we expect democracy to have a harder time competing with the economic values of rich people.  We expect democracy to be twisted to meet their needs.  We expect democracy to be just a form we maintain to keep a shred of self-respect.  And we don't expect to have much impact standing before their city councils when we are trespassed against by their decisions.

     "This is a perfect-sized town," said a new friend Sunday over coffee and cookies after church.  "You can get to know people here," he mused, and though it's not as easy as it looks, it's true.  With a role that provides interaction with folks, you can get to know lots of people here.  You can even learn new languages, exchanging words with new friends.

     In a town this size there's an opportunity to build a business based on the loyalty of friends and family, or get a job in one.  There are opportunities to join with others to form clubs or organizations to meet observed needs, to join churches in the search for strengthening faith and the chance to sing.

     But there are also opportunities for big fish to come in, do a belly flop into the little pond and splash out all the water.  Goodbye, smaller fish.  Goodbye (eventually), big fish.  Hello, mud hole.

     And that's why I'm against Dollar General coming to the edge of downtown, its tail swacking Miguel Chavez's family business out to the south edge where they may or may not survive (especially considering the costs of this move.)  If they would take over the empty Lindsay Foods site, where the visibility would draw people from Strathmore and the countryside, or fill one of the existing empty buildings downtown, with display windows attracting passersby on evening strolls, I'd reconsider.  If they'd act like a neighbor, participate in the Chamber, hire locally and circulate their profits through the community, we might have something worth approving.  But they won't.

    Dollar General ranked fourth-worst employer nationwide in a recent study of publicly-traded companies (see "America's Worst Companies to Work For," July 19, 2013 at www.247wallst.com.)  Citing employee dissatisfaction with inadequate hours and restrictions against having second jobs, the report also notes that "Dollar General has struggled to prop up its bottom line, with net income virtually flat in its last reported quarter."  The report also indicated a poor rating on the American Customer Satisfaction Index.  This is the gift horse we're not supposed to look in the mouth.

     What I'm suggesting is that this proposal has the potential to demolish qualities of life that are precious and unique to a town this size, like getting to know people, start a business or get a job.  Like democracy.  Let's remember our citizenship, step up to the plate and tell the Council we want them to reconsider.
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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial organizer who sometimes sings for food.  You can view this and other essays here and leave a comment below.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Soldier's Heart

Published July 31, 2013 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I have been reading a new book by Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker author whose work has helped me grow repeatedly.  Healing the Heart of Democracy,  with the outrageous subtitle The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (2012,) is helping me understand why I normally would not have picked up such a book had I not been run through the tumbler of small town politics for the last three years:  I think I've been suffering from a form of soldier's heart.

     Palmer opens with the words of Terry Tempest Williams, a Mormon author whose work I admire.  "The human heart is the first home of democracy," she says.  "It is where we embrace our questions.  Can we be equitable?  Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions?  And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up - ever- trusting our fellow citizens to join us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?"  The goal of this book is to offer suggestions on how we get to Yes.

     Palmer's main contention is that the majority of the American people are not apathetic about politics, but brokenhearted.  "When things we care about fall apart, heartbreak happens."  Sometimes heartbreak shatters.  Running through George Carlin's chronology of terms for the wartime shattering we now call PTSD, starting with "shell shock" in WWI to "battle fatigue" in WWII to "operational exhaustion" in the Korean War (noting the humanity getting stripped further away with each generation,) Palmer discovered the term "soldier's heart" from the Civil War on a modern-day veterans website (www.soldiersheart.net.) "The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done," Palmer claims.  The heartlessness we witness daily in the news, experience with government bureaucracies and corporations, and have witnessed over time as our economy has become the tool of the rich (to mention just a few) has also decommissioned hearts.

     And sometimes the heart is broken open by heartbreak. Using insights from Joshua Shenk's book Lincoln's Melancholy (2005) how our 16th President used the combined burdens of the deadly Civil War and his own suicidal depressions to reach for the country's holding together and healing, Palmer begins to scratch out the prescriptions for heart repair and relearning "habits (of the heart) that form the inward and invisible structure of democracy."

     I saw the reality of these things the week before our last city council meeting as I pounded the pavement getting signatures on letters asking Mayor Padilla to bring back a motion to reconsider their approval of the Dollar General II plan and ask for economic and traffic studies under CEQA.  Some mornings it seemed futile:  in the aftermath of Townsend's Follies, the number of people here with soldier's heart is still large.  But sometimes I saw the light go back on inside people, the valves healing, the muscle pumping once again. Eighteen signatures told the City "No, what you did is not right, and here's what we want:  fairness.  Good process.  Respect for our businesses and lives."

     Luckily, this kind of healing is contagious.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer and remedial community organizer who sometimes will sing for food.  Please leave a comment below.