"Well it's been rough and rocky travelin'
but I'm finally standing' upright on the ground
And after takin' several readings
I'm surprised to find my mind's still fairly sound
I guess Nashville was the roughest
but I know I've said the same about them all
We received our education
in the cities of the nation, me and Paul."
-- Willie Nelson
"I'd have lost my mind if I did what you did, moving to a small town like Lindsay," said my treasured friend Bill Preston in a phone call last week. Bill is the author of Vanishing Landscapes (1979), still the book on Tulare County's history that best describes the processes that shaped it.
"I'm not sure that hasn't happened," I replied, making him laugh the laugh of truth. We both know how I've struggled against despair, against lack of income, against lack of response to the message I brought with me when I leapt off the cliff of Davis to move to what was once a nice town and the home of a great olive.
Sunday at the market a customer who thinks she has no ingles, a former neighbor who was glad I inquired about her casa nueva, struggled heroically to tell me about seeing me with Willie Nelson. She loves his music, has one of his albums even though it's not in Spanish, and so when she saw my picture with Willie on the wall of the mini-storage office where my singing partner Jesse and I keep a poster from our last concert taped up just so people will know we do more than collect rent on metal rooms, she was thrilled. I didn't realize what she thought until after she'd left, but Jesse was glad to know he'd been mistaken for that other musician. And so it was no surprise I woke up the next morning with "Me and Paul" going through my head.
Some of you who follow this column may have wondered about the last two weeks, where it seems I've shifted subjects from the City of Lindsay to the bad Big Boys of agriculture. I've been examining the fear some people have about addressing the terrible power that comes when landownership and water rights are concentrated in their hands because I'm writing proposals to create the Center for Agricultural Communities where that very relationship will be studied and the results promulgated along with other issues facing our small towns in this valley.
If I had not run into that fear before, I'd be blindly making propositions to people who don't know they have that fear until push comes to shove and then finding myself dangling from a limb like those old posters of a kitten whose front claws are all that's saving itself, with the words "Hang In There" heroically plastered below. Been there, done that.
What makes that fear hard for me to understand is that I came of age, so to speak, on the other side of that line: in 380 Barrows Hall on the Berkeley campus, the office of Paul Schuster Taylor, professor emeritus of economics, whose work on farm labor led him to his work on reclamation law and the 160-acre limitation, intended to develop and protect small farms with irrigation projects in the arid west, where water is key to land.
Sitting in that office, Paul had no fear of the Big Boys and wrote law journal articles and letters to politicians and journalists advocating the law's enforcement. I know, because I helped type them. But it wasn't just that he was insulated from pressure by his tenured status in the ivory tower: he truly was not a fearful person. In the recent Cornell dissertation on activist academics by Dan O'Connell, Paul's success in World War I leading his troops through minefields that few squadrons survived is detailed to show the mettle of the man. After being gassed in France, he returned, recovered, and simply put his survival to good use.
When I first met him, it looked to me like he was working alone. I started hanging around, thinking I was keeping him company, not realizing I needed his company more than he needed mine. But as I got to know him, I learned that the company of people who'd come before him were there in his office with him every day: his beloved wife, Dorothea Lange, who died a decade before I arrived; his respected teachers at the University of Wisconsin; Robert Lafollette Jr., who had run special Senate hearings on farm labor between 1936-1940 in which Paul had repeatedly testified.
From my wall: me 'n Paul in 380 Barrows, 1978
He had contemporaries there, too, works of people still breathing: Elias Tuma, then at Davis, who wrote Twenty-Six Centuries of Agrarian Reform (1965); Ernesto Galarza, whose Merchants of Labor (1964) about the Bracero Program is as important today as when it was published; and of course, Carey McWilliams, whose Factories in the Field (1971) became the watchwords for farm labor advocates and agribusiness antagonists from then on.
They weren't all academics, either. They included George Ballis and Ben Yellen, who organized people in Fresno and Imperial Counties respectively and who took large landowners and the Bureau of Reclamation to court for non-enforcement of the law. There were many elected officials, photographers and journalists as well. And what I now see that he did in that office was to build evidence of the eternal community of which he was an active member, and they kept him company until he died.
For this concept of the eternal community I owe Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker author quoted in Catherine Whitmire's Plain Living (2001). He writes "A culture of isolated individualism produces mass conformity because people who think they must bear life all alone are too fearful to take the risks of self-hood. But people who know that they are embedded in an eternal community are both freed and empowered to become who they were born to be." (from Let Your Life Speak, 1990.)
And that's what I want to create in the old Exchange Building: a Center where the works of that eternal community concerned with the fates of small towns, small farms and farm workers can be seen and felt. I want to create a place where Lindsay can learn about the processes that shaped it in the past, the real causes of its decline, and the prospects for its future. I want that also for the other small towns and places surrounding us, hoping we can work together to change direction, away from growth as the only means for survival, toward a revived rural economy sustaining the qualities of life we enjoy here.
And I want it to be a place where we can educate the cities of the nation about our real worth - you, me, and Paul.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a rural revivalist who writes and sometimes sings in Lindsay. You can write to her % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
No comments:
Post a Comment