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.

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.