Published Feb. 19, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
"We got a letter from LSID today," said my friend Robert Bastady, who has kept my concerns for the small farmer close to his chest for more than a decade. Robert and his brother John are small-scale family farmers, like most of their neighbors, like most of their friends in Sierra Citrus Association, their packinghouse, like most of the accounts served by the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District (LSID.) Some big operators like Sun-Pacific and Paramount have increased their acreage in the district over the last decade, and one big Sunkist house from the coast, Limoniera, has leased the land of Sheldon Ranches, a medium-sized family-held corporation. But for the most part, the citrus and olive growers around Lindsay have been family-sized historically, which is what created Lindsay's once-renowned well-being.
Robert handed me the letter to read. Dated Feb. 1, 2014, it began "ATTENTION ALL HOMEOWNERS. This year will be the driest year on record. The Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District will be allocating water to its crop growers. The water supply will most likely not be adequate to sustain all permanent crops. Therefore, conservation methods must be used by homeowners to minimize their use of water to increase the supply to irrigators." Requesting an initial, voluntary reduction of 25%, with a ten-point list suggesting ways to do that (including eliminating watering lawns and backyard fruit trees,) the letter reasoned that this reduction could mean the difference in growers being able to sustain his/her permanent crops. "Without an adequate water supply, many will be faced with abandoning trees or not being able to set any crop."
What was most frightening to me was the second paragraph. "We will be using District groundwater wells to supplement our surface water supplies. These groundwater wells are capable of meeting the residential demand in the District only if there are conservation measures being followed. These wells may not last through the season due to rapidly declining underground reservoirs. Should the District's wells fail, strict and mandatory conservation measures will need to be implemented."
"Should the District's wells fail...." What a thought. All those people out there with nothing to drink or shower or wash with.... With groundwater pumping sure to increase by individual property owners, each one fighting for economic survival, what is the likelihood that we, as a community, can make it through this year? What if they're able to keep the trees alive but not set a crop? This year's Freeze-damaged work picking and packing will look good by comparison with next year's non-existent wages. We've been here before, and the prospects are not pleasing.
When I'd finished absorbing the letter, Robert waited for my reaction, then added "And I read in the paper today about the City-sponsored community tree planting day this Saturday. How are they going to keep those trees alive?" It's a good question. Promoted as a community-building event, in flush water times I can see the idea as valid. But for too long we've forgotten the community-building effects of our small-scale growers, their vital contributions to this town's economy. If we want to really build this community, we need to include their needs for water in our sphere of concern. We'd all be better off if we let our lawns die so that the oranges and olives might live.
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Trudy Wischemann is a small-farm, small-town advocate who'd rather fight than switch. You can send her your city-based conservation ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Death and Life
Published in slightly edited form Feb. 5, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
Thursday, on our first day of January rain, I stood on the concrete banks of the San Joaquin River flowing opposite God's initial direction and watched. The water was not muddy, but a deep blue-green, penetrable by eye only a foot or so, mysterious below that. Long, delicate strings of some water plant were being carried in the current like floats in an underwater parade, the roots radiating out like fingers waving or searching for a hold.
It terrifies me to look into the canal. As a child, I would have imagined floating dreamily along the surface, feeling the water benign. As I've grown older, being above water has become more frightening. Since moving into the valley, however, the canal's power to end life abruptly has become a fact of life I don't love but recognize.
They pulled her car out of the canal on Monday, my friend Tammy's car, just upstream from where I was standing on the bridge where Tulare Road butts into the left flank of Elephant Back. It's the section of the canal I know best, so it grieved me to think her body might have flowed through it, down in those invisible depths. It grieved me to think her body might be stuck in the siphon below Lewis Creek, or caught on some other car body stuck in last year's mud. It grieved me to think she was dead, period. Friday they pulled her body out near the siphon.
At the market, as we waited for news, we cashiers wondered out loud with our customers "Who would want to hurt Tammy?" Few of us sensed the forgetfulness her family mentioned as the search began, much less the onset of dementia. Most of us feared the worst as the days wore on.
To soothe ourselves, we made up stories. "I think she find some rich man and run off with him," groused one of our senior Chinese cashiers, hurting like the rest of us but making me laugh. "Oh, I think she's in Hawaii," said another, a little ticked that she left without her. Tammy was one of our regulars, and we each had a bond all our own from years of brief, but intimate contact with this woman through her gift of gab, her gift of friendship. With one, she exchanged secret dreams of finding some rich man whose money would fly them to that Pacific paradise. Tammy and I were more down to earth: we traded stories about kittens and dogs, shared appreciation for our beloved vet, and laughed together about the lunacies of getting old.
One day we cried. She was pushing her cart through the door when I saw her burst into tears. As I hugged her she said "I miss my husband so much. He was such a good man." Some music on the radio had reminded her. But mostly we laughed - for therapy. One day as she walked in when I hadn't seen her for two weeks, I shouted "Where the HELL have you BEEN?" She doubled up. These last two weeks I waited, hoping to say it again.
Whether she drowned in that water accidentally or some way less innocent, we may never know. Before they started searching it, many of us sensed she was in the canal, this death ditch that carries our lifeblood. If it keeps raining, and snows enough in the mountains, it may yet carry some water for us to drink come summer, maybe enough to keep the groves alive that give us our jobs. Though the canal giveth, it also taketh away. Right now the life of a friend seems a high price to pay for the right to stay here in this semi-desert we call home.
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Trudy Wischemann is a wary water freak who is aging not too gracefully. You can send her your stories about Tammy McCall % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below.
It terrifies me to look into the canal. As a child, I would have imagined floating dreamily along the surface, feeling the water benign. As I've grown older, being above water has become more frightening. Since moving into the valley, however, the canal's power to end life abruptly has become a fact of life I don't love but recognize.
They pulled her car out of the canal on Monday, my friend Tammy's car, just upstream from where I was standing on the bridge where Tulare Road butts into the left flank of Elephant Back. It's the section of the canal I know best, so it grieved me to think her body might have flowed through it, down in those invisible depths. It grieved me to think her body might be stuck in the siphon below Lewis Creek, or caught on some other car body stuck in last year's mud. It grieved me to think she was dead, period. Friday they pulled her body out near the siphon.
At the market, as we waited for news, we cashiers wondered out loud with our customers "Who would want to hurt Tammy?" Few of us sensed the forgetfulness her family mentioned as the search began, much less the onset of dementia. Most of us feared the worst as the days wore on.
To soothe ourselves, we made up stories. "I think she find some rich man and run off with him," groused one of our senior Chinese cashiers, hurting like the rest of us but making me laugh. "Oh, I think she's in Hawaii," said another, a little ticked that she left without her. Tammy was one of our regulars, and we each had a bond all our own from years of brief, but intimate contact with this woman through her gift of gab, her gift of friendship. With one, she exchanged secret dreams of finding some rich man whose money would fly them to that Pacific paradise. Tammy and I were more down to earth: we traded stories about kittens and dogs, shared appreciation for our beloved vet, and laughed together about the lunacies of getting old.
One day we cried. She was pushing her cart through the door when I saw her burst into tears. As I hugged her she said "I miss my husband so much. He was such a good man." Some music on the radio had reminded her. But mostly we laughed - for therapy. One day as she walked in when I hadn't seen her for two weeks, I shouted "Where the HELL have you BEEN?" She doubled up. These last two weeks I waited, hoping to say it again.
Whether she drowned in that water accidentally or some way less innocent, we may never know. Before they started searching it, many of us sensed she was in the canal, this death ditch that carries our lifeblood. If it keeps raining, and snows enough in the mountains, it may yet carry some water for us to drink come summer, maybe enough to keep the groves alive that give us our jobs. Though the canal giveth, it also taketh away. Right now the life of a friend seems a high price to pay for the right to stay here in this semi-desert we call home.
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Trudy Wischemann is a wary water freak who is aging not too gracefully. You can send her your stories about Tammy McCall % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below.
Epitaph for a Free Spirit
Published in slightly edited form Jan. 29, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
She was with us, then she was gone. Known as "Grandma Joyce" at the Methodist Church, at 92 Joyce Slagle was still driving herself everywhere and laying out goodies for fellowship each Sunday, a model of elderly independence and commitment. But after Thanksgiving she fell ill, and one week before Christmas she crossed into the realm of the eternal, her soul freed from a body full of cancer.
From things she told me as we cleaned up the church kitchen, I know that she loved to iron, loved family life, loved roses and the people in her church, and understood the importance of order in maintaining freedom of action and thought. But to learn what made her who she was, I interviewed two of her children, Steven and Kathleen.
Joyce was preceded in death by her husband Floyd and three sons, one who died shortly after his birth. Although this can be one consequence of a long life, not everyone survives such losses without losing spirit. "It was her faith," both kids said quickly. "She knew they were in a better place. That's not to say she didn't cry - we all still do sometimes. But she knew."
She seems to have known, rightly, other things even when she had no experience to guide her. After her first date with Floyd, she told her mother "I'm going to marry him." A year later they did. "That's all they talked about on that first date," Kathy said. And it was a marriage that lasted their lifetimes. Though not squabble-free, Steve said his dad never passed by her without touching or kissing her. They had a special whistling sound they each made when they'd come into the room. They loved to dance, both ballroom and square dancing. "They were in love," Kathy said; " - totally," Steve added. "I don't think they ever spent a night away from each other until Dad went to Lindsay Gardens."
Their home was open to friends, and friends of friends, a family that extended out into the community. Kathy has friends from that time who still seem like sisters. Steve told about bringing shipmates home on weekends while he was in the Navy. "About 2 in the morning, Dad would come in and say Okay boys, it's time to go to sleep now. And we would."
"She was the wild one," Kathy said of her mother. "Oh, she had fun..." One story recounted Joyce drag racing one of Kathy's friends in her little four-speed on the back streets of Laverne, then warning Kathy "Don't tell your father I did that." Joyce used the same phrase one day while we were putting away food after church. "Oh, I had fun..." she said of her married life, a sparkle in her eye.
After listening to their abundant stories of a loving, fun-filled family life with values instilled that have served them well, I remembered a passage by Quaker author Parker J. Palmer, who wrote: "People who know that they are embedded in an eternal community are both freed and empowered to become who they were born to be."
It seems to me that Joyce became who she was born to be: wife, mother, lifelong friend to many and member of the communities she lived in all on her own terms. She understood she belonged to an eternal community, and helped me see my membership there as well. May she rest in peace and continue having fun in our hearts.
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We celebrated Joyce's life on Saturday, Feb. 1 in Lindsay United Methodist Church, including a potluck meal where we shared our memories.
She was with us, then she was gone. Known as "Grandma Joyce" at the Methodist Church, at 92 Joyce Slagle was still driving herself everywhere and laying out goodies for fellowship each Sunday, a model of elderly independence and commitment. But after Thanksgiving she fell ill, and one week before Christmas she crossed into the realm of the eternal, her soul freed from a body full of cancer.
From things she told me as we cleaned up the church kitchen, I know that she loved to iron, loved family life, loved roses and the people in her church, and understood the importance of order in maintaining freedom of action and thought. But to learn what made her who she was, I interviewed two of her children, Steven and Kathleen.
Joyce was preceded in death by her husband Floyd and three sons, one who died shortly after his birth. Although this can be one consequence of a long life, not everyone survives such losses without losing spirit. "It was her faith," both kids said quickly. "She knew they were in a better place. That's not to say she didn't cry - we all still do sometimes. But she knew."
She seems to have known, rightly, other things even when she had no experience to guide her. After her first date with Floyd, she told her mother "I'm going to marry him." A year later they did. "That's all they talked about on that first date," Kathy said. And it was a marriage that lasted their lifetimes. Though not squabble-free, Steve said his dad never passed by her without touching or kissing her. They had a special whistling sound they each made when they'd come into the room. They loved to dance, both ballroom and square dancing. "They were in love," Kathy said; " - totally," Steve added. "I don't think they ever spent a night away from each other until Dad went to Lindsay Gardens."
Their home was open to friends, and friends of friends, a family that extended out into the community. Kathy has friends from that time who still seem like sisters. Steve told about bringing shipmates home on weekends while he was in the Navy. "About 2 in the morning, Dad would come in and say Okay boys, it's time to go to sleep now. And we would."
"She was the wild one," Kathy said of her mother. "Oh, she had fun..." One story recounted Joyce drag racing one of Kathy's friends in her little four-speed on the back streets of Laverne, then warning Kathy "Don't tell your father I did that." Joyce used the same phrase one day while we were putting away food after church. "Oh, I had fun..." she said of her married life, a sparkle in her eye.
After listening to their abundant stories of a loving, fun-filled family life with values instilled that have served them well, I remembered a passage by Quaker author Parker J. Palmer, who wrote: "People who know that they are embedded in an eternal community are both freed and empowered to become who they were born to be."
It seems to me that Joyce became who she was born to be: wife, mother, lifelong friend to many and member of the communities she lived in all on her own terms. She understood she belonged to an eternal community, and helped me see my membership there as well. May she rest in peace and continue having fun in our hearts.
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We celebrated Joyce's life on Saturday, Feb. 1 in Lindsay United Methodist Church, including a potluck meal where we shared our memories.
Holy Water
Published Jan. 22, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
"We need rain," my customers lament as I scan their groceries. "Pray for it," I encourage them, and try to remember to do it myself. Perhaps we also ought to dance . . .
On my way to church last Sunday, I saw a man at the fire station hosing down the sidewalk, sending gushing waves of water into the street. Perhaps it was because I'd just surveyed my dry yard that this seemed so offensive. Perhaps it was because I was on my way to read the scripture about Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, which runs through a place so much drier than ours.
Or maybe it's because I feel the portent of drought in my bones. John Lindt has an article in this week's Sierra2theSea online news service which verbalized that feeling into facts (see "Bone Dry & Scared: Tulare County Faces Grim Water Prospects" at www.sierra2thesea.net) Opening with a webcam photograph of bare granite in Mineral King, he says it "provides a dose of reality for anyone who hopes to take a drink of water in June or wonders how we can irrigate 1.3 million acres of productive farmland this summer in Tulare County." Documenting the empty reservoirs, the lack of snowpack, the jet stream's "Greenland Block" that is diverting all moisture-laden storms from reaching California's coast, and water contracts (over)committing scarce supplies elsewhere from the San Joaquin's Friant-Kern Canal, the picture is worse than bleak. It's frightening.
"People need to wake up and stop watering those lawns," he quotes president of the Association of California Water Agencies, Tim Quinn, as saying. Visalia City Councilman Greg Collins says the City of Visalia needs to be a leader in calling for new conservation efforts, noting that he turned off his home irrigation system last September. "We may have to put up with brown lawns while we try to save the trees."
For last Sunday's sermon at the Methodist Church, incipient lay pastor Mark Smith brought a stone that had been immersed in water from the River Jordan by one of his teachers. He passed it around the congregation, spreading the experience of baptism in that holy water from half a world away, and it was powerfully beautiful. But when John the Baptist was immersing people in that river, it wasn't considered holy by the religious powers - it was considered profane. Holy water was in the temple, where holy acts were performed. John's baptizings outside, in the countryside, in naturally-occurring water, were an act of sedition, a way of claiming that the poor people of the land were also God's people, that holiness was not the exclusive right of those who could buy it.
"That muddy water made holy," wrote Gail Cismowski, a Merced County artist, referring to John's baptizings and God's promise. "Transformation or just opening my eyes to what's already there? The old message sounds new when it is addressed to me."
That eye-opening experience is that every life is holy, as is every drop of water. Everything that breathes, not just every person, is dependent on those drops of water. Everything that grows is dependent on them, too. Please, friends, in this year of impending drought, let's see to it that those few drops of water we have are shared and not wasted.
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Trudy Wischemann is a water freak who writes. You can send her your water saving plans and baptism stories % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
"We need rain," my customers lament as I scan their groceries. "Pray for it," I encourage them, and try to remember to do it myself. Perhaps we also ought to dance . . .
On my way to church last Sunday, I saw a man at the fire station hosing down the sidewalk, sending gushing waves of water into the street. Perhaps it was because I'd just surveyed my dry yard that this seemed so offensive. Perhaps it was because I was on my way to read the scripture about Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, which runs through a place so much drier than ours.
Or maybe it's because I feel the portent of drought in my bones. John Lindt has an article in this week's Sierra2theSea online news service which verbalized that feeling into facts (see "Bone Dry & Scared: Tulare County Faces Grim Water Prospects" at www.sierra2thesea.net) Opening with a webcam photograph of bare granite in Mineral King, he says it "provides a dose of reality for anyone who hopes to take a drink of water in June or wonders how we can irrigate 1.3 million acres of productive farmland this summer in Tulare County." Documenting the empty reservoirs, the lack of snowpack, the jet stream's "Greenland Block" that is diverting all moisture-laden storms from reaching California's coast, and water contracts (over)committing scarce supplies elsewhere from the San Joaquin's Friant-Kern Canal, the picture is worse than bleak. It's frightening.
"People need to wake up and stop watering those lawns," he quotes president of the Association of California Water Agencies, Tim Quinn, as saying. Visalia City Councilman Greg Collins says the City of Visalia needs to be a leader in calling for new conservation efforts, noting that he turned off his home irrigation system last September. "We may have to put up with brown lawns while we try to save the trees."
For last Sunday's sermon at the Methodist Church, incipient lay pastor Mark Smith brought a stone that had been immersed in water from the River Jordan by one of his teachers. He passed it around the congregation, spreading the experience of baptism in that holy water from half a world away, and it was powerfully beautiful. But when John the Baptist was immersing people in that river, it wasn't considered holy by the religious powers - it was considered profane. Holy water was in the temple, where holy acts were performed. John's baptizings outside, in the countryside, in naturally-occurring water, were an act of sedition, a way of claiming that the poor people of the land were also God's people, that holiness was not the exclusive right of those who could buy it.
"That muddy water made holy," wrote Gail Cismowski, a Merced County artist, referring to John's baptizings and God's promise. "Transformation or just opening my eyes to what's already there? The old message sounds new when it is addressed to me."
That eye-opening experience is that every life is holy, as is every drop of water. Everything that breathes, not just every person, is dependent on those drops of water. Everything that grows is dependent on them, too. Please, friends, in this year of impending drought, let's see to it that those few drops of water we have are shared and not wasted.
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Trudy Wischemann is a water freak who writes. You can send her your water saving plans and baptism stories % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Peachy Keen
Published in edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun- Gazette, Jan. 8, 2014
For Christmas I received a new book, The Perfect Peach: Recipes and Stories from the Masumoto Family Farm by Marcy, Nikiko and David Mas Masumoto (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2013.) It is a beautiful book about beauty, the common ordinary beauty of the art of farming, about growing, cooking and eating food, about building a family on the land for generations. It is so profoundly the book we need right now that I can only read it in small doses. Every page contains something that makes me want to cry, and then quote.
The gift of the book, its importance, was accentuated by some news I received the day before. Christmas Eve day I ran into a friend at the post office, one of Lindsay's longstanding Japanese-American family farmers. I asked him how farming was going. "We're getting out," he said. Thunk. My heart fell to the pavement. Twenty acres was already in escrow; the other twenty will supply one brother who goes to a farmer's market in LA every weekend. "The small farmer just can't compete against the big guys any more," he said. "And none of the kids want to come back and farm, so why keep struggling?" My heart hurt, not just from the loss of this family farming this land, but also because we have not yet found any way to help save them.
The Masumotos' book, in a very delicate way, is about how to save our family farmers. It's a suggestion, an offering, like offering a recipe to a neighbor who admires your peach cobbler because it tastes better than hers. It reflects a keen understanding of all the forces at work unraveling the family farm fabric here on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, and shooting through the holes with new-old yarn, reweaving a possible new future by holding to, and holding up, the essentials. Work. Knowledge. Love. Land.
Nikiko is the daughter with a Masters in Public Performance who has returned home to farm - and write, and hopefully perform. Her introductory words in "Learn to Love a Peach" show that she is every bit as artistically verbal as her father, and as strongly tied to the land as well. "Every harvest, I envision the path of each peach as it leaves the farm, travels, and eventually goes home in someone's grocery bag or rests on a plate at a restaurant. Maybe it's yours? When that peach touches your lips and nourishes your body, I hope you feel love. Not a plastic-perfect or one-night-stand love. I want you to feel a deep reverence for the food that binds us with one another and the earth. I want you to hunger for our stories. I want you to help make all people in our food system equal partners. I want you to love us, too."
Marcy is Mas's wife, whose Wisconsin German family moved to California where she grew up on a goat dairy farm milking the herd twice a day ("At least peaches take some of the winter off," Mas noted.) In "Lessons I Have Learned Cooking With Peaches," Marcy begins "When I first came to the farm, I tried to save every peach that dropped in the orchard, and every one that was not fit for packing and selling commercially. Finally, after years of painstaking cooking and preserving, I realized that there was no way I could save all the orphaned or special-needs peaches from our twenty-five acres of orchards!" I'll love her forever for those two sentences: when I first started working in orange groves, I had the same life-threatening instinct, but without the kitchen skills required. Marcy has become the specialist in varieties of peaches through this endeavor, and I can't wait to try their recipes this summer.
Mas, of course, is our own native spokesman for the family farm, our West Coast Wendell Berry with a slightly different way of speaking up. His first bestseller, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1995) has been followed by several more volumes documenting the process of continuing to farm, despite the hardships some call impossibilities. But where he's really reached the public is through his once-a-month column in the Fresno Bee, where we hear what he's thinking about as he's thinking it and as it relates to whatever else is in the news and in our own lives. Keeping this farmer's voice available to the reading public is a gift to us from the Bee and from him. His insights about this culture we live in, and the one we're in danger of living without, provide a kind of lightning rod to those of us still trying to preserving farming in our future.
One place in the book where I recognize the Mas I know and love is in his essay "Ghosts of Farmworkers." More than twenty years ago, when he read his work at an event in Parlier for my Humanities project, one short piece was about picking peaches with a friend, a farmworker kid from school. Two decades later, his sensitivities seem to have increased, not declined. "The ghosts of farmworkers haunt my fields," he begins the essay. "My grandparents and parents were farmworkers, immigrants to a foreign land with a history of exploiting cheap laborers and then casting them aside and importing another source of strong backs and fast hands.... Because of our history, my father and I often worked side by side with laborers, sharing the sweat, yet acutely aware of our class differences.... Now I'm the farmer and live with this legacy and stain." He ends "The ghosts stay with me in the fields. Perhaps my contribution is to tell the story of the invisible. I know that one day I too will become a ghost."
This joint venture of the three Masumotos is more than a peach cookbook: it is an agrarian testimony from the heartland of California where family farmers are thought by some not to exist. The Perfect Peach is available at the Book Garden in Exeter, along with many other Masumoto books. To learn more about the Masumoto Family Farm. visit www.masumoto.com.
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Trudy Wischemann is a gluten-intolerant eater who is looking forward to adapting the Masumotos' recipes and writing about them this summer! You can send your peachy keen thoughts to her % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
For Christmas I received a new book, The Perfect Peach: Recipes and Stories from the Masumoto Family Farm by Marcy, Nikiko and David Mas Masumoto (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2013.) It is a beautiful book about beauty, the common ordinary beauty of the art of farming, about growing, cooking and eating food, about building a family on the land for generations. It is so profoundly the book we need right now that I can only read it in small doses. Every page contains something that makes me want to cry, and then quote.
The gift of the book, its importance, was accentuated by some news I received the day before. Christmas Eve day I ran into a friend at the post office, one of Lindsay's longstanding Japanese-American family farmers. I asked him how farming was going. "We're getting out," he said. Thunk. My heart fell to the pavement. Twenty acres was already in escrow; the other twenty will supply one brother who goes to a farmer's market in LA every weekend. "The small farmer just can't compete against the big guys any more," he said. "And none of the kids want to come back and farm, so why keep struggling?" My heart hurt, not just from the loss of this family farming this land, but also because we have not yet found any way to help save them.
The Masumotos' book, in a very delicate way, is about how to save our family farmers. It's a suggestion, an offering, like offering a recipe to a neighbor who admires your peach cobbler because it tastes better than hers. It reflects a keen understanding of all the forces at work unraveling the family farm fabric here on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, and shooting through the holes with new-old yarn, reweaving a possible new future by holding to, and holding up, the essentials. Work. Knowledge. Love. Land.
Nikiko is the daughter with a Masters in Public Performance who has returned home to farm - and write, and hopefully perform. Her introductory words in "Learn to Love a Peach" show that she is every bit as artistically verbal as her father, and as strongly tied to the land as well. "Every harvest, I envision the path of each peach as it leaves the farm, travels, and eventually goes home in someone's grocery bag or rests on a plate at a restaurant. Maybe it's yours? When that peach touches your lips and nourishes your body, I hope you feel love. Not a plastic-perfect or one-night-stand love. I want you to feel a deep reverence for the food that binds us with one another and the earth. I want you to hunger for our stories. I want you to help make all people in our food system equal partners. I want you to love us, too."
Marcy is Mas's wife, whose Wisconsin German family moved to California where she grew up on a goat dairy farm milking the herd twice a day ("At least peaches take some of the winter off," Mas noted.) In "Lessons I Have Learned Cooking With Peaches," Marcy begins "When I first came to the farm, I tried to save every peach that dropped in the orchard, and every one that was not fit for packing and selling commercially. Finally, after years of painstaking cooking and preserving, I realized that there was no way I could save all the orphaned or special-needs peaches from our twenty-five acres of orchards!" I'll love her forever for those two sentences: when I first started working in orange groves, I had the same life-threatening instinct, but without the kitchen skills required. Marcy has become the specialist in varieties of peaches through this endeavor, and I can't wait to try their recipes this summer.
Mas, of course, is our own native spokesman for the family farm, our West Coast Wendell Berry with a slightly different way of speaking up. His first bestseller, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1995) has been followed by several more volumes documenting the process of continuing to farm, despite the hardships some call impossibilities. But where he's really reached the public is through his once-a-month column in the Fresno Bee, where we hear what he's thinking about as he's thinking it and as it relates to whatever else is in the news and in our own lives. Keeping this farmer's voice available to the reading public is a gift to us from the Bee and from him. His insights about this culture we live in, and the one we're in danger of living without, provide a kind of lightning rod to those of us still trying to preserving farming in our future.
One place in the book where I recognize the Mas I know and love is in his essay "Ghosts of Farmworkers." More than twenty years ago, when he read his work at an event in Parlier for my Humanities project, one short piece was about picking peaches with a friend, a farmworker kid from school. Two decades later, his sensitivities seem to have increased, not declined. "The ghosts of farmworkers haunt my fields," he begins the essay. "My grandparents and parents were farmworkers, immigrants to a foreign land with a history of exploiting cheap laborers and then casting them aside and importing another source of strong backs and fast hands.... Because of our history, my father and I often worked side by side with laborers, sharing the sweat, yet acutely aware of our class differences.... Now I'm the farmer and live with this legacy and stain." He ends "The ghosts stay with me in the fields. Perhaps my contribution is to tell the story of the invisible. I know that one day I too will become a ghost."
This joint venture of the three Masumotos is more than a peach cookbook: it is an agrarian testimony from the heartland of California where family farmers are thought by some not to exist. The Perfect Peach is available at the Book Garden in Exeter, along with many other Masumoto books. To learn more about the Masumoto Family Farm. visit www.masumoto.com.
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Trudy Wischemann is a gluten-intolerant eater who is looking forward to adapting the Masumotos' recipes and writing about them this summer! You can send your peachy keen thoughts to her % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Y2K13
Published in slightly edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette Jan. 1, 2014
Reflecting on this past year, I'm ready to leave it. It seems there was more work in my life than accomplishment. I feel the need for a change in approach, but don't see the path. I'm not sure what improvements the new year could bring, but in recognizing the need, there's hope.
Remember the year we sat on this cusp, wondering if the world would end the next day? That was 1999, fourteen years ago. I didn't really expect much difference in that 24-hour period. The End did not arrive, nor the Messiah, nor the Apocalypse. The City of Lindsay was already on its new path of revamping the town's identity, but we, the public, didn't know it, and unfortunately only a handful of people still are privy to its plans. That fact is what has me most discouraged about the year 2013.
When it began I had hope for a change. We installed two new council members and elected Ramona Padilla mayor. At their first council meeting I asked for a small thing: the restoration of the language about public participation in council meetings that former mayor Ed Murray had city manager Rich Wilkinson remove from the agenda materials without discussion by, much less a vote from, the city council. So small. Ramona asked me to give her a little time to get used to her new position, and that time allowed her to get into the position Ed had been in, cozied up with staff. Sad but true. Those sentences permitting citizen involvement in council meetings beyond the three-minute public comment period are still in the wastebasket.
In this year they officially finished the park, still without swings. "Don't have the money to install them properly," is the official word on that. They had money to build the new skateboard park in the park. They had money to rip out the hedge that bordered its east side, fence it, lay a gravel pathway the entire length and post No Parking signs every 20 feet, but not for the rubber chips that are supposed to make it safer when a child falls out of the swing. We've got the swings, supposedly; we've got piles of sand left over from the pathway, but no rubber chips, so the kids can't have a place to swing in the newly renovated city park. They still think they can make excuses like this at the end of 2013. That's another thing that has me discouraged about the past year.
What small good can be said about the past year is that the Council no longer votes 5-0 in favor of every resolution the staff brings before them. We have many more 4-1 or even 3-2 votes than we ever had since John Stava left the council. When one of the old members will be absent and a tie vote is possible on an issue important to the staff, they have to work to reschedule that item for a meeting when those key members will be present. This improvement is hard to see, but it's there.
One hope for improvement in 2014 is that we will have the opportunity to replace two of the old council members, Danny Salinas and Ramona Padilla. Both were appointed to the Council under Ed Murray as mayor, and both have served to advance the staff's agendas. Perhaps there are people who are willing to run for public office who would advance the public's interest in this city's future. Perhaps by the end of Y2K14 we'll have a better report to make.
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Trudy Wischemann is a die-hard observer of public interest matters who writes. You can send her your thoughts on the past and future years % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Reflecting on this past year, I'm ready to leave it. It seems there was more work in my life than accomplishment. I feel the need for a change in approach, but don't see the path. I'm not sure what improvements the new year could bring, but in recognizing the need, there's hope.
Remember the year we sat on this cusp, wondering if the world would end the next day? That was 1999, fourteen years ago. I didn't really expect much difference in that 24-hour period. The End did not arrive, nor the Messiah, nor the Apocalypse. The City of Lindsay was already on its new path of revamping the town's identity, but we, the public, didn't know it, and unfortunately only a handful of people still are privy to its plans. That fact is what has me most discouraged about the year 2013.
When it began I had hope for a change. We installed two new council members and elected Ramona Padilla mayor. At their first council meeting I asked for a small thing: the restoration of the language about public participation in council meetings that former mayor Ed Murray had city manager Rich Wilkinson remove from the agenda materials without discussion by, much less a vote from, the city council. So small. Ramona asked me to give her a little time to get used to her new position, and that time allowed her to get into the position Ed had been in, cozied up with staff. Sad but true. Those sentences permitting citizen involvement in council meetings beyond the three-minute public comment period are still in the wastebasket.
In this year they officially finished the park, still without swings. "Don't have the money to install them properly," is the official word on that. They had money to build the new skateboard park in the park. They had money to rip out the hedge that bordered its east side, fence it, lay a gravel pathway the entire length and post No Parking signs every 20 feet, but not for the rubber chips that are supposed to make it safer when a child falls out of the swing. We've got the swings, supposedly; we've got piles of sand left over from the pathway, but no rubber chips, so the kids can't have a place to swing in the newly renovated city park. They still think they can make excuses like this at the end of 2013. That's another thing that has me discouraged about the past year.
What small good can be said about the past year is that the Council no longer votes 5-0 in favor of every resolution the staff brings before them. We have many more 4-1 or even 3-2 votes than we ever had since John Stava left the council. When one of the old members will be absent and a tie vote is possible on an issue important to the staff, they have to work to reschedule that item for a meeting when those key members will be present. This improvement is hard to see, but it's there.
One hope for improvement in 2014 is that we will have the opportunity to replace two of the old council members, Danny Salinas and Ramona Padilla. Both were appointed to the Council under Ed Murray as mayor, and both have served to advance the staff's agendas. Perhaps there are people who are willing to run for public office who would advance the public's interest in this city's future. Perhaps by the end of Y2K14 we'll have a better report to make.
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Trudy Wischemann is a die-hard observer of public interest matters who writes. You can send her your thoughts on the past and future years % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Home for Christmas
Published without photos in slightly edited form Dec. 24, 2013
in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
"I'll be home for Christmas..." the song goes, "you can count on me." I've heard it all my life: it's one of my mother's favorites, conjuring an environment of love and security she's longed for all of her life. "Christmas Eve will find me / where the love light gleams..." After mentioning the snow and mistletoe outside, the presents under the tree inside, the song ends, of course, "I'll be home for Christmas... if only in my dreams." From all the words we hear, we understand that this environment of love and security once existed for the singer, but perhaps can't be reached this year (or perhaps forever) except through beloved memories. But the memories will be forever treasured.
My mother worked hard to create Christmas for us. So many women do. I have some beloved memories as a result, and some that came from my father as well. Because we moved several times as a family, however, the meaning of "home" lost its rootedness in community and became simply wherever the family was. When my parents split up after too many years of living crosswise with each other, there were two homes to be at Christmastime, neither one I had ever lived in.
But a couple of weeks ago, while thinking about the Bethlehem story, it struck me that Joseph and Mary were not home for Christmas that first bright shining day. They were involuntary sojourners far from home, and when they reached Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, everyone was too snug in their homes, enjoying their close-knit family life to take two strangers in. Not even the innkeepers could be bothered, who stood to gain a little more income from accommodating them. So Jesus was born outside: outside of home, outside of polite society, outside with the beasts of burden in their shelter, outside with the shepherds and the stars.
And that comforted me, because I've discovered that outside is where I am most at home. When I get those homesick urgings to return, what calls to me are scenes from outside our many homes: the backyard hazelnut tree and the beach at Brown's Point, with its Coast Guard lighthouse and the madrone tree that reached out over the water at high tide. To the gravel driveway, barns and alders along the fencelines on our five acres in Puyallup and the breath of my little roan mare, the buckets of milk replacer for feeding day-old dairy calves. The valley of Iao Needle on Maui, with its wild guava trees and brushy paths along the creek; the plumeria bush outside my bedroom window.
But the place I mentally go home to most frequently is my aunt's place on Lincoln Creek, Thurston County, Washington: 130 acres of forest and fields, only about 20 of them flat enough to farm. She had a job in town, but she was most at home outside, fishing, picking apples and berries, baling hay. I may have been born an outsider, but as I grew I received , permission to be myself from her example.
My family spent many Christmases with her there and in her home in town after she sold the ranch. But when I go home for Christmas in my dreams, it's to the ranch's rattletrap house and yellow formica kitchen table, the woodburning stove in the small living room with the red curtains she made herself. Then I fly out the back door, along the wooden porch past the barn where the freezer and chopping block stayed next to the tractor, down the driveway past the barns where they stored the oats and hay they'd harvested, through the fence to the creek. And when I get to the trees that lined the banks, the nettles that grew head-high, the smell of the mud and water, the sound of the riffle below the footlog, I'm home.
May the celebration of the birth of Christ help us all find ourselves truly at home.
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Trudy Wischemann is a natively outdoors girl who writes in Lindsay. You can send your thoughts on Christmas and home % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Note to readers: Five times I have attempted to insert photographs from my scrapbook of the farm into the text of this blog, which I am now abandoning in the name of getting caught up posting subsequent columns. Thank you for your patience! I may have to write a whole book about this place. TW
in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
"I'll be home for Christmas..." the song goes, "you can count on me." I've heard it all my life: it's one of my mother's favorites, conjuring an environment of love and security she's longed for all of her life. "Christmas Eve will find me / where the love light gleams..." After mentioning the snow and mistletoe outside, the presents under the tree inside, the song ends, of course, "I'll be home for Christmas... if only in my dreams." From all the words we hear, we understand that this environment of love and security once existed for the singer, but perhaps can't be reached this year (or perhaps forever) except through beloved memories. But the memories will be forever treasured.
My mother worked hard to create Christmas for us. So many women do. I have some beloved memories as a result, and some that came from my father as well. Because we moved several times as a family, however, the meaning of "home" lost its rootedness in community and became simply wherever the family was. When my parents split up after too many years of living crosswise with each other, there were two homes to be at Christmastime, neither one I had ever lived in.
But a couple of weeks ago, while thinking about the Bethlehem story, it struck me that Joseph and Mary were not home for Christmas that first bright shining day. They were involuntary sojourners far from home, and when they reached Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, everyone was too snug in their homes, enjoying their close-knit family life to take two strangers in. Not even the innkeepers could be bothered, who stood to gain a little more income from accommodating them. So Jesus was born outside: outside of home, outside of polite society, outside with the beasts of burden in their shelter, outside with the shepherds and the stars.
And that comforted me, because I've discovered that outside is where I am most at home. When I get those homesick urgings to return, what calls to me are scenes from outside our many homes: the backyard hazelnut tree and the beach at Brown's Point, with its Coast Guard lighthouse and the madrone tree that reached out over the water at high tide. To the gravel driveway, barns and alders along the fencelines on our five acres in Puyallup and the breath of my little roan mare, the buckets of milk replacer for feeding day-old dairy calves. The valley of Iao Needle on Maui, with its wild guava trees and brushy paths along the creek; the plumeria bush outside my bedroom window.
But the place I mentally go home to most frequently is my aunt's place on Lincoln Creek, Thurston County, Washington: 130 acres of forest and fields, only about 20 of them flat enough to farm. She had a job in town, but she was most at home outside, fishing, picking apples and berries, baling hay. I may have been born an outsider, but as I grew I received , permission to be myself from her example.
My family spent many Christmases with her there and in her home in town after she sold the ranch. But when I go home for Christmas in my dreams, it's to the ranch's rattletrap house and yellow formica kitchen table, the woodburning stove in the small living room with the red curtains she made herself. Then I fly out the back door, along the wooden porch past the barn where the freezer and chopping block stayed next to the tractor, down the driveway past the barns where they stored the oats and hay they'd harvested, through the fence to the creek. And when I get to the trees that lined the banks, the nettles that grew head-high, the smell of the mud and water, the sound of the riffle below the footlog, I'm home.
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Trudy Wischemann is a natively outdoors girl who writes in Lindsay. You can send your thoughts on Christmas and home % P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.
Note to readers: Five times I have attempted to insert photographs from my scrapbook of the farm into the text of this blog, which I am now abandoning in the name of getting caught up posting subsequent columns. Thank you for your patience! I may have to write a whole book about this place. TW
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