Clean Jars

Published March 25, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “You were spoiled,” a friend at church kindly chided me after reading last week’s column.  I was raised with running water and indoor plumbing; neither he nor his wife was.  I loved hearing their stories of different times and places.  I kindly did not ask if they would go back to living that way.

     But their generation’s lifeways are not the only ones being left behind in the sweep of industrial history.  Mine are, too, something I discovered in a long, luxurious evening phone call with a friend (which itself was impossible when my mother was raising her family.)

           

     We were talking about reducing the clutter in our lives.  She had spent Sunday going through her collection of magazines.  They had been sitting behind her couch in boxes and bags since she moved seven years ago.  Recently retired, she found herself with a new job:  what to do with her archive of New Yorkers and college alumni magazines?  I loved hearing the gentleness she applied to both her magazines and herself.  There was no condemnation for having kept these things, which I hear from so many of my other friends at this stage in our lives.

           

     But then she surprised me.  We moved on to her collection of empty jars, which I also have in abundance.  “You know, some of them are canning jars, which are good forever.  But there’s also the perfectly good jars from pickles and things, which I save.  I finally put them into the dishwasher for one last time, each one with its lid.  Then I bagged them up and took them down to Goodwill.”  My heart took a lurch for her gentle soul, knowing what was coming.           

     “I handed this man my bags, and he said ‘What’s this?’  ‘Clean jars with lids,’ I told him.  He just looked at me weird, then said ‘Recycle them.’”  We let the silence between us speak for itself a moment.

           

     Clean jars with lids.  I know that phrase from my childhood.  We save them to hold collections of screws and nails (short, medium, long;) thumbtacks, hooks and eyes, still-good zippers ripped out of old dresses or the last half of the batch of tartar sauce we made but didn’t eat.  We save them because they’re still good for a lot of things, and because it took energy to manufacture them that will be wasted if they get smashed up in the recycling process.  We save them to hold small batches of jam we might make this summer or olives we might cure this fall.  We save them because they still have value, even if no one would buy them, not even at a thrift store.

           

     My sewing machine jammed when I tried to fix a dog collar last week.  One look at the yellow pages told me sewing machine repairmen are almost extinct.  When I asked the women at church if they knew of a good one, they said “Who sews?”  I thought of my shelves of fabric, the boxes of patterns and notions I have saved, and realized I have neglected some of the most basic living skills I learned to survive. 

           

     I think I’ll call my friend and tell her what our golden years are for:  reviving those survival skills, not casting them off for greater dependence on what the corporations want to provide.  As a society, we might need those skills someday.

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Trudy Wischemann is a crocheter who writes.  You can send her your list of almost dead survival skills c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

           

Running Water

Published in slightly edited form March 18, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Whenever I turn on a faucet lately, I feel gratitude when water comes out.  These rainless skies have my body on red alert.  Under natural conditions, I would be migrating out of this semi-desert region, leaving the Lewis Creek watershed with no snow-capped mountains to feed it.  Our unnatural water supply allows me to stay put.
    
     We city slickers take it for granted that water will run into the sink or out of the hose with a simple turn of the handle.  Nowadays, when you buy a house in town, you never ask whether it has running water, although you might question who supplies it.  But it’s really only in my lifetime that such a luxury has come to be seen as a necessity, a given.
    
     I grew up with indoor plumbing, but my mother did not.  She was raised in the small town of Centralia, Washington in the 1930’s.  She still has stories about meeting a hobo coming out of her family’s outhouse one morning as she went to go in, pretty scary for a young girl.  The contrast between having a bathroom inside the house or having to go outside to the privy is something we heard about frequently growing up.  I couldn’t remember if she had running water inside, however, so I asked her this weekend when we talked on the phone.
    
     “We were on a well,” she said.  “The pump was right by the back door, and you had to fill a jar with water to prime the pump the next time.  If you forgot to fill that jar, you really got yelled at.”  My mind followed hers: if you forgot, where would you get the water to prime your pump?  No faucet to turn on.  “We always had buckets of rain water sitting around,” she said later, “to wash our hair.”  That would work in western Washington, but not here.
    
    When she was in her teens, they remodeled the pantry into a bathroom with tub and sink (but no toilet, because it was too expensive to hook up to the city's sewer system.)  They installed pipes and an electric pump which would kick on when you turned a faucet handle.  “If you came home late from a date, you didn’t get yourself a drink of water because the folks would hear it.  You just went to bed thirsty,” she said.  That must have happened at least once for her to remember it so clearly.
    
     She was glad I asked my question, and we strolled down other blocks of Memory Lane because of it, including a mental visit to the ladies' lounge in Centralia's Fox Theater ("So luxurious - and warm," she said.)  I saw how these things that she experienced as deprivations shaped her future as a carpenter’s wife.  Being married to someone who could build her a house with a full-service bathroom was a definite advance.
    
     But it also made me aware how hard it’s going to be for us to down-scale our expectations about what happens when you turn on the faucet.  Some people already have had to face the fact that there’s no guarantee there will be water running when they do.  Some people already have had to face the fact that there’s no water for their groves, their income and life’s work evaporating into thin air.  
    
     Running water is a dividing line between real affluence and real poverty.  I’m afraid we’ll see that gap widen if we don’t figure out some way to share the shortage this year.

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Trudy Wischemann is a humid-clime ex-patriot who dehydrates easily, but writes anyway.  You can send her your water stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below.

Free Rein

Published in slightly edited form March 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“We gallop everywhere we go
 I just loop the reins
And I never say Whoa
To my little red horse.”

     I’m borrowing these lines from a Juni Fisher song to show the roots of the common phrase “free rein.” For those who have never been on a horse’s back, it may not help much.  But being astride an animal ten or fifteen times heavier, stronger and faster than yourself, and letting him have his head, so to speak – can teach the meaning of another common phrase, “hang on.”  You’d better hope your hands can find the reins and “rein him in” (to use another common phrase) as you approach the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

     Last week, when I wrote “Free Rain,” I was hearing this other “rein” in my head.  For almost 40 years I have been researching and writing about California’s water story.  No matter what the issue or urgency, the largest landowners in this valley always have had free rein over the water supply.  They have had free rein over the regulators of our water supply.  They most always have free rein even over the media reporting the news about our water supply.

     Last week I wrote about the letter the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District (LSID) sent to its landowners about the availability of water to purchase at $1,300/acre-foot (af).  The seller listed was not a government agency but a contractor for State Water Project (SWP) water.  I called Scott Edwards, the manager of LSID, to find out who had water to sell and to learn more about the circumstances.

     “Tejon,” he said is the seller.  He thinks there are two other districts asking to buy the offered water and does not yet know how much LSID will receive of the 865 af requested.  I asked who within our district was able to buy this water, and he said “It’s all kinds of people, not just the big guys,” understanding the meaning of my question.

    

     Tejon is a familiar name to most of us, but rings a special bell in my mind.  Tejon Ranch was (and probably still is) the largest landowner in the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, which surrounds the town of Arvin, one of the two towns I’ve studied since 1981.  Only part of its lands lie within the district boundaries, but even those acres were well in excess of the 160-acre limitation that was supposed to apply to Friant-Kern water when it was first received by that district.  The limitation was never enforced.    

    

     Tejon also receives SWP water through the Kern County Water Agency, which accounts for the availability of water to sell to the Tulare and Fresno County districts who don’t.  Paul Taylor, the Berkeley economist who was the champion of the acreage limitation provisions, understood the State Water Project as one of several means the large landowners created to circumvent the 160-acre law.

    
     Besides offering irrigation water for sale at usurious prices, the large landowners are using their free rein invisibly in other ways, particularly through groundwater pumping.  A friend who sits on the board of Tulare Irrigation District told me that he has become concerned about the water banking his district and the City of Tulare have done diligently for the past 10 years being tapped by Boswell’s “pump farm” to the west.  Thought to be 40 acres with 28 wells, the location is not known, much less how much water they are pumping, where it is being used, or how it is being transported.  No government agency is yet in charge of groundwater pumping.  We have no reins.

    

     The North Rim approaches.  What will we do?

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Trudy Wischemann is a voluntary water conserver who worries about agriculture and writes in town.  You can send her your water saving tips c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Free Rain

Published in slightly edited form March 4, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.


     At dawn two Sundays ago, I was drawn outside by the sound of tomcats fighting.  My face caught the first few drops of rain. I felt blessed.


     Within the hour, there was a downpour, then a few more through the afternoon and evening.  We were getting the soaking we’ve needed all February, just in the knick of time. 


     This past weekend’s rain opened March just as sweetly, with snow in the mountains all the way down to the spine of Blue Ridge.  The foothills’ sparse vegetation was revealed by the patches of exposed soil darkened with moisture appearing between the patches of green.  The grasses and mustard, filaree and fiddleneck will all get a new lease on life in the next few days.  The cattle and their keepers say thank you.


     These two rainy weekends have been a sweet taste of hope in this foreboding year, potentially more disastrously dry than even last year.  Fourth in a row:  how many more can our small farmers take?  How many orange groves and peach orchards will have to die so that Paramount can grow almonds on the westside, where there never is enough moisture, to export to China?


     According to a letter sent by Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District to its landowners in late January, a water district in the State Water Project (serving water to lands south of Westlands Water District on its way to LA,) was offering to sell water to LSID at $1,300 per acre-foot.  Landowners within LSID who wanted to reserve some of that water had to pay the entire amount up-front before Feb. 6th.  If the water did not become available, their money would be returned; if the water was even more expensive, they would have to pay the balance before delivery.


     For those of you who do not farm, those numbers won’t mean anything.  But here’s something to compare it with:  if the cost of gasoline increased from its current low of $3.00/gal. to $40.00/gal. in one year, could you afford to commute to your job?   Would you consider moving, or look for a job closer to home?  A farmer cannot pick up her farm and go where water is cheaper, cannot trade it in for a less water-intensive crop to grow overnight.  What would you do?


     It makes it clear just how much rain is like grace.  This water came to us for free, fell on the just and the unjust alike.  It was unearned.  We did not, and could not, do anything to make it happen except hope and pray.  It was pure blessing, even if it turned streets and parking lots muddy from the dirt washed off our roofs, even if it leaked through in a few places.


     There is a need for us to come together, townspeople and countryside folks, to find ways to share the shortage of water.  I don’t want to go through another summer watching sprinklers mindlessly keeping lawns green while orange groves die outside the city limits.


     In the meantime, say thank you for the rain and the hope.  Let us renew our efforts to learn to live in this place with its limitations as well as opportunities.  Amen.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who has been reading Anne Lamott and Lauren Winner this winter.  You can send her your rainy day stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.