Writing the Truth

Published Oct. 28, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I don’t know how many of you imagine seeing your words, your thoughts, or even an image of yourself in the newspaper, but there are days when I find that prospect daunting.  

            Take this week for example.  If I ramble on about the beauties of waiting for TrickerTreaters at my door, will that enflame the Anti-Halloweeners?  If I remind readers that 4 months ago, Lindsay City Finance Director Tamara Laken promised to retire in August of this year and that, chances are, her re-announced retirement come January (reported in last week’s edition) is yet another step in a plan preconceived by the Insiders last spring to merge the city manager and finance director positions, will you throw up your hands in disgust, thinking all I ever do is complain?

            For eight years now I have tried to use this column (and its predecessor, “HomePages”) to present pieces of the truth about our lives in this region that were not readily available elsewhere.  Finding words for these pieces has been a challenge and a gift.  Every time I think otherwise, someone will stop me in line at RN Market or in the aisles of Rite Aid and say “I read your piece in the paper last week.”  Sometimes people even thank me.  I have never been accosted, not even in True Value Hardware.

            Because I don’t just report facts but also evaluate them and the meaning they might have for our community and our region, my writing falls under the category of “editorial,” or “opinion.”  I am grateful to have a place in that category, hopefully one that helps enlarge the truth in the facts found elsewhere on these pages.  

            It’s true that some opinion finds its way into the news reporting of this paper where it might not belong.  But this is a small town newspaper serving many small towns, and praise is just danged hard to come by anywhere else.  Hopefully we know each other well enough to know when someone’s glamorizing the facts with their own point of view, and take it with a grain of salt.  That’s what life here’s all about.

            The question I have for you, dear readers, is this:  What are we to do with the truth when we think we’ve read it?  I face this question constantly when I read others’ words on the printed page, whether those be Katha Pollitt’s in The Nation or Jim Hightower’s LowDown.  Would it be a good idea to witness the monthly County Board of Supervisors’ meetings or attend the Planning Commission hearings, become an alternate for TCAG?  Respond to the Tulare County Citizens for Responsible Growth many email alerts?  Write letters to the editors?

            I think everybody’s got to find their own answer to that question.  My only hope in writing the truth as best I possibly can is that the truth be read and understood as best it possibly can.  From there, the truth becomes community property and community responsibility.  My job is done, and our job begins.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can send her your truths c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Second Rain

Published Oct. 21, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


            Last Wednesday’s rain started in the night, our second rain of the new water year.  It kept me awake, hoping for thunderous downpours to follow the thunder.  They didn’t come until later in the day, several cloudbursts that temporarily filled the gutters on Tulare Road all the way to the center line.  All totaled, however, we really only got pennies from heaven, not the hundreds of dollars’ worth we need to repay our debt to the reservoirs and groundwater table.  But those pennies were welcome anyway.

            I loved how it made the morning smell.  I loved how it settled the dust.  I loved how the trees’ fairy fingers, lightened of their dirt, waved happily in response to the unstable air mass moving through our region.  And despite the possibility that El Nino will evaporate over the Pacific, I enjoyed my quiet anticipation of more to come.

            “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” a friend who farms told me last week.  “Explain,” I asked.  “Even if we get enough rain to fill the reservoirs, it’s going to be years before the well water comes back.  Meanwhile, those people who’ve been just hanging on, paying sky-high prices for water hoping to last one more year, are going to give up . . . .”  And there he stopped, letting me fill in the blank.

            It’s the small farmers we both worry about, the people who make their homes and lives here, tilling the soil and tending the groves.  It’s those people who have helped fill the pews in the past and the slots in volunteer fire departments, manned school boards and irrigation districts, run packinghouse meetings.  Those people who stop what they’re doing to help a stranger on the side of the road, and talk for hours standing in each others’ driveways.  I’m for them even if I don’t like the way they vote, the way they talk about social issues, or the stubborn independence that makes organizing them in their own interests harder than herding cats.

            I’m for them because the small towns need them, and I’m for small towns.  This is true even if I don’t like the non-inclusive social settings characteristic of small towns and the tendency of their citizens to minimize horizons.  I’m for small towns because they provide the incubators people need to become human, including participation in society.  I’m for them because they’re knowable environments, and I think intimacy with our environment is a human need.  I’m for them because, despite what most people think, democracy is still possible here if - and this is a big If - there is not a huge disparity in wealth, if the gap between the richest and the poorest is not too wide to cross.

            Mayor Padilla took a bold step toward re-democratizing Lindsay last week when she put the subject of hiring a permanent city manager on the agenda.  The old guard tried to block it, including the current interim city manager, Bill Zigler (who has no training or experience in being a city manager, as well as no training in city planning, the well-paid position he’s held here for years.)   He was aided by at least one long-term council member.  During the meeting, objections were raised about the salary cost and the timing, both red herrings.  The old guard appears to fear someone from the outside coming in and seeing our condition, while the new guard puts hope in that, in the re-establishment of some kind of fiscal sanity and social awareness in the person responsible for running our town.  

            I share that hope.  It may seem like too little too late, with many horses already well down the road, the barn door flapping in their wind.  But it certainly is not too soon.  May Mayor Padilla’s efforts be rewarded with public support.  Watch for notice of a special study session on the hiring process, and come add your voice to the mix.  Help settle the dust:  be like the rain, a drop here, half an inch there, pennies from heaven. 

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Trudy Wischemann is a small farm town advocate who writes.  You can send her your rain reveries c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Approaching Rain

For the Oct. 14, 2015 issue of the Foothills Sun-Gazette
    
     Thin blades of bright green grass have come up through the bent-over dry stalks in my backyard this past week, responding to last Sunday’s rain.  It’s amazing how the sight of baby wild oats can produce hope, but it has.
    
    Those thin green blades are an antidote to despair in a way, like taking aspirin for a headache.  We’ve submerged much of our despair about the drought, I think, have tried to hold its head underwater while we wait for good news that it was just a mirage.  Maybe the despair will drown, we think, while continuing on with our lives as if we weren’t under environmental siege.
       
     Drought despair is what Paul Buxman’s project “Drill for Will” washed downriver for me two weeks ago (see last week’s column below.)  Paul has been an antidote to my despair before:  in 2003, after yet another freeze made our small-scale citrus growers want to throw in the towel, he came to our Lindsay Lighthouse Breakfast meeting to embolden the members.  “Just try and do something for 2 hours a day that could bring in some money,” he advised, speaking from first-hand experience as a plum grower too subject to hail.
    
     Paul’s paintings are an antidote to another kind of despair that many of us feel:  that our landscape, our precious, verdant agricultural bread-basket-of-the-world, hands-on-the-plow landscape is vanishing.  It is vanishing:  Bill Preston, the author of Vanishing Landscapes: Land and Life in the Tulare Lake Basin (1981,) can barely stand to visit this place for the pain these losses inflict on his heart.  But Paul, in painting them, has made a testimony to their importance.  Several of his paintings bear this witness in the offices of senators and other government officials in Sacramento and Washington.  “This is a reminder of how you need to vote,” he’s told several elected representatives as he handed over the paintings to their new owners.
    
     “Approaching Rain” is the title of one of the paintings reproduced as lithographs that Paul is giving in exchange for financial contributions to deepen the wells of Will Scott, Jr., the black organic grower and small-farm activist near Raisin City who is in danger of being driven out of business next year for lack of water.  This painting shows a small farm against a darkened horizon that could bring disaster as well as blessing, which we might see differently now after four years of little rain.  “After the Rain,” “Autumn Afternoon,” and “Homestead” (which portrays raisins drying in the sun,) are the titles of the other three.
    
     These four paintings are from the 1980’s and were chosen for reproduction because Paul felt they best represented both his style and his subject.  Normally these lithographs sell for several hundred dollars each.  As a quartet, they represent the passion and skill of this artist/tree fruit grower who knows the lay of our land like no other.
    
     “Man, you’re making history,” an old gentleman told Paul last week while he was out painting over on the Kings River delta.  “No,” Paul said, “but I am recording it.”
    
     Actually, I think the gentleman had it right.  It’s radical, what Paul’s doing by painting landscapes we’re all afraid to acknowledge that we love, and then putting them up for people to see and buy.  It’s radical, handing out the fruit of his labors for free to help save another farmer and small-farm activist who tells people that black farmers’ lives matter, and black peoples’ diets do, too.  It’s even radical to hope that deepening a well will drive off the wolf at that farmer’s door, to hope that there is enough rain approaching to satisfy the wants of many and keep the big boys from sucking everyone’s wells dry.
    
     If making that kind of history appeals to you, send your checks to Paul Buxman, Sweet Home Ranch, 4399 Ave. 400, Dinuba CA 93618.  Make the checks payable to “Will Scott, Jr.,” with “well fund” written in the memo space.  Include your name, address and phone number to arrange for pick-up of the lithographs, one for each foot of well to be drilled (currently estimated at $50/foot.)  Make history and drown despair:  collect all four!

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Trudy Wischemann is a small-farm/rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your ideas for turning drought despair into hope c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Drill for Will

Published Oct. 7, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I was bottle feeding a kitten on the back step when I heard Paul Buxman’s voice talking into the answering machine Tuesday.  I caught the phone before he finished, wanting to catch whatever wave he was riding.  This one was tidal.

     “Do you know the name Will Scott Jr.?” he asked.  A two-second mental search produced 149 entries for “Will,” “Scott” and “Jr.” but zero for all three together.  When Paul told me some of the details, however, I realized I’d been clipping articles on Will for years.

     Will Scott Jr. is a black organic small-scale farmer near Raisin City who’s been actively getting people back on the land, particularly other black farmers and Fresno’s urban youth.  He started farming 45 acres after he retired from the phone company, growing vegetables once common in the diets of rural black people that had kept them healthy, selling them at the Mandela farmers market in Oakland where those now-urban black folks could benefit.  He organized black farmers in the Fresno area to provide much-needed support, and began training black youth to farm, reclaiming the invaluable parts of their rural roots (go to his website, www.scottfamilyfarms.net, to see some of his efforts.)

     But now his well is going dry.  This year he was able to farm only 5 of his 45 acres, and his future looks bad.  Featured recently as one of the “Faces of the Drought,” he was quoted as saying “We’re on the verge of losing a lot.”

     I don’t think he was referring simply to himself.  The loss of too many of our remaining small farms in this drought, with its uncertainties of water supply in the future and the groundwater robbers and high-dollar land speculators acting like vultures, has been giving me nightmares 24/7, but that awareness is largely missing in the media.  I think his sentence captures it perfectly.

     But Paul Buxman saw or heard that sentence and the facts about his well, and it lit his jets.  Paul doesn’t need a burning bush to get his attention:  the fire burns inside him, fuels his every step.  This one started him on a marathon, and if we follow his lead, we’re all going to finish first.

     “We can’t lose this man,” he said.  “We’re going to raise $40,000 to deepen his well, and this is how we’re going to do it.  I’m going to offer signed and numbered lithographs of four of my paintings, one for each foot of well drilled, which is around $50.  All we need is to get the word out,” noting that’s where I come in. 

     But before I could get one word on paper, Paul had recruited Alice Daniel of NPR’s “California Report” and Dale Yurong of Ch. 30 Action News (to view Yurong’s beautiful piece, go to www.abc30.com and look for “Drought Hasn’t Dried Up Dinuba Farmer’s Generous Spirit.”)  Thirty minutes after Yurong’s piece aired on TV Wednesday, a man drove to Paul’s house with a $100 check.  “I hope this primes the pump,” he said seriously.  He went home with two Buxman lithographs, portrayals of the very human landscape we’re trying to save.  I have no doubt that, before this is over, we’ll be able to drill a well to China if we have to. 

     Why would Paul Buxman go to this level?  Let’s just say it takes one to know one.  Paul began farming organically when he discovered too many friends with cancer.  He organized small family farmers needing support into a marketing co-op called “California Clean,” whose motto is “We won’t charge you extra for not poisoning your food.”  He’s taught urban youth the joys of farming, painting and cooking on his Sweet Home Ranch with his wife Ruth, and participated in innumerable festivals, conferences and workshops concerned for our agrarian future, including the Forum on Church and Land in 1992 (which I have mentioned in this column more than once.)

     How deep will we go?  Together, it won’t take much to Drill for Will the well he needs to keep going.  If you’d love to help and have a piece of this beautiful history to hang on your wall, watch this column for further details or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com for up-to-the-minute news.  As Paul said, in this drought it’s not hard to paint yourself into a corner, but maybe we can paint Will, literally, out of this one.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who is grateful for this ray of hope.  You can send your rays to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below. 

Sacred Elephant

Published Sept. 30, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There was no physical violence at the Lindsay City Council meeting last week, but a subtle kind of civil war did break out.  I think it was healthy, and long overdue.

     Two issues were discussed:  broken sidewalks and increasing the sales tax, seemingly unrelated.  But a third raised its ugly head, this community’s elephant in the room:  McDermont Field House and its little sister, the Wellness Center.

     There is no question but that these two facilities have added to the community’s quality of life in some ways.  However, they have seriously detracted from our financial well-being, and that’s the part no one wants to talk about, at least not the city’s staff.  And no one probably would talk about it, except that the chronic budget deficit they’ve created constantly “forces” us to take action against the working poor.

     Let’s start with the sidewalks.  About twenty people came to Tuesday night’s meeting who had received threatening letters from the city about fixing their sidewalks.  They live on Sweet Brier Ave., the street that leads to McDermont from Tulare Road.  It’s an old neighborhood with old sidewalks on a narrow street lined with modest houses and small yards.  Until McDermont was constructed, it was also quiet, with little traffic.  Now it is busy, parking is congested on ordinary days, non-existent on days with big events.  Residents complain of having to clean up their yards of vomit and urine as well as fast food trash after those events, not to mention suffering the noise from them.  And now they have less than 60 days to fix the sidewalks that have needed repair for decades.

     Several Sweet Brier residents spoke of relatives living on other streets who have had their sidewalks fixed by the city free of charge, the result of some of this town’s transportation fund improvements.  “That doesn’t matter,” city staff said in effect, “we’re forced by state law to impose this on you now because we are being forced by the actions of an undesirable individual to make them ADA compliant.”  The staff’s shameless attempts to place responsibility for their action (sending the letters) on the squeaky man in the wheelchair, rather than take responsibility for their inaction (i.e., neglecting the city’s infrastructure while they built this castle in the air,) was disgusting.  

     Moving on to the proposed sales tax increase, they said, in effect “ It won’t affect you much, because people in other cities like Tulare and Porterville, even Dinuba, already pay higher sales tax, and you do, too, when you shop there, so no biggy.  We’ll have to spend about $30 K to do it right,” (those sidewalks on Sweet Brier are estimated to cost about $50K total,) “and of course it’s totally up to the voters to approve it (which, by the way, they refused to do in 2008, but that was probably because we didn’t pitch it right.)”  After a brief pause to catch their breaths, Mr. Zigler politely concluded “We’re looking to Council for direction.” 

     The Council gave them direction: they said No Way.  In a vote requiring 4 yesses, they got only two (Salinas and Kimball,) while Sanchez and Mecum turned thumbs down.  The dollar amount the staff had estimated the increased sales tax would produce was between $188K (for .25%) and $378K (for .50%.)  Based on figures from 2013, (the most recent available,) these numbers may overestimate the dollars to be generated, given the decline in Lindsay’s business climate over the last 2 years.

     Had the staff proposed the tax increase for a specific purpose, however (as many of those cities with higher sales tax have done,) say, fixing the sidewalks in the poorest neighborhoods, it might have been a different story.  But considering that we still subsidized McDermont $225K annually from the General Fund – a quarter of a million dollars yearly – you can see why the Great White Elephant was called out for review.

     And that’s when the fighting broke out in the audience between the beneficiaries and the victims.  Most of the people who now must come up with hundreds of non-existent dollars to fix sidewalks cannot afford to participate in McDermont’s benefits or those of the Wellness Center.  The opportunity costs of building these two behemoths have caused our financial crisis and now have come due.  The city staff is wanting to slough the burden to those least able to bear it, whether that be for fixing sidewalks or the higher costs of gasoline, medicine, toilet paper and toothpaste – what few taxable items we are still able to purchase within these city limits.

     When we find a city manager who can see through the eyes of the poorest residents and construct solutions to help us all rise together, then we’ll have a city worth supporting.  Until then, our job is to keep naming the elephants in the room, sacred or otherwise.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes and sings.  You can send her your elephant sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.