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.
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