Strangers In This Land

Published July 13, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


           I had a wake-up call Saturday that helped me put of last week’s violent national events in perspective. 

            I witnessed an accident at the intersection of Spruce Road and Ave. 256.  Heading west on 256, as I approached the 4-way stop, I saw a very small car ram the side of a utility trailer being pulled by a pickup truck turning north onto Spruce.  The small car, which had been heading south on Spruce, ran the stop sign, which the pickup driver did not expect.  He’d have been able to dodge the oncoming car if he hadn’t been towing the trailer.  Both vehicles came to a sudden, unmovable halt in the middle of the intersection.

            Luckily, no one was hurt, and luckily a CHP officer was driving only a few cars behind the crash.  The officer, a Latino man, competently helped the three white folks in the tiny car get safely to the side of the road, checking to make sure the fluids leaking from it were not flammable.  He assisted the pickup truck driver with the limping trailer, who was also white, to a safe parking spot, then pushed the crumpled compact onto the opposite corner.  Danger over.

            The three people in the car that ran the stop sign were tourists from Switzerland, a young couple and a middle-aged woman.  The younger woman was about 4 months pregnant, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how this accident could have been much worse.  “Is she alright?” the driver of the pickup asked when I went to see if he was.  His trailer and his plans for the evening were not alright:  one tire was blown off the rim and the trailer’s once-neatly-stacked contents were all askew.  He was on his way to cater a party, scheduled to arrive in thirty minutes, and Plan B was struggling to surface in his mind.

            To me the accident was a reminder that we tend to take it for granted that everybody knows the lay of the land, from 4-way stop intersections to places on the road where the sun can be blinding at certain times of the day.  We subconsciously learn to navigate by these facts: the landscape trains us through experience.  But strangers in this land haven’t had the benefit of these years of experience, and accidents can happen.  It’s tourist season, friends:  keep alert for the untrained.

             Of course I asked myself if things might have gone differently if the tourists were from Nigeria, or Nicaragua, or worse, East LA.  Would the first words out of the pickup driver’s mouth have been concern for the pregnant woman, or would he have felt more defensive, feeling the impacts on his own life these strangers had caused?  I don’t mean to impugn the pickup driver here: the question is directed to all of us.

            Last week’s national events between police officers and people of color, which appear to be continuing into this week and likely the future, were triggered by fear of the unknown, which is the source of hate.  We are strangers to each other:  we come from different social landscapes, we have not received the same training, and as a result we cannot predict what the other will do with any certainty.  We become guarded at best, enemies at worst.

             The Quaker peace activist Elise Boulding once suggested that the word “stranger” is a good replacement for the word “enemy:”

            “It is a very old word, and a good one.  We have no more enemies, but we have strangers.  Sometimes we are estranged from ourselves and from God.  When we meet a person we call a stranger, that person has to be listened to….    There is no tribal group to my knowledge that does not have a tradition for dealing with the stranger.  That is, when a person you have no way of labelling or categorizing appears on the horizon, that person is defined as a stranger… until some basis for relationship has been found….Oddly enough, we have lost it in industrial society.  Therefore we have enemies.  We don’t have rituals for deciding on the basis for relationship.”  (in One Small Plot of Heaven, 1989, quoted in Whitmire’s Plain Living, 2001.)

             It seems to me that the communities requiring their public safety officers to become familiar with them have a better chance of reducing the unknown in police/community member encounters.  Those of us who have become strangers to ourselves and our families through drug abuse and gangs might even have a better chance of becoming reacquainted under their influence. 

             I think it’s time we get to know each other and ourselves better – before all hell breaks loose.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate in Tulare County’s terra incognita.  You can send her your stories of refamiliarization c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.