O Little Town

Published Dec. 20, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The gingerbread woman reappeared when I opened some boxes of ornaments this weekend.  I wanted to do a little light-handed decorating, at least in my kitchen window, my hearth. I pulled back the tissue paper wrapped around her plump little body, saw who it was, and tenderly wrapped her back up, deciding against that trip down memory lane.  Then I found the little wreath I’d hung to frame her years before, and my hands decided to go back after all, back to the time when she meant something real to me.

           

     I’d written about this cheerful kitchen angel in this column, so I dug up the piece from the notebooks where I’d once kept them organized. What I discovered when I re-read it surprised me.  In the first week of Jan., 2011, I was still in love with my community, tender toward its complexities, not yet tortured by them.  It felt good to remember.

           

     The gingerbread woman reverie was triggered by community pain I was just coming to know thanks to my new job at RN Market.  A much loved woman, Inglatina Huerta, had been killed on her way to work around 5 a.m. on New Year’s Eve Day.  She had a head-on collision with the son of one of Lindsay’s first families, who was coming home from a party. The story I heard is that he was not tested for alcohol.  An Hispanic woman on her way to work, killed by a white boy on his way home from a party and not made to bear any consequences: it was an old story that could have happened anywhere.  People suffered in silence.  That’s how we do it here.

           

     People had just begun to not suffer in silence two months before, when the revelations about high salaries Lindsay’s top employees were being paid splattered against the reality that a high percentage of the town’s residents have trouble paying their water bills.  In mid-October 2010 about a thousand people met in the high school gymnasium for a highly-guarded city council meeting, purportedly to hear their complaints.  At first I was reluctant to get involved, so I simply wrote about it.  The first families fought back.  In the columns before the gingerbread woman, I was just beginning to feel the effect of moving socially from one side of the community to the other, and still holding some middle ground.

           

     That was before the housing fiascos were revealed, and before the effects of Rich Wilkinson’s appointment to city manager could be accumulated.  It was before coming to the podium during public comment period at city council meetings and discovering we had to fight for the right to speak, before the plan to demolish the Citrus Exchange building, and before the lawsuits we filed to try to keep that from happening.  Back then I was afraid of losing my sense of home in this town through the act of protesting. I didn’t know that loss would occur inside of me.

           

     “It’s just love,” the gingerbread woman had told me about Inglatina’s accident and all the pain and silent discord that followed.  “Grief is the price we pay for love,” I’d quoted a fellow Quaker then.  It’s hard to remember.  But as we, against the dark, deck our homes with the lights of life and share our wonder about a birth on the wrong side of the tracks in Bethlehem 2017+ years ago, maybe perspective will come.  All this fighting is just about love for a little town.

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

 

           

The Gingerbread Woman

Published in the "HomePages" column Jan. 5, 2011 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette in slightly edited form


      She’s been hanging in my kitchen window for just a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to take her down.  But I know the time will come, so I soak her up every time I stand at the sink to wash dishes or pare potatoes.  She’s a gingerbread woman, a blown-glass Christmas ornament I found at a 99 cent store last year and brought home to hang in the center of a spare, spruce and holy berry fake wreath I bought there the year before.  And she means something, though I’ve been taking my time discovering what.

           

     She’s iridescent gold with pink crabapple cheeks and an infectious smile, a red ribbon bow at her white collar on the gold dress edged in sugary white, with a green apron tied around her wide middle and a pair of cranberry red boots that might have come from the army but for their scrumptious color.  Between her chubby hands is a string of gingerbread men cookies, an offering that appears to have pleased her as much in the making of them as they hopefully will please the recipients.  Her hair is as white as mine and looks like it’s still up in rollers.  I love this woman.

           

     I think she’s my alter ego, the woman I might have liked to have been if things had been different.  I think in some ways she’s a keeper of the hope, if not the promise, that things might yet still be that way.  She’s the Christmas maker, and I think she stands for the bravery of women everywhere who dedicate themselves to the arts of Home making at this time of year.

           

     I am slow to arrive at the task of Christmas making, and even slower to finish it, reluctant to let go once I have my hands on that plow.  But the Twelve Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day, not end:  they end on January 5^th, the day this issue will hit the stands, something I learned from my dear friend Wendy in Oregon.  In that lovely song, people are still giving gifts through the January New Year doldrums, so I feel quite justified in leaving my red and green decorations in place for yet another week or so.

           

     “It’s not going to be a good New Year,” my beautiful friend Nancy told me in the parking lot of R-N Market as I strode toward her to clock in New Year’s Day.  “Why?” I asked, stopping to listen.  “That woman who was killed yesterday morning, Friday, she was my daughter’s mother-in-law,” she answered, trying not to cry.  “She was always so full of life. . . .”  She told me what she knew about the circumstances of the accident, then we hugged and she left with her trunk full of groceries.

           

     Later, manning register #1 as the afternoon turned to evening on that first day of 2011, I got another glimpse of the impact of this tragedy.  One of the woman’s sons came in with friends and identified himself that way to me, even though I am a total stranger to him.  “She used to come in here all the time,” he mentioned, and I wondered how I would ever be able to identify her in my mind.  He left with two friends and three 30-can packs of Bud, and I called after him to drink carefully.  “I won’t be touching this,” he said softly.

           

     “What was her name?” the other checkers asked, and all I could remember was that it was Hispanic and her last name started with an “h”.  At the market, sometimes we know people by face and personality a long time before we learn their names unless they normally pay by check.  Those who pay cash often remain nameless even if the connection between us borders on intimate.

           

     Inglatina Huerta is the name of the woman who was killed early last Friday on her way to work at 6 a.m. in the dark.  Nancy said she’d gotten the frost off her windshield on the outside, but that the car was fogging up on the inside or something that made it hard to see.  Nancy said she was killed instantly when the car or truck plowed into her head-on, driven by one of Vahn Blue’s sons, Layton.  Despite the fact that the greatest degree of pain is felt through the families of the victim in these situations, I know that the Blue family must also be suffering.  I extend my sympathy in both directions, knowing neither family well enough to say it in person.

           

     After work, I went home and started cleaning up the kitchen, trying to make some peace in the middle of the chaos in my heart and mind.  I found myself staring at the gingerbread woman, still smiling, still offering her cookies and hope.  Still trying to make Christmas last even though the ball has dropped in Times Square and bare, dying fir trees are already lying on their sides in the alleys around town.  What is the hope that drives us, particularly us women, to add the work of making Christmas to our already full lives?  What hope is it that we anticipate breathlessly on Christmas Eve, anticipating that the next morning we will find ourselves transformed?

           

     “It’s just love,” she said, echoing something a man once told me about why he got up at 5 every morning to squeeze fresh orange juice for his two boys.  Just love.  And I imagine it was just love that got Inglatina Huerta up in the wee hours to drive to work on New Year’s Eve day, as she probably has been doing much of her life.  And it is just love that is causing the pain in those families and friends who now have to learn to live without her.

           

     “Grief is the price we pay for love,” Diana Lampen, a Quaker, wrote in 1996, and every time I remember that tremendous paradox, I am comforted.  It is the price we pay for being loved as well as the cost of loving others, because at some point in time all of our lights will go out and the loving we’ve offered and received will pass into memory, become passive rather than active vocabulary.

           

     And some of it may be passed on in strange, invisible ways.  In recipes for cookies and cranberry sauce, tamales and posole.  In wooden toys crafted in Dad’s shop, in doll’s dresses sown late at night on Mom’s Singer.  In saved letters and notes from boxes that arrived in the mail saying “Nothing special – just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you.”

           

     Just love.  That’s what the gingerbread woman is all about.  I’m glad she told me.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial gingerbread woman who is grateful to be told people’s stories.  You can send her your thoughts on grief and/or gingerbread c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Home Land

Published Dec. 13, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the old song opens, and finishes “if only in my dreams.”  In between the beginning and end, the lyrics describe a peopled place, with weather and vegetation we have to go away to get, sitting here on the Valley floor.  Maybe the Sierra.  Maybe Dunsmuir, on the toes of Mt. Shasta.  Maybe Michigan.

           

     The imagination is a wonderful place.  You can find yourself winging home in a song.  And for most of us, “home” has geographic coordinates, a place on the map.  Thanks to that Mother, Change, we may not actually want to go there anymore, but the homing instinct mentally remains to that place we once called home.

           

     Do the people of Israel feel that way about Jerusalem?  As the site of the Holy City in the Bible, the three thousand years of history as the center of the faith that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed over the weekend, meeting in France with its new President Macron, it’s easy to feel compassion for the Israelites.  Our President has given them a great big Christmas present:  home.  In “their” land.

           

     Unfortunately, they are not the only ones to feel that Jerusalem is home.  That city is still the center of faith for the Palestinians and other Muslims, in that region and beyond.  It is also home for Armenian Christians, as my friend Caitlin Croughan reminded me on the phone Sunday.  She visited Jerusalem last year and brought me an Armenian cross from their quarter of town.

           

     She also raised an important point about political states and religious nations.  Our forefathers and mothers built America on the principle of separating politics from religion as a way of protecting religious freedom.  We believe in that.  Many nation-states do not.  Israel appears to be one of them.  That’s their business, but it surely is not ours.

           

     So why did our fearless leader hand them this gift?  Cait thinks it was actually a gift to Mike Pence and his fundamentalist followers.  Something to do with the Book of Revelations, apparently, which is strikingly clear to some about the meaning of the preceding 65 Books.  I’m not a scholar of Scripture, so I can’t help you out there.

           

     What little I do know about the Bible concerns land, particularly the notion of the Promised Land.  It’s a big topic that was opened by Walter Brueggemann in the late 1970’s, and has continued scantily into the present.  The main concept Brueggemann uncovered (for me) is the idea of Covenant.  The land was promised to the Israelites as part of the covenant with their God.  It was a gift, the gift of sustenance and placedness, but it was His half of the bargain.  Israel’s half, in return for abundance and security, was to love their God with all their strength, soul and might and to keep His commandments, which unfortunately have been broken century after century (especially in the West Bank and Gaza most recently.)

           

     Does Netanyahu remember the teachings about Exile?  How the Jews lost Jerusalem over and over again, and why?  More importantly for the current news, however, is this question:  does Donald Trump even know?

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Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who stays home for Christmas in Lindsay.  You can send her your home-based dreams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beyond White

Published in slightly edited form Dec. 6th, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A friend and I were laughing last week about the insidious antics of someone, and the words “Oh, that’s beyond white!” came out of his mouth.  I don’t remember who we were laughing at.  It could have been something from the current slough of national politics.  Maybe it had nothing to do with politics whatsoever.  It could have been anything, anybody.  Outrageous arrogance associated with whiteness is a contagious disease in our culture, and it takes conscious effort to resist.  No one is immune, not even people from other races.

           

     Last Friday night Nikiko Masumoto performed her one-woman play “What We Could Carry” for the Reedley Peace Center.  I’d been wanting to see this play since I first read about it in the Fresno Bee five years ago, when she returned to the Valley to farm with her family.  The play is a re-creation of the 1981 testimonies of Japanese-Americans who suffered the WWII internment, testimonies which led, eventually, to formal apologies and minimal monetary restitution from the federal government.  It was one of the dark chapters in U.S. history, but, as one of her characters says in the play, this chapter, in terms of how our country has dealt with other (i.e., non-white) races, is not the exception, but the rule.  From that point onward in the play, we listened to their testimonies differently.

           

     Mas Masumoto, Nikiko’s father, has been a friend to me since he performed in my first Humanities event in Parlier, early in 1991.  He was teamed with the poet Omar Salinas from Sanger, a town which is less than 5 miles away from the Masumoto’s farm in Del Rey, but the two writers had never met.  Race and social inequality associated with different occupations can create divides “below” white, as Mas testifies in a beautiful short piece called “In the Fourth Grade” published in his first book, Country Voices:  The Oral History of a Japanese American Family Farm Community (1987.)

           

     I have always loved watching Mas give presentations, but Nikiko’s performance was something else.  It was breathtaking.  With only a kitchen stool and battered suitcase as props, she created times and places of the evacuation; with just a music stand and microphone she transported us to the hearing rooms where the testimonies were first given token (and only later serious) attention.  The civic necessity of a whole community speaking up in their own defense was overwhelming, as the different people who did so showed up in Nikiko’s body, came out of her mouth.  Her passionate representation of those people, men and women, young and old, quietly respectful and righteously outraged, gave me new respect for the power of theater, of face-to-face communication, however ephemeral it might seem.  In the blink of an eye, that woman can change hearts.

           

     And changed hearts is what we’re going to need if we’re ever going to move beyond white, beyond the supposed superiority of that race of people and the privileges still associated with it.  Beyond white is where we need to go.  And as we move into the season where Joseph and Mary take their historic, arduous trip to Bethlehem, where they, as swarthy folks of Jerusalem, would be counted and taxed for the white folks in Rome, we have yet another opportunity to move in that direction.  Peace unearth.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rowdy mixture of European peasants who writes.  You can send her your beyond white experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 03247 or leave a comment below.

At the Table

Published Nov. 29, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

           

     Visiting my family for Thanksgiving, we spent many hours at the table this past weekend.  Only a few hours were spent eating.  The table is a place to lay out conversation as well as food.  With both of my parents’ hearing on the wane, the table makes it easier to get ideas across, keeps the words from falling to the floor and being absorbed by the carpet.

           

     At my mother’s table I learned some new things about my grandfather and, accidentally, the geography of her home place.  She spoke of standing next to her dad with her hands in the back pockets of her overalls, mimicking his stance, watching trains come and go from the nearby station.  She asked him once why there were two steam engines groaning in unison on trains headed south.  “That’s to get them over Newaukum Hill,” he answered.

           

     I’d never heard that place name before, though I visited that territory frequently most of my childhood.  So when I got home I went to Google Maps.  There, amidst names I’ve heard for almost seven decades, names like Adna and Littel, Claquato and Napavine, southwest of Chehalis, there was the red balloon stuck on Newaukum Hill, elevation 404 feet.

           

     She also told about her father taking her to see the elephants raise the tents when the circus came to town.  He woke her about 3 a.m. and they went there together to see the feat, which occurred annually on a field next to the station.  My brother and I played together on that field, but I’d never heard about the elephants or the circus setting up there – not until we sat at her table 1000 miles and 85 years beyond that memory.

           

     Not long after that story my mother produced a photograph of her mother holding my younger cousin Teri.  I never met Mom’s mother, their bad relationship keeping them two states apart.  I saw portions of my aunts’ faces in hers, finally placing us within the missing side of the family tree.

           

     At my father’s table the next day, a lot of loose ends were laid out for reweaving.  Some of them have become too frayed for inclusion, but I learned some facts about his father’s time in the Revenue Cutter Service through a story about the recent discovery of one of its ships.  As the story trailed off, Dad said “Now I think I know why Dad and my brother Bill could never get along.  Bill (the first born,) came too soon and robbed my dad of the sea.”  Dad once lamented similarly about my own arrival.  I guess the Wischemann men didn’t know much about timing.

           

     When I’m at my parents’ tables, I have to do a lot of silent forgiving – for inconsistencies, for moral slips produced by their dates of birth, for mangled facts as time works its magic on their memories.  Once in a while, though, the appearance of a new truth absolves them and time both.  May you all be digesting your table scraps and being nourished by them.  Onward – Christmas is calling.

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Trudy Wischemann is a story gleaner who writes.  You can send her your favorite table scraps c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

In the Kitchen

Published in slightly edited form Nov. 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “A woman’s place is in the home,” was an old saying trying to die as I was growing up.  Where we lived, few women worked outside the home, for someone other than husband and family.  Few women brought in a paycheck.  Instead, they served on school and church committees or watched each other’s kids during the day.  But come the end of the afternoon, where most women could be found was in the kitchen.

           

     Serving neither husband nor family, I still find myself most at home in the kitchen.  It’s a kind of command post, the central hub where the food half of home is directed.  The rest of the house serves as “shelter,” but unless the kitchen is functioning well, I might as well be sheltered elsewhere.  The whole sense of home dissolves when the kitchen is a wreck.

           

     At Thanksgiving, when we focus on what comes out of the kitchen and winds up on the dining table, I find myself most distressed.  I’m not a pro in the kitchen, or much of an eater, either.  I prefer my food plain, not glamorized.  I prefer to remember its source at Thanksgiving:  the land and God.

           

     That being said, a woman’s place is still central to most of our Thanksgiving celebrations, whether that be deciding whose table will bear the kitchen’s products, who will be invited to share our kitchens’ bounty, where the money will come from to buy the groceries, and when the whole production will start.  After the feast, when the men and kids retire to the television set to nap off the heavy work of eating, the real hangover of Thanksgiving sets in:  cleaning up the kitchen, putting away the food, distributing leftovers on take-out plates for the visitors, cutting the pies for round two.

           

     In truth, my actual memories of those kind of Thanksgivings are good.  My mother shined, even when the pie crust didn’t turn out perfectly or the turkey browned too soon.  With family around her and other women sometimes joining her in the kitchen, her role as the family’s center was clear, and her ability to perform it well was evident.   I think Thanksgiving seems painful to me simply because I have chosen a different role.

           

     For those of you women who now perform a double role, bringing home some or all of the bacon and then having to cook it, I offer my profound admiration.  It’s what needs to be done, and you do it.  The world is still home as long as our kitchens are functioning.  For those of you who have been joined by men in the kitchen, I am thankful:  equality of the sexes actually begins in that small room, not the one with the bed in it.

           

     For those of you – of us – who still suffer inequality of the sexes in the workplace, I offer my sympathy.  The current flurry of news about politicians and other celebrities addicted to that inequality is only a reflection of everyday reality for many of us.  I think women who still punch the time clock, regardless, deserve our admiration.  But remember whoever is in your kitchen this holiday season, and give her (and/or him) thanks.

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Trudy Wischemann is a picky eater who writes.  You can send her your holiday food encouragements c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Home Itself

Published Nov. 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Home is where the heart is,” a friend tells me.  We are talking about where home is for each of us, which naturally involves WHAT home is.  I counter his definition with Valley author Gerry Haslam’s favorite description:  “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

           

     Both of these descriptions implicate people, describing home as a social environment.  There can be no doubt about that aspect.  All I have to do is be around my mother, bless her heart, for five minutes and I’m mentally back in kindergarten.  This aspect of home is what many of us are facing as the holidays approach, with its mixture of blessings and re-livable curses.

           

     But for me, the word “home” always involves a physical environment, with specific climate, topography, vegetation, wildlife, even geology.  This is to say that home - for me - is also geographic, with a historical context that I have in some way participated.  It is a permanent place where people come and go.

           

     And when I go home in my mind, it is to a specific place where I never lived, but visited often.  When the homing instinct bears down on me, I fly back to the “ranch” in western Washington where my Aunt Hazel lived the best years of her life.

           

     It helps that she often said she bought the place for us, her youngest sister’s offspring, so we would know what it was like to farm.  It helped that what little farming she did made her exquisitely happy, but it was more the life she lived there on that place than any one activity.  She loved harvesting the apples from their little orchard and making pies and ‘sauce, as well as watching the deer come down from the forest above to harvest their share.  It was fishing in the creek and frying trout for dinner. It was baling hay and putting up oats for winter, watching cats in the barn catching mice.  And it was photographing all of it that made for peace in her life.

           

     That place is home for me, I realize now, because there is where I learned the basic truths of my life.  That food comes from the land, and shelter as well.  That contentment is achievable and worthy of pursuit.  That I am an outdoor person at root, and curious about the natural world, fascinated enough to learn from books and from my own observations.  That intimacy with a place, a little piece of land, is priceless.

           

     They say you can’t go home again.  I’ve never believed that, though for most of us over 40 the places we once lived are unrecognizable now.  We destroy home for ourselves every time we obliterate bird habitat, push out olive groves, level fields for development.  But if, as I feel now, that home is an intimate relationship between people and place, there certainly is room for us to come home.  May the pending holidays help us stretch in that direction.

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Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who writes from home in Lindsay.  You can send her visions of your home place c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Paul's Camera

Published Nov. 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Two weeks ago I wrote about the loss of a camera that had been given to me by Paul Taylor 35+ years ago.  I called it “Dorothea’s” camera because I believed it had belonged to his wife, Dorothea Lange.  It matched photos of one she used in the field when the two of them documented the stream of immigrants into California who’d been displaced from their land in the Dust Bowl.

     The camera was returned to me last week, intact.  The story of how it was returned will have to wait until the case of the other missing items is resolved, but it’s one I will chalk up to Lindsay’s inherent goodness when the time comes.  Our town is still a place where love can do its work.  Make no mistake about that.

           

     Before it reappeared, I was searching for people who might be able to ID the camera and establish its worth.  I found Elizabeth Partridge, author of Restless Spirit:  The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (1998).  She’s also the daughter of Rondal Partridge, who had been Dorothea’s field assistant.  When the camera came home, I saw that it was a Zeiss IKON, not the Zeiss Jewel shown in her book.  I emailed her to report the distinction and the good news.

     She wrote back instantly on her iPhone, but referred to the camera as “Grandpa Paul’s.” Then she reminded me of his photographic work before he met Dorothea:  “Paul’s early work, though no great shakes in terms of beautiful photos, was so brave and thoughtful of him to dare to do.”

           

     The revelation that it might be Paul’s camera rather than Dorothea’s riveted me.  It sent me back to the one book I own where his photographs are shown, a book of farmworker photographs by Ken Light, Roger Minick and Resa Tansey called In The Fields (1982.)  Paul had written the introduction with labor historian Anne Loftis and included some of his photographs from his extensive study of Imperial Valley farm labor conditions in the late 1920’s.  But they also included a shot of a billboard for Tagus Ranch advertising for cotton pickers in 1927, just five years before the cotton strikes in Pixley and Corcoran. Paul had been here in our valley, too.

     What was really brave about Paul was not so much that he took and used photos, but his whole approach, which could be called “ethnographic” in academic terms.  Economics, his field, was becoming so statistical that it is almost unrecognizable as a social science today.  But Paul asked questions of the people he studied and wrote down what they said, and he photographed the places they lived and worked, a form of shorthand notetaking that carried these conditions 90 years into the future.  His economic analysis of the Imperial Valley is now highly esteemed.

           

     I’m keeping Paul’s camera with me until I’ve finished the work he sent me to do.  Onward, friends.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial researcher who writes to stay sane.  Thanks to John Kirkpatrick for his sympathetic phone call last week.  Send your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247or leave a comment below.

 

 

Thicker than Smoke

Published November 1, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Through all the national emergencies of the last three months – hurricanes, shootings, fires, more hurricanes -  I’ve found myself focused on the aftermaths.  In the midst of the terror of “the unthinkable” actually happening, we inevitably discover something beautiful in its midst: human hearts and spirits responding in what often seems superhuman ways.

           

     My sister works in Santa Rosa, lives in Windsor just north of the hottest tongue of fire that snaked down canyons from Calistoga three weeks ago.  She is the family’s anchor, and (with her stalwart husband) was preparing to accompany our 91+ year old mother to Maui for perhaps her last trip.  Despite all the potential disruption to that plan, they made it to the airport 6 days after the fire began, while it was still uncertain when containment could occur.

           

     The fires were out when they returned, but restoration efforts had barely begun.  I gave her a few days, then emailed her to ask how her trip had been and if she’s getting caught up at work.  She said no, she won’t be caught up for a long time, but “I have a home to go home to and we’re all safe, so that’s all that matters.”  Then this:

           

     “The trip was ok but not the best trip we’ve ever had – I experienced some form of PTSD/Survivors guilt and, combined with the exhaustion from the week and the horrid winds that followed us to Maui that felt like the same winds that burned my beloved town….I was not sleeping much.  The only thing that made it ok was that Lisa, Vince and John were safely ensconced in our house and it felt like sanctuary for them so that was good.”  Lisa, Carol’s lifelong friend who just remarried, was away the night the fire started.  John, Lisa’s son, had driven through flames to wake Vince in their new home, which burned to the ground not long after the two men escaped with their lives.

           

     “Jordanna’s job at the County Assessors office brings her in contact with everyone who’s lost everything; she’s holding up ok but it’s hard on her, especially to hear the stories of the old people that perished.   Santa Rosa smells like wet ashtray, some of the smell lingers in the office as well and the drive between downtown and Windsor is just devastating to see the wicked and wild path of the fire – what it spared and what it took.  Every day is a fresh reminder of what happened, what we’ve lost and the long and arduous road we have ahead of us.   #theloveintheairisthickerthanthesmoke”

           

     The love in our hearts is thicker than smoke, stronger than a rain of bullets, bigger than the largest tropical storm system.  I think our world would be a safer place if we learned to count on that fact of life.

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Trudy Wischemann is a resolute rural writer who works in Lindsay.  You can send her your heart-in-action stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Dorothea's Camera

Published in edited form Oct. 25, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

"I had to get my camera to register the things that

 were more important than how poor they were -

their pride, their strength, their spirit." 

    

Dorothea Lange, as quoted in Elizabeth Partridge's book

Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange, 1998

     “Do you know my wife, Dorothea Lange?” the old man asked me in the present tense, although the woman, best known for her Dust Bowl portrait “Migrant Mother,” had been dead more than 10 years.  It was the summer of 1976.  The man was Paul Taylor, professor emeritus of Economics at UC Berkeley, and I had walked across campus to his office with him at his request instead of studying for a meteorology midterm.  When I said “No,” he began showing me her photographs that he kept in his file drawers.  Thus began my lifelong relationship with Paul, although he has been dead now for almost 35 years.

           

     One Sunday he called me to come to his home in the Berkeley hills.  I was preparing to update the Arvin-Dinuba study originally undertaken by one of his graduate students in the 1940’s, Walter Goldschmidt.  Paul had supervised the original study and kept it alive by citing it continually in his efforts for enforcement of the acreage limitation provisions of federal reclamation law.  An update was overdue.

           

     When I arrived, Paul handed me a black leather box that, when opened, contained one of Dorothea’s cameras.  The lens slid out on a track followed by accordion-like bellows attached to a square box which she held while she squinted through the rangefinder on top.  When it wasn’t mounted on a tripod, she balanced the extended camera on her knee.  It is the camera most often shown in the documentaries about her career, which started in the bread lines and street protests on San Francisco’s wharf during the Great Depression, moved to the streams of migrants coming into California from the Dust Bowl, then the evacuation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II.

           

     That her hands had made use of this camera to capture what her heart and mind saw through her eyes was powerful, even a little intimidating.  I protested, knowing I would never have the nerve or the expertise to use it.  He insisted I take it.  That camera, and the memory of the gift, have kept me inspired over the intervening years, when I might have allowed doubt to wipe away the importance of the work Paul and I did together.  I have long thought it was the most important possession I owned.

           

     A couple of weeks ago I heard myself think that I didn’t need to keep it with me anymore.  Now that I’m finishing the book on Paul’s contributions, I realized that I might be able to give it to a museum where others could be similarly inspired.  Just days later, on the weekend of Oct. 7-8, it was stolen from my house, along with my flute and autoharp, my jewelry box full of earrings from Long’s Drug and some family treasures, as well as my HP All-in-One printer that I bought at Target on sale for $35 four years ago.  They took all my other cameras as well, including my grandfather’s Brownie and my Aunt Hazel’s Argus rangefinder in the red plaid camera bag she loved.  It was painful.

               

     But, in looking for the proper description of the historic camera, I found this quote of Dorothea’s, one she used often.  “The camera,” she said, “is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  Dorothea’s images have taught us how to see for years, and continue teaching us today.  That camera did its work well past its useful life.  I just pray that it’s somewhere teaching someone to see again.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial documentary photographer who writes.  You can send her your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

Coming Back

Published Oct. 4, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I was coming back from the Fresno airport last week when I ran into a pocket of despair.  Sometimes it takes a while to come back from hitting one of those.

     I took the long way home, the back roads angling through vineyards and orchards, alternating south, then east along the diagonal front of the Sierra foothills.  Section by section, mile after mile, there were signs of dissolution of the very web of our valley’s life.  Normally I am revived by this drive, encouraged by the sight of one fruit-farming family’s place after another.  But the families are disappearing, leaving trails of abandoned equipment and empty barns, houses removed leaving squares of bare ground behind.  The agricultural landscape of Fresno County’s Kings River fan is beginning to look like ours.

     I hadn’t realized how much the reshaping of our agricultural landscape has been depressing me until I saw the disease spreading north.  Some lines from a Tom Paxton song showed up: “Are you going away with no word of farewell?  Will there be not a trace left behind?”  Then the songwriter brings us home:  “Well, I could have loved you better, didn’t  mean to be unkind; that was the last thing on my mind.”

     My despair at the loss is amplified by knowing that my small attempts to prevent it have failed.  I don’t know what can be done to turn around the trends leading us to rural depopulation and cultural oblivion.  Here in the citrus belt the packinghouses are mechanizing right under our noses, eliminating 75% of the jobs that feed our towns, but nobody sees it coming.  The small farmers are being vanquished by Cuties and Halos.  The flow of incomes from the land have moved from trickling up to trickling down.  The costs of the so-called economies of scale will be borne more and more by our communities and countryside.  Lord.

     The only hope I find comes from the experience of some friends who worked in the Tulare Lake Basin restoring wetlands for migrating waterfowl.  Based in Alpaugh, where hope is a little hard to come by, they worked through BLM (where hope is also a little hard to come by) and built ponds on retired farmland with water purchased from Alpaugh I.D.  They had no way to know whether the provision of this habitat would help the declining numbers of birds, but they did it anyway.  In the first year there was a small increase, but each year thereafter, the increase was astounding.  “We had no idea the birds would come back so fast,” my friends said.

     You could call it an experience in loving better, in stopping being so unkind, even though the unkindness of eliminating bird habitat to plow soybean fields is totally accepted in this culture.  The acreage in new ponds was a tiny fraction of the habitat that once was there, but still, it helped beyond their wildest imaginings.  So it seems to me that we could love our lives here a little better, stop being so uncaring about the outcomes of these trends on our neighbors and our communities.  Perhaps they’ll come back faster than we can imagine - if we just try.

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

 

Vietnam

Published in edited form Sept. 27, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette
    
     Some of the news this weekend focused on the word “divisive,” referring to Donald Trump’s leadership style.   It ranged from high-profile TV sports to kitchen tables around the country.  On one hand we had the NFL’s rebuttal to Trump’s criticism of their leadership regarding kneeling during the national anthem, which split sports fans rooting for the same team into armed camps.  On another, we heard about the study session Oprah conducted in Michigan for 60 Minutes.  Participants were asked about the influences of Trump's leadership, and they answered with stories of dividedness across regions, classes and occupations, down to the family level.  Many expressed fears that this dividedness could lead to civil war.
    
     I had intended to explore the word “divisive” for this week’s edition until I watched the sixth episode of Ken Burns’ Vietnam series Sunday night.  Although I know our country is divided now, the series is reminding me of the deep divisions we experienced then - and lived through.  That is what I want to explore with you now.    

    
     The Vietnam series is chronicling the U.S. involvement in another country’s war.  I was a child when our involvement started and a teenager when it escalated to full-fledged commitment of troops and materiel. The sixth episode took us through Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968, the month of my high school graduation.  At that point, like so many people interviewed in the series, I believed the government’s version of the Vietnam story.  At that point I did not believe our government would lie to us.   

    
     Then I went away to college, to the quiet campus of Willamette University in Oregon’s capitol, Salem, where I’d received the best financial aid package.  Most of the students were from conservative, middle-class families who wanted their children safe, and campus activities reflected that desire.  But the outrage unfolding on other campuses around the country wafted through, and by the time I went home for my second (and last) summer, the sorrow of the Kent State student killings in Ohio had become outrage in me.  Not only had our government lied about the deaths and waste of Vietnam, they’d lied about the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution.  Protesting could get you killed in the U.S. as easily as in the U.S.S.R.   

    
     My outrage extended to my family’s conservative, WWII values system, and drove me from them more completely than any fight over the 2016 election would have.  I did not notice (nor was I told) when my brother, the curly-headed second child, signed up in early 1971.  Late 1972, when he came home in a body bag we could not unzip, sorrow and outrage merged with guilt and pain to form a canyon I barely recognized.  As a family, we never really recovered.     


     But the country did, eventually, though I wouldn't say it healed.  What the Vietnam series is providing now is an understanding of the issues that both led us there and kept us from addressing the root causes at the time.  With that understanding - and a modicum of forgiveness and humility - I feel that healing might be occurring as we watch.    

    
     Our current president’s management style, learned from the competitive world of business, is divide and conquer.  It was defined by Machiavelli, and employed by despots like Julius Caesar and Napoleon.  According to Wikipedia, Immanuel Kant wrote that “divide and conquer” is the third of three political maxims, the others being “act now, make excuses later,” and “when you commit a crime, deny it.”  The power of divisiveness as a political strategy has been proven over and over, to the woe of peoples around the world.   

    
     But what the dividedness of the Vietnam era shows us is the necessity of respecting its source.  When an issue divides us, a real issue and not just a rude comment stemming from an inexcusable attitude, and we recognize the validity of complaints on all sides, then we have a prayer of coming together in true unity.    

    
     The issues that divide us now are real.  We need leaders who help us find ways to address them, not shame those who stand (or kneel) in protest of the status quo.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Gold-Star Sister who writes.  You can send her your protests c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.