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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

 

 

 

 

Scar Tissue

Published March 1, 2017 in slightly edited form in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s March.  Black History Month has come to an end, leaving us with eleven months to lay down more white history, skid marks and all, before we’re reminded once again of our propensity for hubris and brutality.  If the institution of slavery is dead (i.e., “it’s history,”) I’m afraid the economic values still thrive that once allowed us to think it’s OK to own other people or determine their future.

           

     This month, the Dakota Access Pipeline will be completed without apology to the future or to the Standing Rock Sioux, who had the juevos to claim their culture’s deeper ecological understanding and their children’s rights to clean drinking water.  This month, the site of their protest (on land once theirs) will be drowned by the waters of a reservoir stored for urban users downstream, another environmental manipulation with white fingerprints on it.  It’s hard for me to believe we can still be so blind to these crimes, but there it is.

     “Get out of my country,” a deranged man yelled in a bar on the Kansas side of Kansas City last week before shooting three men, two from India, killing one.  Officials did not immediately label this act a hate crime, perhaps because the shooter’s state of derangement was already known.  Age 51, he’s lived with his father his whole life until his father died a year ago, devastating him; clearly he's someone who has not been able to make his own way in this world.  Those two young men from halfway around the globe were not responsible for his lack of place or standing, for his inability to function in this society, but they took the hit for it.

     “I want my country back,” my mother used to say when the last George Bush was in office.  Her sense of dispossession came from a political hierarchy she didn’t believe in generating policies touted as American that she couldn’t abide.  She had a white face to blame for her sense of loss, not black, brown or yellow, but little more recourse than the man from Kansas City.  Having an eight year reprieve helped, but now she just leaves the television off.

           

     “The country’s deeply divided,” we hear over and over in the news without having the fault line mapped that separates us.  Week Four of the new administration in Washington ended with President Trump claiming he’s on track with what he wanted to accomplish.  If keeping the country deeply divided was on that list, he’s right.  But I think what divides us goes deeper than his hubris, and deeper than our mental constructs of race, ethnicity, even class.  I think it comes from land, the source of all wealth:  from who has access to it and who doesn’t.

     Near the beginning of his writing career, Wendell Berry wrote a book about slavery called The Hidden Wound.  It’s really a long personal essay about the black people who were part of his Kentucky tobacco farming family, including some held as slaves, and the cost to whites of the divided consciousness inflicted by that system.  But when I read the book, I came to realize that racism is the excuse our minds create to explain why I (the so-called superior person) should have land and you (the so-called inferior one,) shouldn’t.  And if I, a white person, have become dispossessed of land and/or the wealth derived from it, woe unto you less-than-white people who still have a yard to call your own.

           

     I think we don’t know the divide.  Is it race, or ethnicity, or economic class and education – or is it something else that keeps separating us into artificial categories which keep us fighting over straws?  I think it’s Berry’s hidden wound and our ignorance of land’s critical role in slashing our consciences.  The wound’s scabs have been torn off so often the flesh has not healed normally, but become scar tissue, proudflesh.  I think our future is limited to making more scar tissue until we address what made the initial cut.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann almost has finished editing a book of writings on land and water in California.  Anyone interested in this topic can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message below.

My Turn at the Crank

Published Nov. 2, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

This is the sixth report from Reedley, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

           

     Wendell Berry, one of this nation’s treasures in the realm of sustainable farming and living, has a book called Another Turn of the Crank.  I thought of him as I prepared for my turn at the microphone in our Reedley speakers series.  His writing career took the stage just as I entered the field, a new recruit, and just as Paul Taylor prepared to exit. 

           

     My assignment Friday night was to talk about Paul and the field he carved out for so many of us.  I still remember Paul walking into his office one day with Wendell Berry’s first major work in his hands, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.  Published in 1977, that book started a new national conversation about what is wrong with our industrialized form of agriculture.  It gave my tenacious mentor great hope as his pace slowed, the end of his turn at the crank in sight.

           

     I used many four-letter words there in the First Mennonite fellowship hall:  land, town, farm, hope and love.  I probably even used “hate,” though I try to keep that word at bay.  A couple of one-syllable five-letter words were also key:  “faith,” with its partner “grace.”  Faith and grace have been major components of my work over the last twenty years, though I had to learn them on my own, since my mentors and colleagues rarely identify those factors in their writing.  Yet I see them at work in Villarejo’s stories, and MacCannell’s and Fujimoto’s, and perhaps all the stories.

           

     Where I first learned about faith in this work was in a project I joined near the end of my time at Davis called the Forum on Church and Land.  It was sponsored by the Western Small Church and Rural Life Center based in Filer, Idaho.  The Forum was a Methodist undertaking headed by a minister from Corvallis, Oregon named John Pitney.  John is a dairy kid who grew up to become a stay-at-home father, using his seminary training to take him into the dark space between most churches and what was going on in our rural areas in the 1980’s.  He developed workshops, bible studies and a body of songs to address the devastation no one noticed – except those suffering from bank foreclosures and losing their farms.

           

     John had organized these forums in other states, but right about the time of the 1990 freeze, he was called to bring these ideas to the Central Valley.  Someone gave him my name because I was working on a project called “Agriculture and the Common Good” at the time, and he gently roped me into the planning process for holding a forum here.  We called the event “Who is my Neighbor? Agriculture, the Common Good, and the Role of the Church in Truthtelling and Reconciliation.”  It was held in Fresno in Feb. 1992, and though I was agnostic when we started, during the forum I had a conversion experience. 

           

     Friday night, standing at the microphone in Reedley telling this story to the members of the Peace Center, which includes many Mennonite farmers who are interested in this subject of agriculture and the common good, I could see that the church still has a role to play in mending the breaches in neighborliness created by our industrial agriculture system.

           

     I began by telling my story about research at Berkeley and Davis, which turned toward public education when I moved to Tulare County more than twenty years ago.  Then I described some tools I thought we might use to carry on this legacy of social concern.  One of these tools is the book of writings I’ve been editing with Tulare geographer Bill Preston, a professor at CalPoly SLO.  It’s titled A Little Piece of Land:  Writings on Agriculture and the Common Good in California.  The book contains articles from social scientists, journalists, historians and philosophers, and includes a goodly dose of poems and short stories describing the importance of rural life to individual humans and communities, as well our national well-being. 

           

     I see a role for art in creating the awareness we need to tackle this subject, and an working toward creating a non-profit organization, New LEAF (Land Educational Arts Forum) to help support artistic endeavors in this work.  John Pitney’s songs, contained on three albums and four CD’s, offer a similar promise to encourage churches to take on this role (see www.johnpitney.org.)  And I think holding another Forum on Church and Land would be a way to introduce people into the effort.

           

     One of my favorite Pitney songs is based on a Wendell Berry poem called “To Know the Dark.”  It goes like this:

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark.  Go without sight. 

And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. 

And is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.”

            The next speaker in the series will be Dr. Sarah Ramirez, the director of Tulare County FoodLink, speaking on “Good Food Changes Lives.”  She will speak Nov. 11^th.  Go to  www.reedleypeacecenter.org for more information.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a recovering researcher who writes in Lindsay.  You can send her your stories on land, town, farm and faith c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Dan O’Connell for recognizing the baton.

It's the People

Published Oct. 26, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

This is the fifth report from Reedley, where we are holding a speakers series on people, land and water in the San Joaquin Valley.  Called “In the Struggle,” it features individuals who have contributed to the human ecology of this place in the face of its dehumanization from the industrialization of agriculture.

            Twenty-three years ago, in the first days of my residence in Lindsay, my life was interrupted by a clogged sewer line.  It was four-thirty on a Friday afternoon; the next morning I was due to speak at a conference in Los Angeles and needed a shower before leaving at the very least.  I grabbed the Yellow Pages and called a plumber who came from Ivanhoe.

            We talked as we searched my new property for the non-existent clean-out valve.  Nervous, I babbled a little about my presentation the next day on this weird study that no one here in the Valley seemed to know about two nearby towns, Arvin and Dinuba.  Studied in the forties, the two towns then appeared so different from each other that any ordinary observer would have thought Arvin was smaller and poorer than Dinuba, though they were the same size in population, with the same dollar-value in farm products from their land bases.  

            Just as I was about to mention the study’s conclusions, that the different size of farms surrounding each town caused the radical differences between them, my new plumber friend says “It’s the people.  It’s the people in those towns that make the difference.  It’s the people.”

            In another time and place, I might have argued, or at least worked to show how farm size determines what people are able to accomplish.  But I heard the truth of his words in the conviction with which he said them, and they lodged in my heart.  Friday night at the Reedley Peace Center we heard from a man who has invested his entire academic career on that truth.

            Isao Fujimoto is a huge consciousness inhabiting a small body, with less to pack around than most of us, perhaps thanks to the high caloric requirements of his ceaseless mind.  I once heard him described as a hummingbird, which fits.  Only a few more silver hairs showed among his typically Japanese black ones than when I knew him in Davis, though I detected a slight frailty in his walk now from eight decades on the planet.  Still, he stood and talked for more than an hour, then answered questions until we could think of no more.

            He began his talk with the painful contradiction we live with here, that our region has the highest rates of poverty amidst the greatest agricultural abundance nationwide.  Isao then gently unfolded another, less obvious contradiction: although each wave of ethnic immigrants is put through the wringer here, welcomed only as a source of cheap farm labor and scorned until they disappear into the acculturation process, our great agricultural diversity has been built on and spurred by this ethnic/cultural diversity.  Fujimoto sees cultural diversity as a resource, as important as land and water.  He sees it as the third leg in our pyramid of abundance.

            The importance of cultural diversity became easier to see as he unfolded stories of cooperative efforts and organizations in this state, which arose to meet immigrants’ survival needs as well as to overcome constrictions placed on them by the existing power structure.  Isao learned these things first-hand in childhood, as the oldest of 13 in a farming family prohibited by state law from owning land, later as occupants of an internment camp during WWII.  His personal story makes his passion and perspective a little easier to understand, but what’s most important is that it did not keep him from seeing other groups’ distress or the structural forces behind those facts of life.  It opened him.

            Isao’s contribution has been to take that deep understanding of the importance of cultural difference and to encourage others to own it.  He advocates and enables people to join together to work for the changes we need in this society, whether that be farmers markets and food co-ops to re-unite those who work to grow our food with those who eat it, or innovators developing appropriate technology for sustainable living.  He understands that co-operative effort itself is the solution to the problems spurred by our industrial society, which holds individual effort as paramount.  He knows that getting people to work together for their own benefit and the good of all is the most radical act, one that he paid for dearly, career-wise, early on.  Now, however, his genius for helping others learn to help themselves (helping us all in the long run) is finally being recognized.

            We live in this terrible contradiction:  we produce huge agricultural abundance, but it comes with a high-poverty price tag.  The industrial structure at the root of that unhappy relationship dominates more farm land annually, seemingly unstoppable.  But people can do something about that.  It’s the people, folks; it’s us.  We’re the people.

            Next week I’ll be the speaker, describing my history with the previous speakers and how that’s led me to be a farmer of men, trying to plant seeds for that effort.  Join us.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a fourth generation failed family farmer who writes.  You can send her your hopes for a more sustainable future c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Fred Smeds for submitting his piece “Why Farm” for our forthcoming book, A Little Piece of Land.

Land Theology

Published Sept. 23, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!  Isaiah 5:8

     Last week I wrote about land tenure and its importance, not just in the book I’m working on but also in our individual lives and in our communities.  What I didn’t fully understand when I began this book project, however, was that concerns over land tenure go all the way back to biblical times, particularly concentrated, absentee land ownership.

     Before Jesus, before Isaiah and Jeremiah, concentration of control over the best, most productive agricultural holy lands by a few individuals created impoverished conditions for the rural peasants and the mass of urban dwellers.  That’s what made those prophets cry out.  They were crying out not just against the injustices created, but also for the covenant broken, the one the Israelites made with God before they crossed the River Jordan to occupy the Promised Land.   These are the roots of what has come to be known as “land theology.”

     Up to a point, I may be excused for my ignorance 25 years ago.  My parents were suspicious of bible thumpers, and that carried over to the text itself.  Up to a point, you who have read the Bible all of your lives may also be excused, because most theologians over the last 2000 years have also missed that message.  In that scholarly vacuum, I guess our preachers may also be excused.  After all, in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church itself was a large landholder and the source of permission for European explorers to seize the land of natives in the New World, creating landlessness and injustices we still have not lived down. 

    In 1977 an Old Testament scholar named Walter Brueggemann published a book called The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith.  In it he laid the foundation for what would become “land theology.”  My Methodist preacher friend John Pitney picked up that ball and carried it to the Forum on Church and Land in Fresno, where I first heard the message in 1992.  Another Old Testament scholar, Marvin Chaney, presented his research there on the land tenure conditions in 8^th Century BC Palestine, providing a framework for us to compare with California’s state of large-scale, industrialized agriculture.  I left that event physically, emotionally and intellectually transformed, i.e., converted.

     But I think what made that conversion possible was a moment 14 years before, in the office of a retired Berkeley economics professor, Paul Taylor.  I was there to learn about federal reclamation law from him, and to help his efforts in any way I, as an untutored 28-year-old, could.  He’d been invited by Cornell historian Paul Wallace Gates to publish his collection of law journal articles on California water and the 160-acre limitation.  His task that day was to start to write the introduction to this volume of works that spanned more than 20 years, a culmination of his passion and his scholarship.  I was there to help type.

     He got a few sheets of yellow unlined paper, got his pen, and began to think.  Then he looked up at his bookshelf which spanned the entire wall, floor to ceiling, and said “Where’s my Bible?”  At Berkeley I’d never heard an academic ask that question, and had no idea why he wanted it, but joined him in the search until he realized it was at home.

     The next day he returned to the office with Isaiah 5:8 written on a 2x2 yellow Post-it.  I typed it at the top of the page, followed by two other quotes he’d chosen, a passage from the 1902 Reclamation Act and a sentence from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958.  His eyes asked for my approval, but I still didn’t understand what it meant, particularly Isaiah.  He looked at me kindly then and said “Laying house to house, field to field – that’s when people buy up all the land.”  That was my real introduction to land theology, there in the UCB Department of Economics at the knee of a gentle genius from Iowa.

     And now I carry the torch myself.  The truth will not only set you free:  it can set you on fire.  Run the course.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Property Rights and Community Wrongs

Published Sept. 16, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

            “Search for a congenial relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time, for that relation largely shapes the relation between man and man.”  Paul Schuster Taylor, 1979

 

     “What’s your book about?” people ask when I tell them I’m working on one.  I usually say “agriculture and the common good,” sometimes adding a few items lodged under that umbrella like “small farms,” “water,” and “sustainability.”  But the thread running through it all is land tenure.

     “Land tenure” is not a term most people use, although it applies to every single one of us.  It means the system that determines peoples’ access to land, which is the source of all wealth as well as subsistence, and the subcategories of relationships determined by that system.

            In this country, the system of private property determines individuals’ access to land except where government control has interceded (like school grounds or Yosemite National Park, for instance.)  The subcategories in our system are “landed,” “tenant,” and “landless” or “homeless.”  The concept of private property is so important to our entire socio-political-economic system that we take it for granted, almost god-given.  To criticize private property here, even if the intent is to help, is like burning the flag.  

            What’s good about private property (i.e., individual ownership,) particularly when we’re talking about land, however, isn’t always good for the community. One of the worst things for any given community is when some of its land (or most, or all, as in "company towns,") is owned by people who do not live within it, often referred to as “absentee ownership.”  What’s wrong about it is that decisions for the land’s use by the absentee owner are made in a vacuum of knowledge about the community’s needs and beyond the community’s ability to influence those decisions, to encourage or coerce the owner to care about the effects of those decisions on people within the community or the community as a whole.

            Last week’s paper carried a wonderful example of the importance of land tenure in a beautifully written letter to the editor by Chris and Sally Brewer regarding the closure of Exeter’s True Value Hardware.  The letter pointed to a cause the previous week’s news article had skimmed over lightly:  the landowner’s decision to raise the rent 40%, with two weeks’ notice.  It’s the kind of action landowners take when they want to remove the tenant and do not have cause to evict. 

            The Brewers then went on to suggest a motive - to get a tax write-off for having an empty building - and to flush out the implications of that for the community (lost sales tax revenues, the impacts on other businesses of having a large empty building downtown) as well as for the business owners themselves (lost source of income and community identity.)  They then went on to express the hope that “the building owner who started this self-centered and thoughtless action realizes the extent and harm his actions have caused good people and a good community.”

            That last sentence might have some impact if the current owners are local.  The Brewers’ letter did not name or identify the location of the current owners, only that the former owners (who also had owned the hardware business housed there) sold the building several years ago.  This is simply to say that I do not know if the current owners are absentee, or simply acting like it.  My experiences here in Lindsay document that local owners can be as oblivious to the community’s welfare as absentee owners can.

            But it’s a question we should ask.  Who will look out for the needs of the community when the landowners of its spaces live too far away to know or care?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes.  You can send your empty building nightmares to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247

 

           

Studebaker Desert

Published Sept. 9, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The other night I was scanning my bookshelves for pieces I might have left out of my collection of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good.  When my eyes lit on it, my fingers reached for Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, a book so dense with the common bad of water politics it could take a month of reading to find a few pages to excerpt.

     Published in 1986, the book was described as “a savagely witty history of America’s reckless depletion of its water resources,” in Newsday.  The Washington Post Book Review called it “a highly partisan, wonderfully researched portrayal of the damming, diverting and dirtying of western rivers.”  Publishers Weekly said “This timely and important book should be required reading for all citizens.”

     Although I think Publishers Weekly was right, I doubt the book was well read here in the Valley.  Almost 30 years later many of our citizens are still making the same kind of arguments for more dams that Reisner showed were reasonless and irrational, in massive denial of the facts of water’s availability and the costs to develop it.  The reason for making those arguments still exist - that dams can make a few people temporarily rich - but 30 years later those people are even smaller in number.  Unfortunately, they may be more powerful.

     I grew up in the 1950’s, when big water projects like the CVP here and Bonneville in the Pacific Northwest were viewed as heroic and totally positive undertakings designed to create and spread wealth among the western citizenry.  I remember watching newsreels in school about their physical construction and economic contributions, and I believed every word of it.  I chose Grand Coulee Dam as the subject of the first report I wrote in grade school.  A decade earlier that same spirit had captured Woody Guthrie, who worked for the feds for a month putting this heroism and hope into song.

     But by the 1980’s the promises showed their true colors and the costs had begun to show up.  In Reisner’s introduction, “A semidesert with a Desert Heart,” we can see why:

            “One does not really conquer a place like (California.)  One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it.... The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it.  But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move... The point is that despite heroic efforts and many billions of dollars, all we have managed to do in the arid West is turn a Missouri-sized section green - and that conversion has been wrought mainly with nonrenewable groundwater.  But a goal of many westerners and of their federal archangels . . . has long been to double, triple, quadruple the amount of desert that has been civilized and farmed, and now these same people say that the future of a hungry world depends on it, even if it means importing water from as far away as Alaska. 

            “What they seem not to understand,” he continues, “is how difficult it will be just to hang on to the beachhead they have made.  Such a surfeit of ambition stems, of course, from the remarkable record of success we have had in reclaiming the American desert.  But the same could have been said about any number of desert civilizations throughout history - Assyria, Carthage, Mesopotamia; the Inca, the Aztec, the Hohokam - before they collapsed.”

           

     How to live here in this place, within the limits nature provides and God or someone has allowed us to stretch well beyond, is a question this drought has provided for us to ponder.  If we respond rightly, I think we may be finding ourselves downsizing and going backward to something once more common than the Cadillac.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is an old car lover who writes.  You can send her your more politically correct water conservation ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.
   

Hello West of West

Published Nov. 12, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Sunday’s Bee carried a long story about Mark Arax’s new venture, West of West Center, which will “launch” formally this Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum.  Though it’s been a long time coming, the timing seems perfect in my mind.


     Arax is one of this valley’s treasures, passionate about our future as well as our history.  Those of us who know and admire him like to think of him as fearless in this regard, and that spirit is contagious.  His first book, about trying to find his father’s murderer, was just a taste of his courage.  When he and co-author Rick Wartzman lifted the lid on the making of the J.G. Boswell empire with The King of California, they liberated the entire valley from the self-imposed gag order we suffered, never saying anything negative about Boswell’s power. 


     Arax’s third book, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009), gives us a taste of what’s coming with this new Center.  The book’s flap explains the title: “Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed ‘When I am in California, I am not in the West.  I am west of the West.’”  Arax lovingly, but unblinkingly, tells us why that is still true.


     The idea for West of West Center developed organically, starting with a pile of irreplaceable tape recordings of interviews of both the rich and famous and down and out from his long years as a journalist.  The need to digitize these tapes in order to preserve them led to the idea of a website where the  public would have access to them.  Last year, the opportunity to develop an affiliation with UC Merced to become a centrally-located  repository, capped the idea of making it a Center.  It’s a Center in the right sense of the word:  half museum, half training ground for telling this valley’s stories truthfully.


     The venture includes a non-profit publishing house, West of West Books. Not believing that all rich people are greedy, suspicious and hoarding, Arax designed the publishing effort to be supportive of telling the stories of wealthy families in ways that the proceeds and contributions could underwrite the stories of the non-wealthy as well.  The first book, which will be featured Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum event, is Beyond Luck:  The Improbable Rise of the Berry Fortune Across a Western Century, written by Betsy Lumbye, former executive editor of the Fresno Bee.  “You could say he found his luck digging,” wrote Bee writer Donald Munro in Sunday’s story, “- first irrigation ditches in the arid Valley, then a fortune in gold in the remote Yukon, and then a second fortune in oil in the Taft area.”  The grand-nephew of Clarence Berry, who inherited some of this family’s wealth, helped bring this story to light.  It promises to be very interesting.


     One mark of Arax’s courage, however, is that he wants to publish a book of writings on land and water that I have been editing for over 20 years, looking for a publisher.  It won’t make money, which a regular publisher requires, and it could make trouble, which is why I’ve been sitting on this project so long.  But with the drought and the passage of the water bond - another watershed in this state’s life - the need for its contents is greater than ever before.


     As they say, timing is everything.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a hopeful writer and editor who lives in the Lewis Creek watershed of Tulare County.  You can send her your watershed life stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.