Not Now Dirt

Published August 16, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


            Saturday’s events in Charlottesville, VA are still news as I write this.  Most commentaries, appropriately, condemn the hate that fueled the protest over the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue.  There probably also was hate fueling some folks who came to protest the parading of hate-based beliefs in public, although I heard reports that their leaders, mostly people of faith, emphasized the need to resist hate with love.  Still, I admired them for standing up to the fascistic forces, knowing they were risking harm.  Adolph’s day is done.  There’ll be no revival of the brown shirts, not here, not on my watch.

            The proposed removal of the statue, like the lowering of the Confederate flag, is a final defeat to some, a final victory to others 150 years later.  But the angst over the removal of these signs of the South is more a product of their cultural evolution than attachments to bronze and cloth.  The shifts in demography and political power over that same century and a half are the result of the industrialization and urbanization that followed the defeat of slavery as an economic institution.

            In truth, rural people and places in the South have been decimated by the same economic-political forces that left people in Flint, Michigan drinking water from their contaminated river and too poor to protest.  They’re the same forces that have depopulated the rural Midwest, Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and yes, even rural California.  These forces have made laborers out of farmers around the globe and are now making welfare families out of laborers with high-tech robots.  The erosion of work for working people is silently killing us, while the triumphs of technology are trumpeted.

            In the name of that invisible reality, I brought a bucket of dirt into the sanctuary of Exeter United Methodist Church a week ago.  I’d hoped to create an epiphany that dirt is not profane, but sacred, and that those who work in dirt are people for whom we, as people of faith, should have concern.  Then we sang John Pitney’s cheerful song “Get Down and Get Dirty,” which goes: 

Get down and get dirty,

It’s the name of the game.

Get down and get dirty,

‘Cause we’re made from the same.

Yahweh sure got down and dirty

When He made us from the prairie;

The fact that we are not now dirt

Is only temporary.”

            Many of us have fear about speaking up in public or putting our bodies on the line in the face of hate.  Heather Heyer, the young woman killed by that neo-Nazi’s raging car, was frightened of going to the protest and went anyway.  But there are other forms of violence that need our attention, too.   May the rest of us who temporarily are not now dirt use our God-metered breaths in service to humanity and Creation.

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

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

 

 

 

 

Saving Towns

Published August 9, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “How was your sermon?” a friend asked Sunday afternoon.  I forgot that I wrote about it last week, but was pleased she remembered.

     

      “It went well,” I said.  “The people were beautiful.  They sang along with me and listened to every word.  I felt so encouraged by their responses….”  My friend grinned, hugged me with congratulations, and went on with her day.

     It was only after I got home that I realized why I felt so heartened.  “There might be some hope for our towns yet,” I thought, an epiphany about the sermon’s true purpose.

           

     For years I have described myself as a small-farm advocate.  The substance of the Gospel According to John Pitney is that the church has a right and a responsibility to care about the structure of agriculture and be involved in making it more sustainable and just.  This is true in California especially, since we lead the country in mega-farms and the requisite “innovations.”  Some of those innovations make it possible to feed more people from land that would normally feed only jackrabbits and rattlesnakes.  Some of those innovations steal markets from other regions where water is less scarce and climate less accommodating, however.

     Some of those innovations also steal jobs, livelihoods, even whole industries.  And where the damage is felt first, second and third is in our rural towns.

           

     I didn’t speak Sunday about my fears for our citrus belt towns.  I sense an earthquake coming as I watch farmhouses disappear and groves of navels being pushed and replanted to mandarins destined for the mega-packing facilities in Kern County.  As these farms are consolidated, the lands surrounding our towns are tended by mobile crews who move from parcel to parcel with no one supervising the work or being there to watch the results.  Fewer acres are being tended by people who live there year after year and know the wet spots, the cold spots, the average crop, the normal bug population or how things are varying this year from last.

     Then there’s the ongoing mechanization of the packinghouses, which is eliminating 75%- 90% of the jobs at each one.  In the past, the availability of winter work in citrus packing has made it possible for the laboring population to move up occupationally and become permanent residents, keeping their kids in school and becoming citizens.  What will towns like Lindsay do when they’re no longer incubators for immigrant stabilization and progress?  Lindsay’s city fathers and mothers bemoan the loss of our middle class, but it’s the working people who have kept us afloat so far.  When they leave, we’ll look more like empty Dust Bowl towns than orange-growing communities.

     Most of our town governments do not see the connection between agriculture and Main Street.  That’s unfortunate, but one role the people of faith could adopt is to bring these realities to their attention.  I look forward to singing and speaking more with you in the future.

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

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

Imagining Justice

Published August 2, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The good people of Exeter United Methodist Church celebrated Christmas last Sunday, July 30^th.  It was a beautiful service.  The bulletin bore a nativity scene on the cover, with shepherds and angels and wise men surrounding the holy family under the signal star.  We sang “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” and “Joy to the World.”  The children lighted a pint-sized Christmas tree, and in his sermon, Pastor Mark Smith excitedly ripped the ribbon and wrapping paper from a box, the forgotten present under the Christmas tree, the gift of faith.  “Be like little children with that gift,” he encouraged us, demonstrating the idea beautifully.

           

     I was grateful that I listened to my inner adult that morning and took myself to their church.  It was the perfect antidote to last week’s toxic news.  Between a truckload of dead immigrants from south of the border discovered in a Texas Walmart parking lot, the political MADness in Washington over healthcare, and North Korea’s ICBM, my faith account was overdrawn.  Being among people of faith celebrating their creation story was cleansing.

           

     I also learned that this coming Sunday, the 6^th  is the day I get to fill in for Mark, not the 13^th like I thought.  Although the fewer days for preparation might seem like an inconvenience, the timing couldn’t be better, because the message I want to bring is about the work of Christmas.  Now we can have Epiphany in August!

           

     My epiphany occurred back in April, a day or so before I ran into Rod Capps at RN Market.  “What are you up to these days?” he asked.  “I just discovered I want to preach the Gospel according to John – John Pitney,” I said boldly, surprised at the words that came out of my mouth.  “I have some pulpit vacancies I want to fill,” he said, getting out his calendar.  And here we are.

           

     Now, I’ve preached the Gospel of JP here in this column many times.  He’s the Methodist minister songwriter from Oregon whose body of work on land, the church, and the common good allowed me to see the faith dimension in my socio-economic research on agricultural communities.  His songs buttress me as I drive around our region, watching almonds replace stone fruit and vineyards, watching mandarins replace navels and valencias, watching small towns erode and small farms disappear.   They buttress me in my belief that we can find a better way to produce food and an economy,  a better relationship between ourselves and land which will produce more neighborly relations with others and fulfill our covenant with God.  They keep me imagining justice.

           

     And that’s the epiphany, really:  that there could be more justice in this world, and that the people of faith could be instrumental in bringing that about.  There could be more justice in our towns and our countryside, in our land relations and our politics.  And though the prospect seems daunting, claiming that truth begins with imagining.

           

     Come join us for Epiphany in August, Sunday the 6^th at 10:30 a.m.  All are welcome.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a small town researcher who writes – and prays.  You can send her your land epiphanies c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beyond Dreaming

Published in abbreviated form June 21, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This morning I woke with a dream that was more like a backward vision.  I was in the old Lindsay Gazette office on Honolulu St. awaiting the bad news (for me) from Reggie Ellis (who was still the editor) that I was being laid off, even though in the dream (as in real life) I was not an employee.  The paper simply no longer could afford to give me these column inches, he said, because “no one reads anymore.”  The paper’s fate was looking grim.

           

     I know the dream was in the past not only because the Gazette had not yet merged with the Exeter Sun, but because the town still had two hardware stores.  I had just written about one of them, a beautiful piece (I thought) about how the community gathered not only its goods there, but also a sense of well-being and purpose, as well as a portion of its local news (sometimes known as gossip.)  A good hardware store is even better than the grocery for reinforcing our domestic claim to this place and each other, since there we tend our homes and not just our stomachs.  Pipe fittings and curtain rods, nails, nuts and bolts; seedlings in spring, lawn rakes and leaf bags in fall; tools for the garden and garage, picture hangars and furnace filters, flags to fly on the Fourth of July – a good hardware store is really the hub of town.           

     Lindsay had two hardware stores when I moved here in 1993.  Then Western Auto closed, followed a couple of years later by Race and Landers’ True Value.  For several years we had no hardware store at all, until Art Serna re-opened the True Value across the street from the Race and Landers building, which remains empty to this day.  In my dream this reality was just a trajectory, the future foreseen but yet to be fulfilled.

           

     For someone in my research area, small towns are like canaries in the mine.  When they start to die off, it’s a sign that something toxic is in the air, figuratively speaking.  It’s easy to blame our small towns’ disintegration on the growth of Visalia, Tulare and Porterville, with their medical facilities, big-box stores and other worldly attractions.  But what’s really crumbling is the ground beneath our feet:  the smaller, resident, owner-operated farm system built by the agricultural cooperatives of Sunkist and Lindsay Olive, sustained locally by the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District distributing the waters from the federal Friant-Kern Canal.

           

     Remnants of that system remain, but giant chunks have been replaced by urban investors and the fruits of industrial agriculture.  This does not bode well for the town, much less the remaining hardware store - or the newspaper, for that matter.  Yet these towns we live in – Lindsay, Exeter, Farmersville, Woodlake, even unincorporated Ivanhoe and Strathmore – are critical to the well-being of our region and nation.  They are the incubators of citizenship and the seedbeds of our humanity.

           

     There is much we can do to conserve this social resource.  We can protect the remnants, and use them to generate the new, sustainable agricultural system we need.  We can learn from them how to build churches and civic organizations, support the schools, and generate new businesses with the wisdom from their experience.  We can “buy local” and grow our own rather than put our money where the ravenous corporate mouth is.  We can rebuild sustainable towns by rebuilding sustainable farms that raise families who know where food comes from and communities connected to their source of livelihood.

           

     “Impossible,” you say? Not according to my Methodist songwriter-friend John Pitney, who has spent his entire ministry singing and preaching that reality back to life in rural places across the country.  John’s work has brought to life the theology of land in the Judeo-Christian tradition in places like Idaho, the Great Plains, Washington and Oregon.  He even planted a mustard seed of hope here in Fresno in 1992.   It’s not impossible, John says, because we’re being called to that work by our Creator.  In the last verse of one of his songs, “If You Want Your Neighbor’s Land,” he writes:

 

 “Now it may be beyond our dreaming

when we see the land divided

and re-familied by the neighbors

who can keep the world from fear. 

 

But you should know it’s not our cleverness

that keeps the land reforming,

but that Wisdom beyond dreaming

that returns our children here.”

 

           

     And all the people say “Amen.”

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

Trudy Wischemann is a once-nomadic researcher who came home to write. You can send her your land & kitchen reform ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Standing Tall

To be published Dec. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “The Corps of Engineers just denied the permit half an hour ago” said my step-mother triumphantly in Sunday’s phone call.  She knew I’d welcome that news even though our conversations haven’t traversed the Standing Rock Sioux’s territory or the corporate pipeline that threatens it. 

           

     The bravery of those people camping out at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers in defense of their rights to their lands has had me standing taller lately.  However, to think that our government could respond appropriately at this moment of great need – in fact, the Corps of Engineers, which is not known for its interest in public input – has re-instated my belief in this system.  Suddenly I feel glad to be Uncle Sam’s daughter.

           

     It’s all about land, when it comes right down to it, how land matters ‘way more than we think.  The Standing Rock Sioux know how much land matters, as do most Native American tribes.  Despite treaties and lands reserved for their exclusive use, their history is peppered with losses of control over resources and their quality of life to the kind of thinking behind the Dakota Access Pipeline.  

           

    It’s watching others stand up for land that’s straightened my backbone, like Dave Archambault, the Standing Rock tribal chairman, who was interviewed Friday on the PBS News Hour.  Responding to the pipeline CEO’s statement that the tribe was worried about nothing, he said “If the safeguards are all there, why not put it (back to the original route) north of Bismark?”

           

     “He (the CEO) will say that it can’t go there because of the population of the community, the environmental impacts, the sacred sites that are there, the wetlands that it has to cross. These are all the same concerns that we have. It’s just that we’re a lot fewer (in population.)  And so, if there is no worry, if the safeguards are there, then relocate it to that location. That’s OK.”

               

     As he said this, his face showed nothing: no anger, no glee at beating that kind of logic at its own game, no snide-bordering-on-vindictive disgust like my face would have shown had I pulled that off.  He was remarkable, sitting there in the News Hour studio in his light blue, button-down collar shirt, no jacket, no tie, no eagle feathers in his hair or silver jewelry draped around his neck.  He was just a man speaking truth to power who had come to Washington to discuss his peoples’ concerns with the federal government, which Sunday’s news confirmed was worth the effort.

           

     The news earlier in the week that several thousand veterans would be joining the tribes at their encampment, intending to make a human wall between the land protectors and the proto-military police forces who had drenched the protestors with water cannons the week before, had confirmed the national importance of this seemingly tiny decision.  Have we not had enough of our culture’s and our government’s ignorant, arrogant demeaning treatment of native people?  The veterans’ actions say that we have.

           

     I feel that the efforts of the Standing Rock tribe and other Americans, Native and natural-born citizens both, have been a great gift to those of us who feel compelled to question the erosive aspects of “development.”  “We have every right to protest this pipeline,” Archambault said.  “We have indigenous lands, we have ancestral lands, we have treaty lands. The pipeline is 500 feet from our reservation border.… (I)t’s unfortunate that this nation continues to treat our tribe and tribal nations around this country in this manner.”

           

     Monday morning I logged on to the PBS News Hour website to follow up the Corps’ announcement.  There, in an article by Jenni Monet, was a photo of a 97-year-old woman standing in a gymnasium on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation Saturday, waiting to greet the veterans arriving in support.  First Lt. Marcela LeBeau of the Lakota tribe had served in the U.S. Army as a nurse between 1944 and 1947.  Dressed in a plum-colored, dress-length Ultrasuede raincoat, her powder-blue snow parka lying on a folding table behind her, her silver hair piled high on her head, Lt. LeBeau stood tall as she waited for the volunteer troops with a placid, peaceful smile on her face, a smile only slightly wider than the Mona Lisa’s.  Did she know then that this effort was going to work?  Or did she only know that it was the right thing to do, regardless?

    When governments and corporations do not respect the laws of the land or the people who live there, we all have every right to protest.  In fact, I believe we have an obligation.  Standing tall at Standing Rock, the veterans of wars both foreign and domestic have shown us how to reclaim our democracy. May we stand tall with them in support and spirit.

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

Trudy Wischemann researches issues of land ethics, land use and land tenure from her home in Lindsay.  For more information on the Standing Rock efforts, go to www.pbsnewshour.org.  To contribute funds to these efforts, visit http://www.rop.org/rural-oregon-stands-standing-rock/. Thanks to rural minister/songwriter John Pitney for this recommendation.  See also Waddie Mitchell's lyrics to Juni Fisher's song "Still Here," described in this blog Feb. 11, 2015.

 

 

 

 

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.

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.

A Little Drought Music

Published in edited form October 1, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.
    
     Sunday morning, when I woke to a sunrise dampened by orange-edged clouds and robins singing for rain, I felt blessed to have such beauty in my life.  Then the first drops sounded on the patio roof, and I ran outside to the clothesline where I’d hung my cotton quilt to dry the night before.  In my bedroom I unfolded the heavy wooden clothes rack my aunt had used many winters in Washington and spread the quilt on it to continue drying, proud that I’d tricked Coyote into releasing some moisture from those clouds.  I was making a pot of tea when the drops increased to a shower, and went back outside to drag a few more things under cover.  Then I poured a steaming cup and sat inside reveling in this music so familiar to my Pacific Northwestern ears.
    
     Saturday I’d spent time working on an answer to Mas Masumoto’s call for some “art of the drought” in last Sunday’s Fresno Bee (9/22/14.)  He used the example of Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” and its impact on public opinion during the Okie/Arkie migration from the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.  I know the photo well, and many of her others:  I worked with the photographer’s husband, Paul Taylor, near the end of his life during my early days at Berkeley.  He knew the power of her art, and when they combined it with his facts and knowledge, they created a document of that drought’s causes and effects - An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion - that was never surpassed. 
    
     This drought is different, at least the one here in California that politicians are trying to fix with legislation and taxpayer monies.  There were no irrigation projects then in the midwestern half of the country when farmers (mostly small independent, tenant and sharecrop families) were dried up and blown off the land.  After awhile, politicians tried to fix things with legislation and taxpayer monies, but ended up benefiting mostly the larger farmers who turned their tenants and sharecroppers out, replacing them with tractors purchased with the government funds.  This, in turn, enabled them to buy out (for pennies on the dollar) their drought-stricken small-farm neighbors still plowing with mules.
    
     About two-thirds down in Mas’s column there’s an uncharacteristically political suggestion that voters should approve the water bond in the upcoming November election.  The point of the piece is that artists should find ways to the voters hearts to help make that happen, although he never comes right out and says so, or explains why they should.  That would be fine with me if I were sure the bond would be used to provide more water where it’s needed, which I think is on the smaller, independently owned farms the irrigation projects were built to support in the first place, but I’d have to be brain dead to be convinced of that.  In California water always flows uphill to the pinnacles of power, and we’re hardly even embarrassed anymore to admit that yes, the big boys and girls will get their share first, and we get to share what’s left.  I think the hope is simply that if there’s more supply, the shortage will have more acre-feet in it and go around a little further.  Maybe this drought’s not so different after all.
    
     Knowing Mas’s good heart, however, I think what he was really calling for was art that would call on us as a people to share the shortage, bond together and lean into the wind, to work on fixing the problems together that this drought has revealed.  Like “Come on, people now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try and love one another right now,”  that line from the Youngbloods’ song from our era, Mas’s and mine, our beautifully idealistic generation so crassly labeled “Boomers.”  To put our money, our water, our efforts and our faith where our mouths are.  That, of course, would require us to rise up united and take the power back from those who are using the drought to advance their family fortunes, like the Resnick’s and the Westlands’ Fortune 600’s.  Like John Vidovich’s Sandridge Partners, who Judge Harry N. Papadakis “just said no” to a couple of months back.  It would require us - even the educated “us” - to get educated about water in California, and from some entity other than the California Water Foundation, which serves as a mouthpiece for the big boys, teaching us the proper propaganda to make us good citizens of their empires.
    
     After Sunday morning’s blessed rainfall, when God let those raindrops blow where and when He willed, I have a song to suggest we learn to sing in these days of anxious anticipation of the coming water year.  It’s a song by John Pitney, that dairy kid turned Methodist minister from Oregon, titled “I Will Sing,” pure Judeo-Christian tradition straight out of the Book of Habakkuk.  It’s about being thankful for what we have and trusting God will provide, even in times of drought or other hardship.  Here’s the first verse:


When the fig tree’s barren in the field,
I will sing, I will sing.
And the produce of the olive fails,
I will sing, I will sing.
When the fields are yielding up no food,
And the flock be cut off from the fold,
And there be no cattle in the stalls,
I will sing, I will sing.

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

Trudy Wischemann is a Pitney disciple who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your drought music ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.