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.”

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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.

God Willing

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

   Since I was a little girl, I have loved the phrase “God willing and the creeks don’t rise.”  I love its use as a preface to some intention, such as “God willing and the creeks don’t rise, I’ll clean out those gutters today.”  The phrase warns that something important is coming while recognizing that not everything is in our control. 

    I love its use as punctuation to a vow:  “I’ll be there Saturday, God willing and the creeks don’t rise.”  I love the tag-team match of God and the weather.  I love its friendliness to colloquial speech.  But I think I love most its hydrologic understanding of creeks.

    I love creeks.  I love their scale, from headwater trickles to churning, muddy uncrossable floods.  I love their responsiveness to rain, the way we can see the connection between what falls and what runs off.  The fact that Yokohl Creek is running right now excites many people to go watch.  For me, seeing humble Lewis Creek come to life feels like Grace.

    This watershed we live in, once known simply as the Four Creeks Region, is unique in its form.  In part due to the geologic uplift pressing Mineral King ever skyward, the mountain flows of the Kaweah River split into four main fingers when it hits the valley floor, spreading horizontally rather than cutting deep, and dropping the heavy load of sediments, which becomes our precious soil.  The smaller, more manageable scale of the Four Creeks is what made new white settlers in the 1850’s choose this area first.  They thought they could cut channels into the creek banks and divert the water for irrigation without losing their headgates to flooding every year when the creeks did rise.  Some years they were right.

    I attended the Tulare County Historical Society annual meeting last Sunday, where Richard Zack presented some of the interesting stories he uncovered while writing the history of the Tulare Irrigation District.  I started writing that history more than a decade ago, but was grateful when Richard, the son of Dave Zack who managed the Tulare Irrigation District most of his life and was responsible for major water rights decisions on the division of flows upon construction of Lake Kaweah, was able to take over the project.  As engineers, both Richard and Dave had a different perspective on TID’s history than I did, and theirs matched TID’s purpose of having that history written far better than what mine would have produced.

    Listening to Richard Zack’s presentation, however, I was reminded of what the engineering perspective leaves out.  In telling the story of how a downstream group of landowners gained legal and physical control over the inconstant flows of a river and converted that into a semi-reliable supply of water for irrigation, reliable enough to build farming enterprises solid enough to support a town, the stories of the upstream losers in that contest for water were slighted.  The natural history of the watershed was invisible.  So were the future  consequences of TID’s management on our experience of this place as a part of the Four Creeks region.

    Sitting in Tulare, looking from TID’s perspective, the issues of the twenty-year lawsuit with Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District and the more recent fight to prevent lining the creek channels with concrete would be seen as an annoyance, an inconvenience, a waste of time and resources by anyone, I’m sure.  But LSID’s plan in the 1930’s to pump groundwater from the Kaweah fan and export it to farmlands around Lindsay through the Highline Canal is an early (and small-scale) precedent of the interbasin transfers that would follow, from the Friant-Kern Canal (carrying San Joaquin River water to points far south of its watershed) to the State Water Project, which takes water from multiple rivers in the Sacramento Valley to slake the thirst of westside owners of sagebrush land and the huge coastal metropolises of Los Angeles and San Diego. Lining the channels to increase TID deliveries would have robbed the groundwater table for those east of Visalia and made the effects of this drought far worse than it was.  TID’s current efforts to “bury” the channels wherever development takes over from farming will amount to another loss to groundwater, not to mention the beauty of the landscape.

    Where, and to whom, does water belong?  Is there any other right to water besides the right to its use?  Does the landscape or the region hold any title to the waters that give them their identity?  Do the people who live there have a right to experience this primary fact of nature?

    Those are not engineers’ questions, but I think they should be ours.  They crop up continuously in the research reports and essays, short stories and poems I’ve collected for this long-overdue book on California agriculture and the common good now coming to completion.  God willing, after the book’s publication, these questions will crop up more in our public discussions about appropriate uses of water and more equitable distribution of this essential natural resource.  After its publication, God willing, the creeks will still rise in some places.

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Trudy Wischemann is a western Washingtonian born with webs between her toes.  You can send your favorite flood stories to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

Silver Linings

Published in edited form April 22, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     We’ve entered Orange Blossom Week with no orange blossoms left on the trees, a combination of the drought-induced early bloom and the late timing of the event (caused in part by trying to avoid conflict with Easter.)  It struck me as odd until I remembered silver linings.

     The whole idea that there are silver linings to even the darkest storm clouds is really a biblical concept:  that in dire conditions God may be sending a hidden blessing.  Reading Habakkuk this weekend, I discovered that the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians was God’s winnowing hand, a way of recovering His people from their lust for other gods and the domination of the common people by the sin-filled, greedy Jewish elite.

     An orange grower friend called last week to catch up. Living outside the boundaries of the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District, he pumps groundwater to irrigate his trees. In normal years all he has to worry about is the winter recharge of his wells, Edison rates, and the lifespans of his pumps.  This year his worry is doubled by the possibility that neighbors, again having no surface water deliveries from the district, will draw down the aquifer and leave his pumps high and dry.  

     “The bloom was light,” he added, contemplating the possibility that there may not be enough crop to warrant irrigating beyond keeping the trees alive.  “That could be a silver lining,” I thought to myself.  Then he said “But I see the baby oranges already.”  I knew immediately that this true farmer will do everything he can to get those oranges to maturity and to the packinghouse, where my neighbors will find work this winter and be able to keep living here.

     The drought itself may have a silver lining.  I find myself holding my breath a lot, too aware (thanks to my education) that our population is well above the natural carrying capacity of this land and that the physical, political and social infrastructure we have created to amend that natural capacity is fragile.  In many places it is broken, perhaps beyond redeeming.

     That awareness has made me super-conscious of my domestic water use.  I find myself dedicating more of my day conserving the water I use and hauling the best of the used water outside to my plants and trees. “Run once, use twice” has become my new motto. These efforts have a silver lining: they connect me to this little piece of land I live on and give me a supportive role in its life.

     It has also led me to look for models of how we here in California might begin to resolve some of the raging conflicts over water supply and use.  Most people who think this drought is man-made look to Sacramento as the location of the evil-doers.  But if they  look west, like where my walnut grower friend who sits on the board of the Tulare Irrigation District looked, discovering a 40-acre “pump farm” where Boswell is pumping Tulare ID’s conscientiously-recharged aquifer with 29 huge pumps running 24/7, they will see that we have neighbors to blame (or at least hold accountable) in this shortage.

     In the early 1990’s, in a similarly-raging water war in Idaho, a woman named Janice Brown, who ran a trout-fishing motel on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, teamed up with Dale Swenson, the head of the local irrigation district, to form the Henry’s Fork Watershed Council.  The council brought together all the competing interests to learn to manage the flows of the Henry’s Fork for the benefit of all.  The first two years were fearful.  But by the late 1990’s, more than 150 people participated in the coalition, including river-runners, loggers, farmers and land managers, and the coalition had reached a point where it stood for equitable use of the river’s flows for all the economic sectors involved.  (Visit www.henrysfork.org to view their continuing efforts.)

     For those of us served by the Friant-Kern, who live outside the watershed where the majority of our water has come for 60 years, this concept may be more difficult to fathom.  But the need is there.  Maybe the silver lining of this drought is that we will begin to acknowledge the conflicts over water development and use, and begin finding solutions - together.

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Trudy Wischemann is a faithful water and community development researcher who writes.  You can send her your silver lining stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Free Rein

Published in slightly edited form March 11, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“We gallop everywhere we go
 I just loop the reins
And I never say Whoa
To my little red horse.”

     I’m borrowing these lines from a Juni Fisher song to show the roots of the common phrase “free rein.” For those who have never been on a horse’s back, it may not help much.  But being astride an animal ten or fifteen times heavier, stronger and faster than yourself, and letting him have his head, so to speak – can teach the meaning of another common phrase, “hang on.”  You’d better hope your hands can find the reins and “rein him in” (to use another common phrase) as you approach the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

     Last week, when I wrote “Free Rain,” I was hearing this other “rein” in my head.  For almost 40 years I have been researching and writing about California’s water story.  No matter what the issue or urgency, the largest landowners in this valley always have had free rein over the water supply.  They have had free rein over the regulators of our water supply.  They most always have free rein even over the media reporting the news about our water supply.

     Last week I wrote about the letter the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District (LSID) sent to its landowners about the availability of water to purchase at $1,300/acre-foot (af).  The seller listed was not a government agency but a contractor for State Water Project (SWP) water.  I called Scott Edwards, the manager of LSID, to find out who had water to sell and to learn more about the circumstances.

     “Tejon,” he said is the seller.  He thinks there are two other districts asking to buy the offered water and does not yet know how much LSID will receive of the 865 af requested.  I asked who within our district was able to buy this water, and he said “It’s all kinds of people, not just the big guys,” understanding the meaning of my question.

    

     Tejon is a familiar name to most of us, but rings a special bell in my mind.  Tejon Ranch was (and probably still is) the largest landowner in the Arvin-Edison Water Storage District, which surrounds the town of Arvin, one of the two towns I’ve studied since 1981.  Only part of its lands lie within the district boundaries, but even those acres were well in excess of the 160-acre limitation that was supposed to apply to Friant-Kern water when it was first received by that district.  The limitation was never enforced.    

    

     Tejon also receives SWP water through the Kern County Water Agency, which accounts for the availability of water to sell to the Tulare and Fresno County districts who don’t.  Paul Taylor, the Berkeley economist who was the champion of the acreage limitation provisions, understood the State Water Project as one of several means the large landowners created to circumvent the 160-acre law.

    
     Besides offering irrigation water for sale at usurious prices, the large landowners are using their free rein invisibly in other ways, particularly through groundwater pumping.  A friend who sits on the board of Tulare Irrigation District told me that he has become concerned about the water banking his district and the City of Tulare have done diligently for the past 10 years being tapped by Boswell’s “pump farm” to the west.  Thought to be 40 acres with 28 wells, the location is not known, much less how much water they are pumping, where it is being used, or how it is being transported.  No government agency is yet in charge of groundwater pumping.  We have no reins.

    

     The North Rim approaches.  What will we do?

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Trudy Wischemann is a voluntary water conserver who worries about agriculture and writes in town.  You can send her your water saving tips c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Free Rain

Published in slightly edited form March 4, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.


     At dawn two Sundays ago, I was drawn outside by the sound of tomcats fighting.  My face caught the first few drops of rain. I felt blessed.


     Within the hour, there was a downpour, then a few more through the afternoon and evening.  We were getting the soaking we’ve needed all February, just in the knick of time. 


     This past weekend’s rain opened March just as sweetly, with snow in the mountains all the way down to the spine of Blue Ridge.  The foothills’ sparse vegetation was revealed by the patches of exposed soil darkened with moisture appearing between the patches of green.  The grasses and mustard, filaree and fiddleneck will all get a new lease on life in the next few days.  The cattle and their keepers say thank you.


     These two rainy weekends have been a sweet taste of hope in this foreboding year, potentially more disastrously dry than even last year.  Fourth in a row:  how many more can our small farmers take?  How many orange groves and peach orchards will have to die so that Paramount can grow almonds on the westside, where there never is enough moisture, to export to China?


     According to a letter sent by Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District to its landowners in late January, a water district in the State Water Project (serving water to lands south of Westlands Water District on its way to LA,) was offering to sell water to LSID at $1,300 per acre-foot.  Landowners within LSID who wanted to reserve some of that water had to pay the entire amount up-front before Feb. 6th.  If the water did not become available, their money would be returned; if the water was even more expensive, they would have to pay the balance before delivery.


     For those of you who do not farm, those numbers won’t mean anything.  But here’s something to compare it with:  if the cost of gasoline increased from its current low of $3.00/gal. to $40.00/gal. in one year, could you afford to commute to your job?   Would you consider moving, or look for a job closer to home?  A farmer cannot pick up her farm and go where water is cheaper, cannot trade it in for a less water-intensive crop to grow overnight.  What would you do?


     It makes it clear just how much rain is like grace.  This water came to us for free, fell on the just and the unjust alike.  It was unearned.  We did not, and could not, do anything to make it happen except hope and pray.  It was pure blessing, even if it turned streets and parking lots muddy from the dirt washed off our roofs, even if it leaked through in a few places.


     There is a need for us to come together, townspeople and countryside folks, to find ways to share the shortage of water.  I don’t want to go through another summer watching sprinklers mindlessly keeping lawns green while orange groves die outside the city limits.


     In the meantime, say thank you for the rain and the hope.  Let us renew our efforts to learn to live in this place with its limitations as well as opportunities.  Amen.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who has been reading Anne Lamott and Lauren Winner this winter.  You can send her your rainy day stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.