Home Land

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


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

           

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

           

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

           

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

           

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

           

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

           

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

           

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

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

Beyond 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.

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.

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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.

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.

Here, Now

Published Dec. 31, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Here we stand, 10 days into the new solar year, 7 days past the miracle in a manger, now ready to turn the page on December, close the calendar on 2014.  It’s a threshold, a movement away from honoring continuity with the past with gifts and traditions, through a doorway toward self-conscious resolutions and hoped-for newness.  What lessons of Christmas will we take into the new year?


     We live in a Post-Manger world.  Pastors in some of our churches will continue with the Jesus story: the warnings in dreams, the trip to Egypt as a refuge from homeland insecurity, the massacre of all Jewish male children between the ages of 1 and 3 ordered by their king.  The dark night in Israel that forced God’s hand to deliver his Son through the womb of a teenage peasant girl, the lowliest of the low, continued for another 30 years while the boy grew into a man, a lifetime for some people.  Indeed, the darkness continued after his death three years later and continues to this day.


     We are not there in Judea, some of you might say, that flash-point, hot-bed Middle East.  We are here in the Tulare Lake Basin, in the central, holy portion, neither on the forested upland slopes with thin soils in the headwaters, nor in the swampy end-point full of tules and cattails.  Especially here in the Kaweah’s drainage, we’re in the fertile section of the sweetest, most productive watershed in California.


     And it’s not then, you might say, when Caesar and Herod rode roughshod over everything and everyone.  It’s now, when we have law and order and a democratic system to keep things functioning properly, an economy that produces the good life for many.  It’s not there and then, it’s here and now.  What lessons apply?


     Water is one.  When Caesar built an aqueduct to serve his new city of Caesarea on the coast of Israel, it deprived lands of water in the surrounding countryside and impoverished the peasants who depended on that water for survival.  The inability of Tulare County’s Board of Supervisors to come to the aid of those whose wells were drained by the CEMEX mining operation demonstrates that our democratic law and order needs some fine tuning.  Citizen participation is needed in 2015.


     Land is another.  Near the end of his ministry, Jesus warned the daughters of Jerusalem that their good life was coming to an end, that they would be moaning before it was over.  The complicity of the Jewish kings and priests with the Romans, forgetting their compact with God and impoverishing their own people, would bring an end to that urban religious fortress.  The impetus for the good life that deprives others of life whatsoever won’t be tolerated, Jesus was warning.  Inequitable relations between people and land, people and natural resources, people and the good life, result inevitably in destruction.


     If that babe in a manger means anything, it is that we must seek judicious distribution of the earth’s resources, must find ways to share the wealth.  Here, now in the Tulare Lake Basin and in the entire state, we are ‘way overdue in addressing imbalances of power over water and land, and facing more enormous challenges than ever before.  In 2015, let us resolve to take this birth more seriously and bear upon our administrators and representatives the crux of its message.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Methodist Quaker who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your interpretations of the Christmas/New Years threshold c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

           

Earth and Heaven

Published Dec. 24, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     For the past month, as the days have marched quietly toward the Solstice and the Manger, I’ve been reading two experts on the relationship between earth and heaven to keep me centered on the realities of this season.


     Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterian pastor and scholar who translated the Bible into contemporary language in The Message, has a book of daily reflections called Living the Message.  The December 15th entry was particularly meaningful for me, because he wrote about the importance to his family of the book by Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It.  He said they loved it because “it gave dignity and a sense of holiness to our place, a place that was home to us....We already knew it was a holy place, but the book confirmed and deepened our reverence.  The book functioned as a shrine, calling attention to this place:  this is holy ground -- worship God here.”


     Walter Brueggemann, also a Presbyterian and theologian who wrote The Land:  Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith in 1977 (reissued in 2002 in an expanded second edition,) has become the grandfather of a growing movement in land theology.  Briefly, he has reinterpreted the Old Testament message from a placeless chronicle of God’s acts in history to one of “storied place” in which the main theme becomes the covenant with God in the land (a state of landed-ness) and the movements to and from land-less-ness when God’s people weren’t holding up their end in covenant.  The refocus of the connection between God and Earth is radical, but heaven-sent.  It’s a window on a new faith relationship with land and place which is long overdue.


     In this season we’re keenly aware of the journey of Joseph and pregnant Mary from their rural home village, Nazareth, to Bethlehem.  And it’s not because they had better hospitals in Bethlehem, but so that they could be counted and taxed for the new cities the Roman Caesar was building in their country with the complicity of the Jewish priests and King Herod.  In effect, Joseph and Mary and the majority of the Jewish people were in exile in their own country, occupied by urban foreigners who extracted the wealth of the land through the fingers of the rural peasants.  The night the star shone bright and the angels came down singing hosannas to this newborn child and scaring the wits out of some innocent shepherds who went away singing - that night was not dark just because it was winter in Israel.  It was a dark time in the history of God’s people, and he was shining a light on that, too.


     And who were God’s people?  In the Christmas story we see that being Jewish did not ensure that status.  Herod was Jewish, but he’d broken his covenant long before the angel Gabriel gave Mary the good news.  The Wise Men were not Jewish, but they listened and followed God’s instructions, tripping Herod and saving the infant Jesus from the king’s murderous scheme.  My reading of Brueggemann suggests that God’s people were those who kept covenant in the land and the poor, those who had been dispossessed of land but still honored their Maker, having faith that sooner or later, God would redeem his people and restore them to land from which to make their living.


     In the Lord’s Prayer we say “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  I pray that message will become bright and clear this Christmas:  that this means here, now.  Watch for the light tonight.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Quaker writer who worships with the Methodists in Lindsay, where there will be a Candlelight service tonight at 6 p.m.  Send her your starlit sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.