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.

Clean Jars

Published March 25, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “You were spoiled,” a friend at church kindly chided me after reading last week’s column.  I was raised with running water and indoor plumbing; neither he nor his wife was.  I loved hearing their stories of different times and places.  I kindly did not ask if they would go back to living that way.

     But their generation’s lifeways are not the only ones being left behind in the sweep of industrial history.  Mine are, too, something I discovered in a long, luxurious evening phone call with a friend (which itself was impossible when my mother was raising her family.)

           

     We were talking about reducing the clutter in our lives.  She had spent Sunday going through her collection of magazines.  They had been sitting behind her couch in boxes and bags since she moved seven years ago.  Recently retired, she found herself with a new job:  what to do with her archive of New Yorkers and college alumni magazines?  I loved hearing the gentleness she applied to both her magazines and herself.  There was no condemnation for having kept these things, which I hear from so many of my other friends at this stage in our lives.

           

     But then she surprised me.  We moved on to her collection of empty jars, which I also have in abundance.  “You know, some of them are canning jars, which are good forever.  But there’s also the perfectly good jars from pickles and things, which I save.  I finally put them into the dishwasher for one last time, each one with its lid.  Then I bagged them up and took them down to Goodwill.”  My heart took a lurch for her gentle soul, knowing what was coming.           

     “I handed this man my bags, and he said ‘What’s this?’  ‘Clean jars with lids,’ I told him.  He just looked at me weird, then said ‘Recycle them.’”  We let the silence between us speak for itself a moment.

           

     Clean jars with lids.  I know that phrase from my childhood.  We save them to hold collections of screws and nails (short, medium, long;) thumbtacks, hooks and eyes, still-good zippers ripped out of old dresses or the last half of the batch of tartar sauce we made but didn’t eat.  We save them because they’re still good for a lot of things, and because it took energy to manufacture them that will be wasted if they get smashed up in the recycling process.  We save them to hold small batches of jam we might make this summer or olives we might cure this fall.  We save them because they still have value, even if no one would buy them, not even at a thrift store.

           

     My sewing machine jammed when I tried to fix a dog collar last week.  One look at the yellow pages told me sewing machine repairmen are almost extinct.  When I asked the women at church if they knew of a good one, they said “Who sews?”  I thought of my shelves of fabric, the boxes of patterns and notions I have saved, and realized I have neglected some of the most basic living skills I learned to survive. 

           

     I think I’ll call my friend and tell her what our golden years are for:  reviving those survival skills, not casting them off for greater dependence on what the corporations want to provide.  As a society, we might need those skills someday.

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Trudy Wischemann is a crocheter who writes.  You can send her your list of almost dead survival skills c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.