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.

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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.

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.

little luxuries

Published September 14, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last week I stopped in at one of my favorite cheap chain stores, the kind where nothing is over one dollar.  I try to keep my purchases there to a minimum, but when I need a little freehanded spending, the kind that makes me feel like I really do belong in American society, it’s the place to go.  That’s where I find the little luxuries that add spice to my life without making it impossible to pay my water bill.

           

     One of the things I brought home from that little splurge was a jar of raspberry jam.  It was a squared-off jar like some of the classy imported jams arrive in, holding 12 oz. of deep ruby red fruit, with the words “world class” and “premium product” on the label.  The label, when I finally got around to reading its backside over my first cup of coffee the next morning, also informed me that it was a product of Egypt, imported indeed.

    

     And that’s when the shame moved in.  One dollar American paid for a glass jar with a metal lid, raspberries, sugar, and pectin; it paid for the energy and labor for processing, and even more for shipping half-way around the world.  What could the Egyptian berry farmers have received for their fruit in this product, or the sugar producers?  The jar manufacturers, the jam makers, the longshoremen loading cases of jam aboard ships?

           

     And what American product did my purchase displace?  The fine jam makers in Fresno County may get $2.50 or $3.00 for their jars of jam produced only an hour away.  Why would I not pay $2.00 more for this little luxury to keep my neighbors in business, reduce (or at least not contribute to increased) greenhouse gases, global warming, pollution of the oceans?  I didn’t even need a new jar of jam:  I found two in the cupboard when I got home.

            And this is the issue I tripped over as I girded up once again to protest the proposed location of a new Dollar General store in Lindsay:  I’m up against the wall of my own buying behaviors.  I know what it could mean to Lindsay’s buying public to have something like a general store back in town, especially one with discount prices where you can snag little luxuries for yourself with the justification of getting a real bargain.  How many of us in our now-not-so-prosperous town can afford to pay full price for things, at least in our minds?  And if it eventually drives stores out of town with higher prices for the same goods made in China or Thailand or even Egypt, like Rite Aid or Art Serna’s hardware store, can we ourselves be blamed?  We only bought one little jar of raspberry jam for ourselves.  Each one of us cannot bear the responsibility for a marketing system gone mad through global trading.  Heck, at least the raspberry growers in Egypt made something instead of nothing in this transaction.

      In many ways the race is already lost, at least for the moment.  Those of us who would, if we could, vote anti-trade in November’s election in honor of the jobs lost to foreign countries in years past, will be standing in line on Dollar General’s opening day, waiting to dive in for the bargains from this globalized fact of life.  I will have eaten all my raspberry jam and begun to save thumb tacks or paper clips in the convenient little squared-off jar, hoping to remember all that little luxury has cost us.

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Trudy Wischemann is a native-born bargain hunter who writes.  You can send her your stories of little luxury hunting c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

The Right to Labor

Published Sept. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     High clouds dim the heat and light this Labor Day morning as I sit down to write, a good day for reflection.  I am celebrating this holiday by exerting my right to labor, even though it is unpaid.  Writing is what I do.

     Many people are celebrating this day by exerting their right to not labor.  On my brief jaunt between Exeter and Lindsay this morning I saw bicyclists coming down off Rocky Hill, exhilarated by their exertions.  Others will celebrate this right to not work by going shopping, cashing in on the Labor Day sales, which have wiped out the right to not work for hundreds of thousands of retail employees who might rather be up at the lake with their friends or attending backyard barbecues.  Thanks to our cultural tendency to celebrate too much, hundreds of thousands of service employees like nurses, EMT’s, rangers and police must also clock in.  Some will even get paid extra for it.

     On my quick trip this morning I saw many others exerting their right to work:  a farmer sitting in his pickup while running furrows in an old orange grove; a farmworker towing a spray rig through rows of citrus; an irrigator on a Kawasaki checking valves in baby mandarins.  A man I know is out near Ivanhoe installing a Blue-Tooth in a harvesting rig for a large walnut grower whose family has been working all weekend getting ready for the shakers.  Walnut growers all over our region are doing the same, their families and employees working overtime.  In farming the days are determined by the progress of the crops, not the calendar.  It’s part of the beauty of farming, if occasionally also part of the grief.

     But mostly my mind is contemplating the larger issue of the right to labor at all.  I started this weekend being interviewed on KFCF’s radio program “Down on the Farm” with Tom Willey.  Tom is an organic farmer in Madera who’s been laboring to feed folks decent food for 40 years, as well as generating programs that promote the small farmer and sustainable agriculture.  For the interview I was joined by Dan O’Connell, a Ph.D. from Cornell who’s worked up farmland conservation easements for Sequoia Riverlands Trust and American Farmland Trust for years and helped start Fresno’s Food Commons.  Dan has organized a speakers series on sustainable ag this fall at the Reedley Peace Center, and the speakers include some of the most important academics and community organizers who have contributed to questions of social justice and environmental quality in our food system for the last 80 years.  The interview with these two men tied up many threads and was mind-enhancing. 

     Then, reading Mark Arax’s phenomenal essay “Phantoms in the fields” in yesterday’s Fresno Bee, the important link between land and the right to labor became clear.  Mark’s story went beyond journalism, portraying the portion of the food system we inhabit locally in our neighborhoods as well as our fields, our politics as well as our plantings. What I saw in his verbal painting was how the right to labor, to earn a living, is determined by the ownership of land.  It is a terrible irony that right now, as some celebrate last week’s legislation increasing the number of hours of overtime pay farm laborers can now receive, their jobs are being eliminated by farmers’ shifts in crops from raisins to almonds, which is, essentially, a decision to mechanize.  No crop is free of this shift, not even olives. Both in the fields and the packinghouses, the landowners’ race is on to replace men and women with machines.

     Perhaps if we understood the “flood” of immigrants from Mexico and points south as being driven by dispossession from land on which people have labored for centuries, people coming here to exert their right to labor somehow, some way, we might seek different solutions.  Until then, building a wall is just an idea for Humpty Trumpty to sit on and make himself feel king-like.  Keep watch for the inevitable.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural researcher who writes.  Thanks to Perla Soria for her educated interest in these issues.  Send your labor rights ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Eulogy Values

Published June 1, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and a conservative commentator on PBS’s News Hour on Friday nights, gave a wonderful presentation in Fresno on May 10^th.  He was promoting his new book called “The Road to Character” which identifies two different value systems.  One he calls “resume” values (i.e., values that define professional success in this society,) and the other, “eulogy” values:  the things people say about you after you are dead and define you as a good person.

           

     “The argument in the book,” he told Fresno Bee reporter Tim Sheehan, “is that we spend a lot of time, especially in our educational system, on (developing) the resume virtues and not enough time on the eulogy (virtues) – are you a good person? – even though we know those are more important.”  He believes that “We’ve become a country that’s just really pleased with itself,” having become “a more narcissistic culture,” “over-politicized and under-moralized,” over the past half century.

           

     With the current level of political debate at the national level, it’s just a darned good time to be thinking about these distinctions.  The gap between these two values systems is where we find ourselves caught in this country.  When Donald Trump confided at the microphone that he was kinda hoping for the housing mortgage bubble to burst ‘way back in 2008, and then defended  himself when Democrats seized on that little revelation with “Hey, what am I supposed to do? I’m a businessman!” – he was trying to straddle that gap.  The fact that he normally stands with both feet on the businessman side apparently is still lost on his supporters.

           

     Or not. There are those who still believe that whatever is good for business is good for the country, that whatever trickles down is better than nothing, I guess.

           

     I believe in trickle up, which is always harder to defend, especially when resume values hold sway or are touted as the only ones that matter.  If we didn’t have to keep writing eulogies, we might forget the other system entirely.  But thankfully we do.  

           

     David Brooks may have been caught in that values gap recently when he wrote a story for the New York Times (republished May 19^th in the Bee) on the philanthropic contributions to the small Westside community of Lost Hills by land and water tycoons Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Paramount fame.  The Resnicks, both noticeably aging in the 2013 photo of them attending a community forum in that town, may be developing their own set of eulogy values for their bucket list.  (It should be noted that what they’re giving is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak: an infinitesimal percentage of their net worth.)  Brooks’ literary portrait of those contributions was sweet.  I hope it encourages the Resnicks to double or even triple their efforts.  

           

     But there is no way to offset the damage done to Lost Hills and myriad other Central Valley towns by the structure of political power and economic control created when one entity owns too much land.  You cannot offset the jobs lost in packinghouses from the plant closures and mechanization by Paramount (oops, sorry: Wonderful, Inc.)  You cannot offset the farming opportunities lost in citrus or nuts like pistachios and almonds; you can’t bring back the small pomegranate farmers they decimated several years ago when they thawed the frozen juice they’d been hoarding.  You can’t bring back the downtowns they destroyed when they sold off those communities’ water to southern California or pumped down the aquifers.  No amount of financial aid can offset the socio-political and economic damages inflicted by giant landholdings on communities. 

           

     The Resnics do not now, and probably never will wear Haloes, no matter how many dollars they drop on Lost Hills or how many other communities they attempt to rescue.  Like Donald Trump, they have one foot on each side of the resume/eulogy values gap, and when push comes to shove or some opportunity raises its snaky head, we’ll find them with both feet on the resume values side, not even blinking.

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Trudy Wischemann is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Michele Hester and Mark Arax for their comments this week.  You can send your thoughts on rural philanthropy c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.