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.

Fooled

Published in edited form April 15, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I’m going to blame it on the orange blossoms.  I got fooled into thinking the Lindsay city manager, Rich Wilkinson, had a change of heart or at least saw the handwriting on the wall about his role in stripping the public of their rights to participate in our city council meetings.  Two weeks ago, when I wrote optimistically about the restoration of those rights, I must have been high on blossom-perfumed air.
    
     For three years I have been recommending that the language he removed regarding public participation be restored to the agenda packet cover sheet.  There was one place on the agenda itself where three words needed to be reinstated, but the major sentences he obliterated were found on the cover sheet, which says across the top “Welcome to your Lindsay City Council Meeting,” followed by this statement: 
     "Whether you are attending this meeting because of general interest or because an item of special interest to you is to be reviewed, your presence is an important means of helping ensure and informed public and responsible Municipal Government."

    

     The cover sheet goes on to describe the city council and its role, the city manager’s job, the timing of council meetings and types of actions that occur, the processes for making suggestions, inquiries and complaints to city staff as well as the rules for citizen participation in meetings.  Except for the website, it is the only place where the city communicates to the residents their rightful place and responsibilities in maintaining the community.

     When I was called down to Rich’s office, as if I were the offending party, I had noticed that the purpose of the meeting was called “the agenda.”  I assumed, wrongly, that this was just shorthand for the project of restoring our rights.  But after his vacation, when he finally communicated some of the language he proposed in response to my complaint, it became clear that not only was he not restoring language to the cover sheet, he was doing away with the cover sheet altogether.

     Naturally, I asked why.  “No other cities have a cover sheet,” replied the faithful Maria Knutson, assistant to the city manager.  I called the mayor, who did not find much merit in that reason, either.  I am still waiting for a resolution to this question.

     Are you tired enough of all this?  It seems so small on the surface, like a gnat on the windshield.  But this unaccountability, this refusal to bear responsibility to the people who pay his enormous salary, who rely on him to maintain a law-abiding staff as well as the entire department of public safety, is the tip of a big and dangerous iceberg.

     Friday the Lindsay police arrested a young man, 24, in some kind of fracas, location not identified. In the squad car, on the way to his booking, he died.  The sheriff’s department will conduct an investigation, but who are they going to ask?  That young man cannot speak for himself.  He cannot say he should have had an ambulance instead of a squad car; his family cannot know where or when a mistake was made.  And at this moment at least, the only opportunity anyone has to voice their concerns to our elected officials in public is three minutes during the public comment period, during which no one, council or staff, has to answer your questions.

     Don’t be fooled.  Help your city council members establish the need for accountability from our city manager/chief of public safety.  We will not have real public safety until we do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a wordworking realist who writes.  You can send her your stories of public endangerment c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

On Restoration

Published April 1, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


“Must I restore what I have not stolen?”  Psalm 69.4, Jewish Publication Society
    
     For three years I have been working to restore rights for public participation in our Lindsay city council meetings that were stripped from us, invisibly and unaccountably, after the February 14, 2012 meeting. 
    
     I did not do the stripping; it was done by the city clerk at the request of the city manager, who apparently was responding to then-mayor Ed Murray.  But it was done in response to my attempts to use the rights outlined on the council agenda packet cover sheet, so I have felt responsible.  I was ignorant:  I could not imagine either that my efforts would be seen as threatening or that such wanton disregard for public rights would result.  So, on behalf of all of us who might want to participate and a more democratic community that could result, I have kept trying to get those rights restored.
    
     Some small progress is being made.  Our current mayor, Ramona Padilla, placed an item on the Feb. 24, 2015 agenda to consider restoration of the language regarding public participation on the agenda packet cover sheet.  She had requested the city manager, Rich Wilkinson, to provide that language in the agenda packet.  Unfortunately he provided wording for only one of the three rights he removed.  The discussion between council and staff  revealed conflicting ideas about what rights the public should have to participate, and the city manager was instructed to explore what other cities allow.  The fact that the City of Lindsay once accorded these rights didn’t seem to matter.
    
     March 9th I got an email saying Rich Wilkinson would like to meet with me regarding the agenda.  We had our meeting on the 12th.  He said he wanted to know what would satisfy my concerns, and that the language couldn’t just be restored for a long list of reasons I cannot remember.  I told him how I perceived it:  that it was an act of violence against the public that still needed healing.  I said that those words were removed in order to squelch public participation, and that putting them back would be a sign to the public that we aren’t having that kind of governance anymore.  He said he’d never heard me say it so clearly before.  I didn’t say that obviously we still have that kind of governance, despite the increased responsiveness of our current city council.
    
     I told him it’s not the language that’s so important – it’s the rights:  the right to ask that an item be removed from the consent calendar for discussion in public; the right to ask questions and make comments on agenda items when they are being discussed during the council meeting; and the right to place an item on the council agenda.  We had all those rights prior to Valentine’s Day, 2012, although few of us knew them, and when those of us who did know tried to exercise them, we often were denied.
    
     We worked over the three rights to find potential language to represent them; he said he’d email a draft to me the week after his vacation.  After we’ve reached a consensus, he’ll pass it by the city attorney for his approval before submitting it to the council.  He hoped we’d have it ready by the April 28 meeting.  I think it’s possible we’re on our way to a more open, more respectful form of governance.  I just hope this isn’t “April Fools.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a community researcher/advocate who writes.  You can send her your public participation 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.

 

 

 

 

           

Running Water

Published in slightly edited form March 18, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Whenever I turn on a faucet lately, I feel gratitude when water comes out.  These rainless skies have my body on red alert.  Under natural conditions, I would be migrating out of this semi-desert region, leaving the Lewis Creek watershed with no snow-capped mountains to feed it.  Our unnatural water supply allows me to stay put.
    
     We city slickers take it for granted that water will run into the sink or out of the hose with a simple turn of the handle.  Nowadays, when you buy a house in town, you never ask whether it has running water, although you might question who supplies it.  But it’s really only in my lifetime that such a luxury has come to be seen as a necessity, a given.
    
     I grew up with indoor plumbing, but my mother did not.  She was raised in the small town of Centralia, Washington in the 1930’s.  She still has stories about meeting a hobo coming out of her family’s outhouse one morning as she went to go in, pretty scary for a young girl.  The contrast between having a bathroom inside the house or having to go outside to the privy is something we heard about frequently growing up.  I couldn’t remember if she had running water inside, however, so I asked her this weekend when we talked on the phone.
    
     “We were on a well,” she said.  “The pump was right by the back door, and you had to fill a jar with water to prime the pump the next time.  If you forgot to fill that jar, you really got yelled at.”  My mind followed hers: if you forgot, where would you get the water to prime your pump?  No faucet to turn on.  “We always had buckets of rain water sitting around,” she said later, “to wash our hair.”  That would work in western Washington, but not here.
    
    When she was in her teens, they remodeled the pantry into a bathroom with tub and sink (but no toilet, because it was too expensive to hook up to the city's sewer system.)  They installed pipes and an electric pump which would kick on when you turned a faucet handle.  “If you came home late from a date, you didn’t get yourself a drink of water because the folks would hear it.  You just went to bed thirsty,” she said.  That must have happened at least once for her to remember it so clearly.
    
     She was glad I asked my question, and we strolled down other blocks of Memory Lane because of it, including a mental visit to the ladies' lounge in Centralia's Fox Theater ("So luxurious - and warm," she said.)  I saw how these things that she experienced as deprivations shaped her future as a carpenter’s wife.  Being married to someone who could build her a house with a full-service bathroom was a definite advance.
    
     But it also made me aware how hard it’s going to be for us to down-scale our expectations about what happens when you turn on the faucet.  Some people already have had to face the fact that there’s no guarantee there will be water running when they do.  Some people already have had to face the fact that there’s no water for their groves, their income and life’s work evaporating into thin air.  
    
     Running water is a dividing line between real affluence and real poverty.  I’m afraid we’ll see that gap widen if we don’t figure out some way to share the shortage this year.

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Trudy Wischemann is a humid-clime ex-patriot who dehydrates easily, but writes anyway.  You can send her your water stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a message 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.