Come High Water

Published Feb. 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Storm warnings, high wind advisories, flood watches, evacuation orders pending – what a week.  For some, this week’s weather is foreboding and dreary, perhaps even a sign.  But for me there’s something holy, even righteous about it.  It’s been a long time since I felt this at-home in California. 

     At first, when it was just the prospect of full reservoirs for the first time this decade, the water watchdogs warned not to get too hopeful that our five-year drought is over.  “There’s still the groundwater table in overdraft,” they chided, reminding us that the big boys’ long straws have been oversucking from it so long there might be no replenishment possible.

     Then the reservoirs had to start releasing water just to keep the bounty from breaking the dams and to maintain some semblance of flood control.  Oroville, one of the newer dams in California’s massive water development system, reminded us that facilities age and that infrastructure must be maintained to be of true value.  Then levees broke in the Alpaugh Irrigation District as the flood flows of multiple creeks in the Tule and Kern River watersheds accumulated and ended up where they belong, in the old bed of Tulare Lake, which they do every once in a while, come hell or high water (literally.)

     To the north of us, levees along the length of the mighty San Joaquin are promising a similar replenishment.  Old valley communities like Vernalis, Stevinson and Tranquility are likely not so tranquil right now, as the attempt to keep flood flows off the farmland threatens to drown out the farmworker communities.  It’s a trade-off we still haven’t found a way to make correctly.

  "It’s too bad,” a friend who grows olives told me Sunday, “all this water going to waste.  LSID cut us off completely the last two years, and yet now, here’s all this water….”  His voice trailed off into the mystery of the moment.  “It’s not going to waste,” I wanted to cry, though I kept my protest to myself since I don’t farm.  In fact, when it spills out onto the land, it brings life to the soil as well as improving the groundwater supplies.  In fact, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do in God’s holy hydrologic cycle.  Here all this time we’ve been praying for rain, and now we’re going to complain about where He puts it?

     Down in Alpaugh, when the levees broke this time, the big boys hired helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags on the break, stemming the flow for now.  But it’s kinda like working on old cars:  installing a new part often puts pressure somewhere else, causing another part to break.  The history of farming the Tulare Lake bed is full of stories about heroic flood prevention efforts by the large landowners causing storm water to take out some small guys’ operations.  At least that water’s not wasting to the ocean, right?

     This drought-flood pattern is part of California’s natural cycle, at least so far.  I’m comforted by the return of the wet half of our true nature, glad we haven’t yet reached the point where the rains are always meager, the snowfall non-existent, where the floods never come.  We would do well to plan for this pattern, to accommodate the extremes, not the averages, and then try everything in our power to keep from altering it.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who once wanted to be a hydrologist.  You can send her your favorite high water stories c/o P.O Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

News from Oroville

To be published February 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     Driving home Sunday night, I heard the voice of urgency through the radio, issuing an evacuation order for low-lying areas below Oroville Dam.  Earlier that day, I’d heard the opposite news:  that no danger was present despite spillway problems and full-to-overflowing levels of the reservoir.  The change in the news put me into emergency mode.

     In my early thirties, while at Berkeley, I’d studied dam failures and a phenomenon called “reservoir-induced seismicity” for a class on earthquakes I was taking as part of my preparation for environmental planning.  An earlier class, “Hydrology for Planners” taught by a nationally-famous hydraulic engineer, Luna Leopold (one of two sons of environmentalist Aldo Leopold who both taught on that campus,) had focused on floods and flooding, particularly with respect to urban areas.  Reservoirs, unfortunately, are where those two subjects sometimes converge.

     Eight years after Oroville Dam was completed, the city of Oroville (located just downstream from the dam) experienced a 5.7 magnitude earthquake embedded in a series of foreshocks and aftershocks that were caused by the reservoir itself – specifically, the rapid drawdown and refilling of the reservoir.  The damage from the earthquake, which involved no flooding because the new dam remained intact, was estimated at $3 million dollars.  Had the dam failed as a result of those earthquakes, the costs would have been astronomically higher.

     As I write this, the failures on both the main and emergency spillways, which prompted the evacuation of almost 190,000 people, are being managed.  Even if they succeed in lowering the reservoir in time for the next downpour, however, the costs of the evacuation to those shuttled away from homes, jobs, farm animals and implements could easily top the $3 million suffered in 1975, even when number is recalculated for inflation.  Add the costs to the state and multiple counties for providing emergency services, then the costs of repairing the dam’s spillways, and what we have is a portrait of one of the things that’s wrong with building large reservoirs:  the total costs of these projects are never computed in the cost-benefit studies.  They aren’t calculable.

     Oroville is an interesting town, especially considering that the majority of its vast water resources is shipped well beyond the lands surrounding it.  With a population of 16,000 it has much in common with the towns in our readership area.  The first olive processing plant was built there; the original “Mother Orange Tree” still resides there.  Located at the last spot on the Feather River where boats can go, it began as a service center for gold miners in the foothills when the state was still in diapers, then developed small-scale farms.  It has a small downtown with half-empty brick buildings like most of our towns have, and serious challenges for survival.

     Unlike Lindsay, however, it has many people working to preserve its historic quality and stimulate its economic development in sustainable ways.  My friend and attorney Richard Harriman has been following and assisting in these folks’ progress, and has brought me stories of hope even as we ponder how to help something similar come into being here.

     So I’m praying for the folks of Oroville right now, and the future of their downtown restoration.  The Feather River would like to go right through those streets and buildings right now and carry the fruit of many peoples’ efforts all the way to the Sutter By-Pass just south of Nicolaus.  Pray that the Department of Water Resources can stay on top of water under the tremendous force of gravity.  Pray that weighty water doesn’t trigger another earthquake.

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Trudy Wischemann is an environmental planner who writes.  You can send her your favorite flood stories c/o P.O. Box 1374 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.

Mixed Media

Published Feb. 1, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Watching, listening and reading the news this past week has been like attending a mental gymkhana.  What with executive orders coming out of the White House like arrows at Little Big Horn, keeping up with the news has meant using all the media at hand, not just one or two favorites.

           

     It’s meant adding the commentators to the  mix, too, reading the opinion writers as well as more traditional journalists whose reports are required to be as objective as humanly possible (which turns out to be more humanly difficult than we once thought.)  The editorial cartoons and comic strips have contributed focus for me, while the wordsmiths and photographers have added depth and breadth.  Valley Public Radio has provided grains of truth to chew through the day, while MSN’s Breaking News banners have alerted me to new twists and turns, frequently diverting me from my day’s purpose.           

     But Sunday’s Bee caused a temporary meltdown, primarily the page where Mas Masumoto topped Victor Davis Hanson.  Both Valley boys born on Fresno County’s fertile farm soil, one with orchards, the other with vines, their words mean a lot to me even when I don’t agree. Sometimes Mas is too bucolic for me, while reading VDH is always like wrestling a prickly pear:  a lot of thorns have to be removed afterward.          

     Unfortunately, their two contributions Sunday, at opposite ends of the playing field, seemed both right and simultaneously futile.   I left the scene of the crime – the paper-strewn breakfast table – and went to the sink to clean up my mind as well as the dishes.  There, with my hands in the warm water, I remembered my friend Andrea in Merced, who is an artist.  My distressed mind began to relax.       

     Andrea paints still lifes and landscapes, and also writes poetry, but her primary form of artistic contribution is something she calls “mixed media.”  In form, it is a combination of drawing, cutting and pasting, then copying the whole shebang and coloring portions to shade and shape the message.  That’s the form, the style.  But the content, the message she’s bringing home relentlessly and without fail, is how she weaves together the complex, and often conflicting, fragments of her life, how her heart makes sense of the world.

           

     It’s a constant struggle, making sense of her world and ours.  Since having her own personal meltdown in late 1999, when her brain inflamed and a virus stole most of what her verbal center had learned over 50-some years, she’s questioned both God’s lovingkindness and her own ability to tolerate living repeatedly.  Yet her struggle benefits her, makes her stronger every time she wrestles that angel to the ground.  Perhaps as a reward for struggling, she gets more glimpses of beauty than many of us, and then she puts those glimpses on paper for us to see.  In a way, she’s teaching us survival skills.

           

     Art also teaches us how to proceed even in the dark, when the mind can’t make sense of the world around it.  Still restless after my stint at the sink Sunday, I turned to my book of Quaker writings, which opened to a poem written by a girl before her adulthood arrived.  Under the title “Madras Airport,” Mira McCelland wrote in 1998:

My heart is beating fast.

Landing,

there is the smell of heat;beggars enclose me.

They don’t say a word, but

their eyes are screaming,

“Help me, help me!” 

I am ten years old;

I want to help them but

I can’t.

I don’t say a word,

but with my eyes I say,

“I’m coming,

I’m coming.”

Mira’s ten-year-old bravery helps me every time I read her words.

            Art is another form of truthtelling, and a process of working out new understandings, new solutions.  These weeks ahead do not promise to sort themselves out, much less the months and years.  Sorting is our job, and maybe in this current upheaval, we have a new opportunity to participate.  Onward, friends.  Tell them we’re coming. 

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Trudy Wischemann is in the final editing stages of her book on agriculture and the common good.  You can send her your mixed-up responses to this new regime c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247, but don’t expect a response anytime soon.  You can also leave a comment below.

 

A Piece of Chalk

Published Jan. 25, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     There’s a scene in the movie “Hidden Figures” that snagged my mind Sunday and wouldn’t let go.  I think it helps us see why this film is important now, not just as a document of race and gender inequalities in the 1960’s, but as a statement of how change occurs.  I think this perspective could help us as we face the intent of the new folks in Washington to roll back many advances in social justice we have made over the last 50 years.

 

     The scene happens twice, doubling our ability to see its significance.  It is the handing-over of a piece of chalk from an authority figure to an underling, and it’s actually an invitation to equality.  The underling is the main character, Katherine Johnson, a heroine, really:  a black female rocket-science mathematician (literally and figuratively) who persists despite society’s inability to recognize her skills.  The first person to make the offer is a black, male professor; the second is her white male boss at NASA.  Both times the gesture is saying “Maybe you have something to teach us.  Show us what you can do.”

 

     And show them she does.  Cheers went up in the audience both times, I think because she demonstrated the falsity of their reasons for doubt.  She demonstrated that the box they’d been thinking in was wet cardboard.  But she also triumphed over self-doubt, the kind inflicted on most of us, even white males, which is really why we cheered.  With little hesitation she took the chalk and worked out equations no one else in the room could do.  Then, with no arrogance, she stood aside and let her answers sink in.  All of them.

 

     I am sure the piece of chalk had special significance for me, a Boomer: growing up with black, then green chalkboards, I could feel the cool smoothness and smell the dust as the white stick changed hands in the film.  I loved the chalkboard as a place to work, and even more, to have my work seen.  I envied the teachers’ freedom to write there, even as I loved following their thought processes flowing onto the wall before our eyes.  I could imagine Katherine’s excitement (and potentially, intimidation) at being offered that piece of chalk, that chance to go to the blackboard and stand in the spot of one who knows.

 

     The whole film is full of similar teaching moments, as two other black women run the gamut alongside Katherine, gaining ground.  And I think the film issues a challenge to all of us, no matter which side of the social divide we sit. 

 

     To the underlings it says “Be brave.  Make your case, and when you can do so, make it in ways that have some hope of being heard.” 

 

     To people with some authority and power, the message is permeability.  The rules are not set in stone, and even where they are, the mortar holding them together has a short shelf-life.  Reason has power over rigidity; hearts need only the tiniest jumping-off places to take wing.  You can be part of the solution no matter what part of the problem you’re representing.

 

     There is much we can do, no matter how high or impenetrable a wall they try to build around this country, and it will come by exerting our humanity.  A “yes” here, a “maybe” there, a chance to learn or work, an extension of time on repayment, a buck for gas, an extra sweater – there is no limit on how we can help each other experience our personhood more fully.  

 

     As we dig into the task ahead, I think we can find ways to extend equality to each other in simple things, like handing someone a piece of chalk.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial writer and researcher who was supposed to be a teacher when she grew up.  You can send her your chalkboard reveries c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Bricks & Mortar

Published Jan. 10, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     In a bad dream last week, I saw myself moving to some border community to find a job hauling buckets of mortar for the wall our presumptive president-elect wants to build.  I’m not sure where the mortar bucket idea came from, but it seems to have been one of those cross-fertilization things.    

     On Jan. 7^th The Fresno Bee carried an article announcing the estimated costs for the 2,000 mile fixture - $6.5 million PER MILE for a single-layer fence, with $4.2 million more for additional layers and roads, construction only, not including maintenance.   Adding 6.5 with 4.2, then multiplying $10.7 million times 1,300 miles (2,000 minus 700 equals the length of border we do NOT already HAVE fencing) and having only slight trouble keeping track of my decimal points and zeroes, I was stunned.  The thought that we’d spend that much on bricks and mortar (oops - steel-reinforced concrete) that has about 0.0015% chance of doing what it’s supposed to do was mindboggling.  Mexican peasants, quoted in a Bee article earlier that week, say it won’t keep them away from a chance to work and help their families.  A total waste of materials and money, if you ask me.

     Then I remembered where I’d heard the word “mortar.”  It was at the special meeting of the Lindsay City Council, which was convened to discuss their goals and objectives for the coming year.          
    
     The meeting was pleasant and productive, a chance for the new finance director and the newly-appointed councilmembers to come up to speed with the old ones.  CM Bill Zigler conducted the meeting with his usual panache, and it was during a discussion about the goal of retaining a friendly, small-town atmosphere, particularly downtown, while growing in economic diversity and “rebranding” the city’s image that I heard the term “brick and mortar.”
           
     I thought it was planning slang, but it’s actually a result of the e-world.  According to Wikipedia, “brick and mortar” businesses are those with a physical presence:  an address on a physical street, not the Web, where customers go to shop with their feet, not just let their fingers do the walking.  “Brick and mortar” also distinguishes stable businesses from those that are transitory or mobile, such as taco trucks.  The concerns of brick and mortar businesses, as distinct from the other two, are things such as foot traffic, storefront visibility and appealing interior design.  I would add to that list “meeting the needs of community residents” as well as attracting tourists or visitors.
           
     The Council discussed many potential improvements to the city, and I was encouraged by their creativity.  But at the end of the meeting Mr. Zigler showed a brief slide show of downtown sidewalk vendors he observed on his recent trip to Portland, Oregon.  He then showed a map of Lindsay, indicating places (all outside the downtown core) where such vendors could be encouraged to locate in our town.  The trick, he noted, would be to promote these businesses without detracting from the brick and mortar folks.
           
     The impact of the downtown Friday Night Market on brick and mortar businesses has not yet been evaluated, but it is finally clear, even to its most adamant proponents, that the effects have not been all that positive.  The financial contribution of the Friday market to the City of Lindsay is also unclear, and the council members were right to be interested in learning more, hopefully before pursuing more transitory/mobile businesses to our sidewalks outside the downtown core.
           
     But I would like to hear some thoughts (if not plans) for preserving the actual brick and mortar buildings of our downtown.  They are the essence of our small-town atmosphere, emblems of our community’s tenure here over time, holding the fort on another form of human interaction than the electronic one.  The image of the real quality of our town lives in those bricks and the mortar that, for the time being (but not forever,) holds them together, shaping environments that once sheltered viable businesses and community groups, and could do so once again.

    There is a place where bricks and mortar make a difference, and that’s in the downtowns of our cities, big and small.  Hand me my bucket, friends – we’ve got work to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a carpenter’s daughter who writes.  You can send your downtown sidewalk dreams to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Dan and Zoe Delk for reconnecting last week!

Christmas Truth, 2016

Published December 28, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I’m writing this on the second day of Christmas; you will be reading it on the fourth or later, when the illusion I intend to describe below will be even stronger than it is this morning.  The illusion is that Christmas is over.           

     The media are contributing to the illusion.  CBS’s morning news showed hordes of shoppers returning gifts and offered advice for making it less demanding, a mirror image of shoppers buying last-minute gifts two days earlier. Advertisements for New Year’s programs filled the spaces between the news segments, rushing us toward 2017.

           

     The weather adds to that impression.  Skiers cast loving looks at the Sierra, which were dusted white by the Christmas Eve storm.  New Year’s Eve may have a repeat performance, says the weatherman, increasing our anticipation.  But in other parts of the country, the weather is producing danger, not delight.  The upper Midwest is frozen solid, that cold air mass headed for upstate New York and New England.  Travel advisories abound.  It’s back to the real world, folks: the magic is over.

     I’m a minimalist when it comes to Christmas preparations.  I don’t bake Santa’s cookies until the 24^th, if at all.  I didn’t decorate the tree until Christmas Eve, and then only lightly, spare with the ornaments and lights, no tinsel.  My cards will go out this week with a New Year’s message (I hope.)  The season’s frenzy I try to leave alone so the season’s peace can emerge like a flower blooming, imprinting on my heart and mind.

     Last week, while out participating in that last minute shopping, I listened to NPR on Valley Public Radio.  They re-played many old Christmas programs, and two entered my consciousness like the smell of ham roasting in the oven.  One was about the Christmas Truce of 1914; the other was a story from a Texan tall-tale writer who captured the joy of a poor rural boy in 1933 over the gift of an orange.

     Starting the car Thursday, the sound of men far away singing “Silent Night” in German wafted up from the radio over the sound of the engine.  Idling, I listened while the story progressed to a British verse replying from the other side of a frozen front line where the opposing forces had reached a stalemate.  Then soldiers, one by one from both sides, approached each other, swapping rations and cigarettes, eventually indulging in the freedom of a game of soccer before turning in for the night.  Although each nation’s leaders and the Pope himself had been calling for a Christmas truce, it was the soldiers themselves who declared and implemented it.  The desire for peace was in the men themselves, not the nations.

     Friday I heard about a barefooted boy walking down a cold December road.  He caught the eye and sympathy of a man driving a truck, who stopped to offer the boy a ride.  The boy was taking his orange to show a friend, and he volunteered the story of his country family receiving a box of charity food from some good-deed-doer group in town.  The family shared their good fortune with the sharecrop family next door, who were Negroes, because they realized they weren’t “eligible” for such gifts from folks in that town.  The black family brought extra pots and pans to the white family’s small shack, and the two mothers cooked Christmas dinner together, which was shared around plank tables set up in the yard.  “It was the best Christmas ever,” the boy said ebulliently, “the best Christmas in America!”  And through the voice of this Texan storyteller, the story came to real life.

           

     We don’t have to wait until next December to experience the real meaning of Christmas again, any more than the real meaning of Jesus’ birth disappeared when the wise men and shepherds returned to their real lives.  The desire for peace lives within each one of us if we’re brave enough to experience it.  The joy of sharing is always available, the need for it never ending.  The twelve days of Christmas don’t end until January 5.  Let’s see if we can make it that far at least.

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Trudy Wischemann is a wandering Christian who writes year-round.  You can send her your post-season joys c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Many thanks to all you cashiers and shelf-stockers who worked Christmas Eve day.