As If It Were

Published March 29, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “It’s beautiful,” wrote my friend Caitlin about my column from two weeks ago, which I’d sent for her opinion.  “There’s just one teeny grammatical error I’d correct if you like.”  I’ve only known Cait for 27 years, but her English is impeccable, so I asked for her editing.  “It’s the subjunctive,” she wrote back, changing one sentence fragment from “By treating my fear as if it is a gnat-sized annoyance” to “as if it were.”


     Now, I know from stumbling over the decision of how to write clauses that start with “as if” that I missed the subjunctive in junior high.  Maybe I was sick that week.  I was sick a lot.  But I must have heard about it, because I actually know that it’s supposed to have “were” attached to “it” even though the plural verb tense doesn’t match the singular noun, and moves the idea into the past tense instantly, dissolving the subject’s place in the present.   But I don’t know why I’m supposed to use “were” instead of “was” or “is,” and I’ve built up a teensy resentment over the past 50+ years that I’m supposed to do it anyway without understanding why.  Two weeks ago when I wrote my column, I think I used “is” instead of “were” as a little explosive device in my silent war against the inconsistencies of English.


     So, what is the subjunctive?  Wikipedia helped me out a little.  “The subjunctive is a grammatical mood found in many languages. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language.”

           

     “Various states of unreality.”  Did you catch that?  I get it now, why “treating my fear as if it were a gnat-sized annoyance” qualifies.  The fact that “gnat-sized” is unreal is what I was trying to convey.  Much more like a cobra most of the time.  I stand corrected.

           

     As I’ve thought about it, however, I’ve discovered that I have a bone to pick with the words “as if.”  There’s a pretense inherent in that coupling.  For instance, when I say “as if I were a real person,” it’s like saying that I’m not.  If the truth is that I’m not a real person, why not just say so?  See?  You can really get snarled up in that two-word hook “as if.”

           

     Yet it is exactly that pretense that most of us live with most of the time.  Commercial advertising feeds on the prospect that if we have that Cadillac or those Madden Girl shoes, it will be as if our lives are (or were) as successful or carefree as the models in the ads who appear to be really enjoying life.  When we don our gay work apparel with the corporate logo on the shirt pocket or hat brim, it is as if we are (or were, when we put it on) happy to be part of that business, to be an important cog in its wheel.  Or at least we are happy to appear to be happy, or were happy to appear to be happy.

           

     There are places in the work world where the phrase “as if” gets more insidious.  In a job description for a manager position I saw recently, it said the manager’s essential function is “to run the day-to-day operations of the facility as if it was your own personal business.”  Forget the improper verb tense:  listen for the unreality.  To work in someone else’s business as if it were your own is a lofty expectation, but seldom do these jobs come with the conditions that would make that experience real.  A person filling that position must put themselves in various states of unreality in order to act as if the business were their own without having the authority to make essential decisions or to experience the actual costs and benefits of those decisions.  Yet the prospect of working in a business “as if it were your own” is mighty tempting.  I could fall for that one hook, line and sinker.

           

     So, friends, watch out for the subjunctive.  When you hear the words “as if,” keep your eyes peeled for the pretense.  Maybe it’s just a pretty metaphor, a way of coloring words to deepen understanding.  Or maybe it’s a lure with fishy bait.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is an aging employee with no benefits who also writes.  You can send her your favorite subjunctive treats c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Home Bound

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


     A good book came into my hands last fall from the hands of a Reedley grape grower I’ve loved and admired for over a decade, Fred Smeds.  Some of you may remember him as the producer of Ruby Red organic raisins that we bought in 25 pound boxes and gave away by the bags-full as an expression of God’s earthly abundance in a time of Man’s economic drought.

     The project was small in scale, but with big impact.  It helped keep that man farming until it was time to retire, helped keep him home on his farm where he belongs.  It was the spiritual support we offered more than the money.  In exchange we got to experience the fruit of his labor on some truly holy ground.  The fragrance of those raisins when we opened a box and peeled back the plastic liner was a waft of heaven.  No one was unmoved by it.           

     So when Good Fred came up to me at one of the land symposium events at the First Mennonite Church and said “There’s a book I want to tell you about,” and came with it in his hand the next week, I understood it as communion.  Through the holidays and the rest of winter, the book kept me company where I write, sitting on top of the stack of books I want to read.  This weekend brought the opportunity to sink down into it and receive its blessing.

     The book is Lila, by author Marilynne Robinson (2014), who, according to notes on the back cover, has written three other novels around this theme (Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping.)  I almost don’t want to read them because the beauty of Lila is that it is spare, singular somehow.  I almost don’t want to write about it, either, or even try to tell people what it’s about.  Yet here I am, typing these words. . . .           

     The story is about a homeless girl who starts life so disconnected from love and nurture that she doesn’t even know her own name.  She’s given her names by those who rescue her from certain death by parental neglect, if not violence, but they have little more to offer than food and the shelter of their bodies, itinerant themselves.  There is no home in the sense of a physical structure or geographic place; Lila learns to be at home in the world at large by fending for herself.           

     But those little scraps of love she received from her rescuers make her hungry for more when they’re gone.  Reluctantly, fearful of people and the unknown requirements of living in one place, of living in a community, Lila reaches for more tiny scraps, people’s leftovers.  As they come into her life, she begins to learn how to receive.

     It’s a more difficult process than you’d think, learning to receive love.  Through the author’s delicate sentences, I could identify easily this struggle in myself, and the temptation to return to a state of solitariness as security.  But like Lila, I also know that there is no real security in aloneness, in one-hood.  We need each other.  And as Lila becomes part of the community, even though she’s still half feral herself, it’s not hard to recognize the benefits of civilization. 

     To be at home in the world of people, we have to know each other.  We have to trust each other to be what and who we are, even if we’re not who we say we are.  Learning to navigate this world of people as an equal is what it takes to make home.  Allowing ourselves to become bound in this way is a big deal, which Lila’s struggle shows me in a way I’d never seen before.  But the benefits are real.  

     Does anyone else remember the fragrance of those Ruby Reds rising from the newly-opened box?  That’s heaven.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a small farm advocate who writes.  You can send her your raisin memories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Many thanks to Fred for contributing his writing to A Little Piece of Land, due out this year.

Just Fear

Published March 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “It’s just fear,” I said to my friend Pam on the phone the other day.  We were talking about relationships, the great subject of womankind, and I was mentioning a discovery I’d made for about the ten-thousandth time.

           

     “Trudy,” she said, having known me for more than 40 years, “do you think you could leave off the word ‘just’?”

           

     My mental eyes opened as she stripped away my protective covering.  Minimizing fear is one of the ways we try to deal with the most natural, protective instinct we were born with.  By treating my fear as if it is a gnat-sized annoyance, I’m making myself a gladiator, big enough to spit in its face and walk away.  Dealing with what caused the fear is a different, and actually more productive, response.

           

     I think fear is at the root of the deep divide that is said to be plaguing the country.  If I were to give that fear a name, it is that people are afraid of being left behind economically because of the group they belong to, shut out from participating in America’s bounty because of some categorization scheme.  For many this fear is not “just,” but justified.  Many people have to overcome not just fear, but also handicaps placed on them by others in order to receive rewards for their efforts.

           

     And it seems to me that the people placing those handicaps on others are being driven by fear.  Is it also justified?  Might be worth asking that question.

           

     Fear makes jihadists out of rebels, revolutionaries out of social discontents.  It makes nations go to war.  It makes men (and women) buy guns to protect their households and their persons even though the statistics on gun accidents show that people harm themselves more often than trespassers.  It makes people stop loving each other even when the reasons for loving still exist.

           

     “Fear not,” were the first words I really comprehended in the Bible when I returned to the church in search of faith.  The Quaker mystic Rufus M. Jones understood fear’s universal role in conflict, as well as the antidote to fear that Christianity offers.  He wrote this passage sometime during the prelude to World War II:

           

     “Christ’s major point throughout the Sermon on the Mount is to get rid of fears and anxieties.  It might almost be said that the substance of his mission as a teacher was to set us free from the slavery of fears.  ‘Why are ye so fearful?’ he keeps saying.  Stop your unnecessary worries.  Cut out your excessive anxieties.  It has been well said that the most ruinously expensive of all our emotions is fear.  It is that very emotion of fear that has thrown our world out of joint and brought us to this unspeakable calamity. . . .”

           

     Many of the fears being expressed by people on my side of the political divide are that the fears being generated and/or fanned to flames on the other side will push us toward more ‘unspeakable calamities’ like those we’ve witnessed before:  genocides like the Jews’ and Armenians’, wars like Viet Nam, El Salvador and Afghanistan.  Extinctions like the passenger pigeon, soon to be replicated in the Arctic, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Pacific Flyway.  In this new realm of “alternative facts,” there are fears for justice itself moving to the endangered species list.

           

     Pam’s right.  It’s time to leave off the word “just” and learn to deal with our fear another way than minimizing it.  It’s time to face the music, so to speak:  the music of democracy is equality among, not advantage over, others.  Let’s dance.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a neophyte Friend who writes.  You can send her your stories of defeating fear c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to Carolyn Davenport for her loving and helpful feedback.

When One Cries

Published March 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


      One night last week while washing dishes, out of the corner of my ear I heard a man on public TV say “When one cries, we all cry.”  He was part Cherokee and he was discussing a problem of tribal membership blocked for those who also were part Negro.  Although some members of the tribe disagreed, to this man one drop of Cherokee blood was not negated by one drop of Black blood.  For him, one drop of Cherokee blood is enough to qualify anyone for membership in the tribe of Us.

           

     “When one cries, we all cry.”  When I heard those words, I wanted to cry myself.  I admired, even envied the understanding of community that says to its individuals “You are not alone, no matter what.”  Then later that week, in the PBS program on African history, I learned that Africa is the cradle not just of civilization but of humanity itself.  The first human beings evolved in Africa and then migrated to other parts of the globe, sometimes in response to drastic climate change and war.  What anthropologists, the scientists of humanity, now believe is that all of us have a drop of Black blood in us.  So, when one of us cries.…

           

     Community was called on this week in Lindsay.  At Tuesday night’s city council meeting, the minister from New Life Church, Pastor Roger Wright, asked the council to consider hosting some kind of seminar that would clarify the city’s role in managing the immigration questions before the country right now.  “In my small congregation of about 80 people I have four families who are undocumented.  These are really good people,” he said, then repeated “really good people.”  He let the meaning and the truth of that evaluation sink in.

           

     His appeal was not political, but a call to compassion because “There’s a lot of fear out there.”  Noting that some of the fear has been triggered by misinformation, he felt that fear could be relieved by something that would educate the people about their real standing in the community.  It’s relief that only our city’s government can provide.

           

     Pastor Wright’s plea was seconded by an organizer for Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights, who noted that people all over our region are frightened.  He said that those who have no criminal record need to know that they can call the police if they are victims of crime without being deported themselves.  He was followed by a Lindsay resident who summed it up this way:   “They (the undocumented) need to know that Lindsay will protect its own.”  What all three men were saying is that these people need to know they are ours, that when one of them cries…

           

     Then, at the Wednesday evening Cultural Arts Forum, the audience heard about homeless people in Tulare County and within the Lindsay Unified School District.  Jason Britt and Angel Galvez from Tulare County Health and Human Services were joined by Linda Ledesma from Lindsay’s Healthy Start Family Resource Center.  Together they painted a portrait of our homeless population in terms of numbers, causes, and possible solutions, giving the problem a set of human faces I could recognize in my mind.  However, when one of the speakers mentioned that there are no shelters in Lindsay for homeless people, a voice rose from the audience asking “why?”

           

     Mr. Britt explained that most shelters are developed and maintained by non-profit organizations, including church groups, and that the county does not provide this service.  But when the woman repeated her question “Why are there no shelters in Lindsay?” he simply said “I don’t know.”  Then she said “I’m homeless,” and stood up to address the audience herself.

           

     She spoke about where she sleeps each night, how she maintains herself, where her money comes from.  She told us why most shelters are not an option for her because she has two small dogs who form her entire family, and most shelters don’t admit people with pets.  She turned what had been an incredibly informing presentation into an incredibly moving experience, her personal story reinforcing what we’d heard from the experts.

           

     The truth is, this brave woman made it easier to see that the people who bear the nametag “homeless” are also ours.  The potential solutions to homelessness, as well as those of undocumented immigrants, are many and will take multiple initiatives.  But perhaps where we start is with this basic principle of community:  when one cries, we all cry.

_______________________________________________________________

Trudy Wischemann is a native of the Pacific Northwest who migrated south to Lindsay.  You can send her your thoughts on rights to a roof and land c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.