Beyond Dreaming

Published in abbreviated form June 21, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This morning I woke with a dream that was more like a backward vision.  I was in the old Lindsay Gazette office on Honolulu St. awaiting the bad news (for me) from Reggie Ellis (who was still the editor) that I was being laid off, even though in the dream (as in real life) I was not an employee.  The paper simply no longer could afford to give me these column inches, he said, because “no one reads anymore.”  The paper’s fate was looking grim.

           

     I know the dream was in the past not only because the Gazette had not yet merged with the Exeter Sun, but because the town still had two hardware stores.  I had just written about one of them, a beautiful piece (I thought) about how the community gathered not only its goods there, but also a sense of well-being and purpose, as well as a portion of its local news (sometimes known as gossip.)  A good hardware store is even better than the grocery for reinforcing our domestic claim to this place and each other, since there we tend our homes and not just our stomachs.  Pipe fittings and curtain rods, nails, nuts and bolts; seedlings in spring, lawn rakes and leaf bags in fall; tools for the garden and garage, picture hangars and furnace filters, flags to fly on the Fourth of July – a good hardware store is really the hub of town.           

     Lindsay had two hardware stores when I moved here in 1993.  Then Western Auto closed, followed a couple of years later by Race and Landers’ True Value.  For several years we had no hardware store at all, until Art Serna re-opened the True Value across the street from the Race and Landers building, which remains empty to this day.  In my dream this reality was just a trajectory, the future foreseen but yet to be fulfilled.

           

     For someone in my research area, small towns are like canaries in the mine.  When they start to die off, it’s a sign that something toxic is in the air, figuratively speaking.  It’s easy to blame our small towns’ disintegration on the growth of Visalia, Tulare and Porterville, with their medical facilities, big-box stores and other worldly attractions.  But what’s really crumbling is the ground beneath our feet:  the smaller, resident, owner-operated farm system built by the agricultural cooperatives of Sunkist and Lindsay Olive, sustained locally by the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District distributing the waters from the federal Friant-Kern Canal.

           

     Remnants of that system remain, but giant chunks have been replaced by urban investors and the fruits of industrial agriculture.  This does not bode well for the town, much less the remaining hardware store - or the newspaper, for that matter.  Yet these towns we live in – Lindsay, Exeter, Farmersville, Woodlake, even unincorporated Ivanhoe and Strathmore – are critical to the well-being of our region and nation.  They are the incubators of citizenship and the seedbeds of our humanity.

           

     There is much we can do to conserve this social resource.  We can protect the remnants, and use them to generate the new, sustainable agricultural system we need.  We can learn from them how to build churches and civic organizations, support the schools, and generate new businesses with the wisdom from their experience.  We can “buy local” and grow our own rather than put our money where the ravenous corporate mouth is.  We can rebuild sustainable towns by rebuilding sustainable farms that raise families who know where food comes from and communities connected to their source of livelihood.

           

     “Impossible,” you say? Not according to my Methodist songwriter-friend John Pitney, who has spent his entire ministry singing and preaching that reality back to life in rural places across the country.  John’s work has brought to life the theology of land in the Judeo-Christian tradition in places like Idaho, the Great Plains, Washington and Oregon.  He even planted a mustard seed of hope here in Fresno in 1992.   It’s not impossible, John says, because we’re being called to that work by our Creator.  In the last verse of one of his songs, “If You Want Your Neighbor’s Land,” he writes:

 

 “Now it may be beyond our dreaming

when we see the land divided

and re-familied by the neighbors

who can keep the world from fear. 

 

But you should know it’s not our cleverness

that keeps the land reforming,

but that Wisdom beyond dreaming

that returns our children here.”

 

           

     And all the people say “Amen.”

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Trudy Wischemann is a once-nomadic researcher who came home to write. You can send her your land & kitchen reform ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

The Not-O.K. Corral

Published in edited form June 14, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I grew up hearing the phrase “Meanwhile, back at the O.K. Corral, ...”  It meant that the real stuff was happening just around the corner while we were looking somewhere else.  That phrase returned to me last week when I learned about the passage of Lindsay’s Measure O.

           

     The O.K. Corral was a livery stable in Tombstone, Arizona where the most famous shootout in the Wild West occurred in 1881.  Wikipedia says it lasted 30 seconds, used 30 bullets, killed 3 out of 5 bad guys and wounded 3 out of 4 good guys.  U.S. Marshall Wyatt Earp was the good guy who walked away unscathed.

           

     It was an era when outlaws outnumbered lawmen in the western part of the U.S.   This time, however, the lawmen won, forecasting the future.  The West would eventually be safe for settling in towns, homes, farms and ranches.

           

     It’s hard to see the connection between that event and the City of Lindsay’s victory at the ballot box.  But there are some similarities, primarily that “the good guys” appear to have won, saving Lindsay from pending financial disaster.  At least, that’s the hope.

           

     Although I voted against it privately, I didn’t oppose Measure O publicly for several reasons.  First, I don’t know that it won’t help.  I have my doubts that it will help and fears that it will hurt, but I don’t know.  Second, I was chicken.  With all the perfect Vote Yes signs on the lawns of upstanding people in the community, a hand-painted Vote No sign on my lawn would have been politically incorrect.  Third, at least we had the opportunity to vote for or against this tax increase (thanks to state law,) unlike the property tax increases we experienced due to Townsend’s projects, which we had no say in whatsoever.

           

     But the fourth reason was political.  The current City administration thinks this column causes a lot of their problems.  I wanted to see if they are right.

           

    Looking at the results, it’s hard to call this a victory for democracy.  Of an estimated 8,000 voting-age residents, Lindsay has 2,789 registered voters.  As of June 12, only 561 people had cast ballots:  380 for, 181 against.  Less than 14% of Lindsay’s registered voters (and less than half of one percent of the voting age residents) raised our sales tax to the highest rate in the county.  Six percent of registered voters resisted that increase, without any campaign, any lawn signs or bumper stickers, or any prompting from this column.  A handful of people decided the future of Lindsay’s retail merchants serving 12,000 city residents and thousands more residing outside the city limits.  That’s not a victory for the town even if it is for the City.

           

     Things aren’t O.K. down at the corral.  Two weeks ago in this paper, editor Paul Myer advised vigilance on the part of community members to ensure that the hoped-for additional revenues will be spent as projected.  Unfortunately, thanks to this city’s uncivic practices, citizen participation is marginal at best.   I think we might need some new good guys to ride into town and give us a hand.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher who writes. You can send her your thoughts about our 8.5 % sales tax c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Joy and Wonder

Written for Memorial Day, 2017


     Saturday morning, as we entered the Memorial Day weekend, a passage from a book of Quaker wisdom caught my eye.  It was about joy and wonder, and it helped me prepare for the ceremonies ahead.

           

     Memorial Day is not my favorite holiday.  Like so many others, its conversion to a celebration of American consumption patterns, away from its true purpose, irks me.  But its true purpose is also a challenge. I have yet to learn to honor my war dead, which includes the brother born 17 months behind me, the curly redhead second child, the first son.  The twenty-one years he spent on this planet made my life both complicated and complete.  His departure ended all grievances I might have held against him, but, more than I knew at the time, it left me alone.

           

     His death was the result of some poor choices he made, including getting his girlfriend pregnant.  But the daughter that was born to him and the girlfriend who’d become his wife, made him a proud father for more than a year.  The sight of that baby tucked into his arm like a prize is one I’ll never forget.           

    

     His death in Viet Nam was like a hand grenade thrown into the family’s center.  I had already left for college and marriage, starting my adult life.  He’d left for basic training and the opportunity to fly in helicopters. We two older ones left behind a younger brother, sister, and two parents whose marriage was wearing thin.  Less than two years after he died that household had split in two, the younger kids dangling separately from the edges.  You might think the passage of 45 years would erase or soften that memory, but it has not.

           

     Despite his premature death, my brother is the only one of us to carry the family into the future.  That baby, my niece, has gone on to make two babies of her own; her firstborn daughter has made my niece a grandmother twice.  It’s a story many families have, but it’s one I’ve somehow ignored until recently when my niece began actively introducing her beautiful family into the ragged remnants of her father’s tribe.

           
     It was my amazing niece who came to mind when I read this passage from Plain Living:  A Quaker Path to Simplicity (2001), a book I still read daily: 

     “Something seen, something heard, something felt, flashes upon one with a bright freshness, and the heart, tired or sick or sad or merely indifferent, stirs and lifts in answer.  Different things do it for different people, but the result is the same:  that fleeting instant when we lose ourselves in joy and wonder.  It is minor because it is slight and so soon gone; it is an ecstasy because there is an impersonal quality in the vivid thrust of happiness we feel, and because the stir lingers in the memory.”  Elizabeth Gray Vining, 1942

           

     Joy and wonder.  I had that those fleeting instants while watching my niece weave the two halves of her family together.  I saw that her way of being in the world, which is so like my brother’s and yet is her own, is the one intimate experience I have of the eternal, and of grace.

    

     I offer this story in case anyone else suffers on Memorial Day.  Press on.

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Trudy Wischemann is a not-so-gifted writer who has much to be grateful for.  You can send your Memorial Day thoughts to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.  Thanks to Joe Mohnike for his war stories this week, and for coming back alive.

Dead Snakes

Published in edited form May 24, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     “The only good snake is a dead snake,” my aunt used to say, followed by a predictable shudder.  She admitted they had their purpose, that they were good for the world – what I would later be taught in environmental studies was their niche in the ecology of a particular place. “I just don’t want to see them,” she’d explain.

           

     My aunt was the closest thing to a naturalist I would encounter until my late 20’s when I returned to college.  She taught me the names of flowers and mosses in her woods, fish and insects in her creek, birds in her orchard.  From her I learned respect and love for the wild things, even when they came up on the porch.  I never saw her kill a snake: she just jumped away.

           

     This past weekend I saw two dead snakes along the road.  Both appeared to have been run over, although I didn’t stop to examine their carcasses.  Both glistened, as snakes do when they’ve just shed their skins, reminding me of a time I nearly stepped on one sleeping in the grass.  “Good thing you didn’t,” said a naturalist friend who knows.  “They’re can’t see as well  when they’ve just shed, and their vulnerability makes them quicker to bite.”  The snake was golden, beautiful even though frightening.  I’m still grateful I saw it.

           

     My fear of snakes, which is natural, was heightened by growing up on 1950’s western movies, where snakes and Indians were the villains who made the cowboys look heroic.  I had rattlesnake nightmares throughout my youth and still remember one vividly when I was 6.  It was about a Christmas tree “decorated” with them, which I did not discover until I reached for a present below its boughs.  I woke up screaming, standing in the middle of my bed.  In my late 20’s I worked hard to unlearn that accentuated fear, but it wasn’t until I moved here, where rattlers are part of daily life in the foothills, that I adjusted.

           

     So when I saw those two dead snakes last week, I hurt.  Most likely they were just gopher snakes, since I was west of the Friant-Kern Canal.  Regardless of species, snakes are natural predators of ground squirrels, which plague our groves and growers.  Each snake death eliminates a harvester we need for balance, which is a form of beauty as well as necessary for our long-term survival.

           

     Were their deaths accidental, or the result of some driver’s intention?  I asked myself that question without realizing its importance until a friend spoke the same question when I told him about my sightings.  He then told me about stopping to herd a snake off the road himself, reminding me of other friends with the same proclivity.  I’ve stopped to herd stray cattle off the road, but when I watched a friend move a tarantula from the path of cars, I was humbled.

     Snakes are better alive than dead, friends.  They don’t threaten our existence until we threaten theirs, so when we can avoid killing them, let’s do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a fearful eco-freak who lives west of the canal for a reason.  You can send her your snake stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or visit www.trudysnotesfromhome.blogspot.com and leave a comment there.

 

 

Jessup's Tire

Published May 17, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “I’m really going to miss this place,” Sallie McDonald told me last week as we sat in what used to be Jessup’s Tire.

           

     I’d come to find out how I made the terrible mistake in my column two weeks ago, implying that the new owner of the building was being unreasonable about the date to vacate the premises. “Let’s just say he was understandably eager to begin work,” she corrected me.

           

     We looked around at the walls and floors, the windows letting in morning light, the beauty of the past preserved in the present use of the building by the Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council in their modest, but critical offerings to the community.  I realized that I’m really going to miss this place, too.  It will be demolished by the new owner.

           

     The thrift store’s counter is in the same place where I first met John Jessup in the last years of the tire shop’s operation.  I went there with the excuse of wanting to know if I could still buy tires for the 1947 Dodge flatbed I’d acquired in August, 1994, hoping to use it as a parade vehicle for my rural advocacy work.  I looked around as he thumbed through the catalogs of tires, finally delivering a certain “yes” to my question.  The years of serving this community showed in the photos of Lindsay High football teams and class pictures displayed on the walls, the ads for cars and tire companies, the word “vulcanizing” prominent.  John Jessup held his place in this town with dignity and respect.  I felt privileged to be there to witness it.  On the shop’s last day of business, I photographed the interior, wall-to-wall.

           

     “Who knows the history of this building, how the City came to own it?” I asked Sallie.  She said “Joe.”

           

     Joe Mohnike sells insurance two doors down from Jessup’s Tire, so I passed by his open office door, saw him sitting at his desk, and went inside.  It turns out that Jessup’s Tire had once been his grandfather’s livery stable, one of two in town.  The stable had a place for dipping livestock in creosote to protect them from vermin, and Joe’s first sentences of concern were that the soil contamination there should prevent the demolition of the building.

           

     Another reason appeared.  “John Jessup gave that building to the school district for educational programs and some kind of museum,” he followed.  “They didn’t want it, so they sold it to the City for $2,” he said, correcting another mistake I’d made two weeks ago.

           

     But his concern about the building was trumped by his concern for LSCC’s efforts.   “It’s sickening,” he said, “the one thing this town really needs – the Coordinating Council - is being pushed aside.  No one’s getting rich from it, and it brings people downtown.  Nothing else does that but the hardware store – what does that tell you?”

           

     Both Joe and Sallie view the large number of empty run-down buildings in town as part of the problem we face in revitalizing our community.  These buildings are the town’s anchors, like the root of a tooth.  The historical knowledge and caring needed, which seem to be missing at City Hall, are here, waiting to be tapped.  May we find another path than the one we’re on.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rapt listener to Lindsay’s stories.  You can send her yours c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to my editorial board for keeping this story straight.

Essential Kindness

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

     These days I spend lots of time looking for my keys.  I like to think I misplace them because my mind is somewhere else, not that it went missing entirely.  But when a set of keys went missing last week, we almost lost our minds.

    We discovered them gone after a simple evening bike ride to pick up mail from the Exeter post office.  Must have left them on the counter, we thought, and went back to get them.  Not there.  Must have dropped them somewhere, maybe into the waste basket with the sale flyers that had jammed the P.O. box.  After digging through mounds of paper, not there.

     Maybe they fell out of a pocket and are lying somewhere on the street.  Two trips both directions produced no keys.  After exhausting all the possibilities, the obvious one arrived: we left them in the door of the P.O. box and someone took them.

           

     Now, I don’t know about you, but I think at that point a person has two choices.  You can assume that means you’ll never see those keys again and start planning on replacing them.  Or you can imagine what you would do if you walked into the post office one evening and found some keys hanging from an open P.O. box.

     I figured that if I had presence of mind (and some days that’s a big “if,”) I’d drop them in the post office letter slot where they’d be safe.  Hopefully the keys’ owners would figure out where they left them sooner or later and come back asking if they’d been found.

           

     Mentally, that’s the route I chose that night.  The next morning it proved to have been correct.  The postal clerk checked the letter slot, and there they were, wrapped in an emptied envelope secured by a turquoise hair band with a note describing the location where the keys were found.  No name, no credit to take or be given, just the essential kindness of looking out for a fellow human being.

           

     The clerk and I looked at each other with something between amazement and relief.  “Ninety percent of the time, this is what would happen,” I said, verbalizing my vindicated belief.  But I think we were appreciating that fact together silently.  It was one of those ordinary sacred moments, finding the holy in a rescued set of keys.

           

     And I think these moments are the keys to how we get through the uncertainties we’re living through right now, what the writer Thomas Friedman has been calling the turbulence of accelerating change.  “We have to stay in the eye of the storm,” he advised at a recent presentation in Fresno, “where it’s calm.”  I was helped when I heard him say that, but I wondered how - until someone performed an essential kindness for a stranger.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer in Lindsay.  Many thanks to whoever rescued our keys, and also to Rev. John Gutierrez for offering his ladder Sunday.  Both made the world a calmer place. 

           

Mayday Mayday

Published May 3, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Circle the wagons, folks:  here comes another City of Lindsay sneak attack on our culture and history.

           

     I stopped at the Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council’s thrift store last week hoping to find some kind of large saucer to put under a pot of wildflowers.  The shop was nearly empty of people and goods, much reduced from its normal stock.  I saw Sallie McDonald sitting at her desk in the next room, so I stopped to talk.

           

     “We have to be out by June 10^th and I can’t find another place to rent,” she told me.  I looked at this woman I first met during the Coordinating Council’s heroic efforts following the 1990 Freeze:  feeding people, helping them find clothes and work, keeping the children in school, keeping the lights on.  It was an emergency effort that grew into a sustaining effort:  making sure there was some place to go for help when employment flagged, when bills toppled family budgets, when eviction notices and red-inked shut-off letters arrived.  I went there myself one year when plans collapsed.

           

     When I first encountered LSCC in early 1992, they were located in two empty shops in the 200 block of West Honolulu, one across the street from the other.  It was difficult, but the spaces were donated, a temporary arrangement in tough times.  A few years later, when Jessup Tires closed their doors and the building was donated to the City in hope of preserving it, LSCC was offered the space.

           

     A tire shop is not necessarily the most hospitable environment for a food distribution effort, but it has one necessary feature:  no steps.  The food is delivered by Food Link on pallets with fork lifts.  Storing it until it the pallets can be broken down and redistributed into family sized bundles requires space for tables and refrigeration units, not to mention the volunteers who man that operation.  One year I dropped by with 100 bags of Fred Smeds’ Ruby Red raisins to donate for the Christmas food baskets, and it looked like Santa’s Workshop.  Elves everywhere.

           

     Sallie told me that the City has offered to “let” them use the gravel parking lot behind the current location for distributing food.  That would mean the whole operation would have to be done in one day, rain or shine, including clean-up.  That idea ignores the reality of what is needed by either LSCC or its clients and the entire community it serves.  It is offensive.

           

     When I called Sallie two days later, I learned that the new owner wants them out in ten days.  I don’t know whether he has legal grounds for that demand, but this entire episode needs more public airing and input, or we will be a community without caring before May ends.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer in Lindsay.  You can send your ideas for LSCC relocation c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.