Hello West of West

Published Nov. 12, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Sunday’s Bee carried a long story about Mark Arax’s new venture, West of West Center, which will “launch” formally this Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum.  Though it’s been a long time coming, the timing seems perfect in my mind.


     Arax is one of this valley’s treasures, passionate about our future as well as our history.  Those of us who know and admire him like to think of him as fearless in this regard, and that spirit is contagious.  His first book, about trying to find his father’s murderer, was just a taste of his courage.  When he and co-author Rick Wartzman lifted the lid on the making of the J.G. Boswell empire with The King of California, they liberated the entire valley from the self-imposed gag order we suffered, never saying anything negative about Boswell’s power. 


     Arax’s third book, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009), gives us a taste of what’s coming with this new Center.  The book’s flap explains the title: “Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed ‘When I am in California, I am not in the West.  I am west of the West.’”  Arax lovingly, but unblinkingly, tells us why that is still true.


     The idea for West of West Center developed organically, starting with a pile of irreplaceable tape recordings of interviews of both the rich and famous and down and out from his long years as a journalist.  The need to digitize these tapes in order to preserve them led to the idea of a website where the  public would have access to them.  Last year, the opportunity to develop an affiliation with UC Merced to become a centrally-located  repository, capped the idea of making it a Center.  It’s a Center in the right sense of the word:  half museum, half training ground for telling this valley’s stories truthfully.


     The venture includes a non-profit publishing house, West of West Books. Not believing that all rich people are greedy, suspicious and hoarding, Arax designed the publishing effort to be supportive of telling the stories of wealthy families in ways that the proceeds and contributions could underwrite the stories of the non-wealthy as well.  The first book, which will be featured Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum event, is Beyond Luck:  The Improbable Rise of the Berry Fortune Across a Western Century, written by Betsy Lumbye, former executive editor of the Fresno Bee.  “You could say he found his luck digging,” wrote Bee writer Donald Munro in Sunday’s story, “- first irrigation ditches in the arid Valley, then a fortune in gold in the remote Yukon, and then a second fortune in oil in the Taft area.”  The grand-nephew of Clarence Berry, who inherited some of this family’s wealth, helped bring this story to light.  It promises to be very interesting.


     One mark of Arax’s courage, however, is that he wants to publish a book of writings on land and water that I have been editing for over 20 years, looking for a publisher.  It won’t make money, which a regular publisher requires, and it could make trouble, which is why I’ve been sitting on this project so long.  But with the drought and the passage of the water bond - another watershed in this state’s life - the need for its contents is greater than ever before.


     As they say, timing is everything.

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Trudy Wischemann is a hopeful writer and editor who lives in the Lewis Creek watershed of Tulare County.  You can send her your watershed life stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

           

Blessed Assurance

Published Nov. 5, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     We got rain this weekend, over an inch.  It was an answer to prayers, some spoken, some silent in the hearts of many.  I prayed, or said I did, that it would come but not until the kids got done trick-or-treating Friday night.  That prayer was answered almost as if by design.


     The children were all so beautiful, they and their guardian angels.  It was still balmy, that pre-storm calm, so the scantily-dressed Cleopatras and Ladybugs had no more problem staying warm than the Draculas and Spidermen.  We had around 400, a moderate Halloween considering it fell on a Friday.  I particularly want to thank the two Bananas who came to the door and sent two little boys into peals of laughter.


     Then came the wind, swirling leaves down the street, the first drops falling on the kids headed home.  I brought in the pumpkin and battened down the hatches while thunder rolled and lightning flashed, then came inside as torrents came down, remembering to put pans under the places where things leak.


     But the real blessing came the next morning when I opened a window to scare off  stray dogs in my yard, and got my first breath of fresh, rain-washed air.  It was like being home in Washington.  I’d forgotten how wonderful that smell is - that smell that tells the frightened heart that everything is going to live after all.  The calm before a storm is trumped by the peace that comes after.


     And perhaps that’s what we’ll be feeling on this Wednesday following Tuesday’s election.  It will be a morning-after for some, triumph for others, but perhaps peace for all.  No matter the outcomes, we will take the results and live with them, work for the improvements we hope and see needed, regardless.  Think of an election as a much-needed rain...


     What I loved about the rain this weekend is what it did for the people I meet through my job at the market.  It slowed them down, took the edge off their spirits, revived them from their worrisome desiccation.  One mechanic, an owner of a repair shop who said business has been up and down, explained the systemic release from fear better than most city planners comprehend.  He said:


     “This rain will help plump up the oranges.  The people will have more work, and so they’ll have money to buy things and fix their cars.  Everything will be better.”


     I think this rain was also a preliminary assurance that this drought may not be Divine retribution for the follies of our kind, visited on the good and evil alike.  Perhaps we are not facing the total destruction of our rural way of life portended by the mega-drought scenarios, in which every drop of water is commanded and controlled, industrialized for those urban enclaves we think are the pinnacle of human existence.


     Perhaps we’ll recognize in time that pure bliss is getting soaked in the first rain of the year, and waking up the next morning to birds singing and damp soil, to trees breathing huge sighs of relief -- and the prospect of oranges plumping and there being enough work.

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Trudy Wischemann is a seriously refreshed writer who lives in Lindsay.  You can send her your Halloween rain observations c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below. 

 

 

Lindsay's Finest

Published Oct. 29, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Lindsay’s Finest” is the name of a car club in town with some avid members.  I’ve always thought the name charmingly bold, if perhaps slightly incomplete.  But Friday, at Lindsay Strathmore Public Cemetery, I caught a glimpse of a widely-expanded group of people who fall into that category, and a simple force that makes this place Home.
 

     We were gathered to celebrate the life and bury the remains of Robert Lindsay Hart, 58.  His body had been overwhelmed by cancer Oct. 16th, his spirit released.  His family and friends, at least those who were aware that he had died, assembled there on the grass to recognize the passing of someone they cared about.  And there were many.

     Lindsay was a character.  I didn’t know him well, but I recognized the free spirit in him the first time we met.  He was out for a stroll through the neighborhood one night when I was out working in my yard under the cover of darkness.  We stood and talked for over an hour.  We were friends from that time on.

     And judging by the number of people who came to pay their respects, he had many friends.  Most have known him all their lives and have stories to tell, some of which we heard that morning.  They were stories of befriending, of intense “discussions” over important aspects of car maintenance and anything else, of parties on the canal that could have gone south but for his presence.  And there were tears from some of the young men who looked up to him and were helped by him.

     I didn’t know how much he loved cars, and what a good mechanic and machinist he was.  But when people started arriving in hotrods and vintage sedans from the 1950’s, one good ’n loud motorcycle, that part of his life became evident.  As one particularly souped-up coupe pulled in, I realized that Lindsay’s finest had arrived - this huge cadre of people who called him Friend.

     Some people knew he could be irascible.  I never experienced anything from him but respect.  After I heard that he’d passed, I realized that the one thing I knew about Robert Lindsay Hart was that if I were standing naked and he stood next to me with only a shirt on, he would take it off and wrap it around me.  I know that as certainly as my own name.

     So we gathered, old and young, friends and family, friends and enemies, some women, mostly men, to say goodbye reluctantly.  Pastor Karen Stoffers-Pugh came up from Bakersfield to guide us, grateful to be back in this community where she started her ministry.  I sang an old A.P. Carter song, “Diamonds in the Rough,” because the music Lindsay loved (in the words of a mutual friend) was “too wild” for me.  Karen chose a song from his favorite group, Boston, called “Don’t Look Back,” their #2 hit, and played all 5 minutes of it at the service’s end.

     And as the guests gave the family their condolences, and the sun kept moving across the sky, men of all ages began peeling out and laying down rubber in Lindsay’s honor.  In my mine, that was as good as a 21-gun salute or jets streaking across the sky.  It was some of Lindsay Hart’s finest friends paying tribute to one of the town’s finest free spirits.  Thank you, everyone, for this sweet glimpse of our real community.

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Trudy Wischemann is a 21-year-long newcomer to Lindsay.  You can send your funeral sightings of bliss to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

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Vote Lindsay OPEN

Published October 22, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     For the second time in two years, candidates' lawn signs decorate Lindsay’s streets and neighborhoods, telling us it’s time to make up our minds.  I see it as a sign of improvement, though not everyone feels that way.  Perla Soria, who was elected to the school board two years ago, mentioned that she received an anonymous letter during her campaign saying the signs had ruined the town.

     There were no lawn signs before the 2012 election.  No one ran against the sitting city councilmembers; they simply re-appointed themselves to those positions and saved the taxpayers thousands of dollars in election costs.  Of course, that carte blanche situation cost the community millions in wasted grants and loans that have strapped and will continue to strap Lindsay for the next 40 years.

     It also cost us in community participation, a dearth from which we are still trying to recover.  The words “openness” and “transparency” were not uttered before the Townsend dynasty collapsed - there was no point.  It wasn’t until the recall effort was launched, triggered by the appointment of Rich Wilkinson as permanent city manager under the leadership of Mayor Murray, that what was wrong with Lindsay was identified.  It was closed to citizen participation, and opaque to public scrutiny.  Even the press couldn’t find a way in.

     The two incumbents running for city council are the last two non-elected appointees from Mayor Murray’s reign.  At least they were forced to run - we can thank the other candidates for making that happen.  Danny Salinas was appointed somewhere around 2001 to fill the vacancy left by John Stava, who was the only councilmember to cast an occasional “no” vote until Steven Mecum and Roseana Sanchez were elected in 2012.  From Danny’s appointment onward, Scot Townsend and crew got whatever they wanted from the council.

     Under Mayor Padilla, with leadership from Mecum and Sanchez, things are beginning to change.  When citizens do attend city council meetings, they are treated with more respect, although the rules for engagement are still preventing real participation.  The staff can no longer rest assured that their desires will be met with Council’s automatic approval.  But what Council truly needs is one more pair of eyes examining the staff’s proposals for flaws and half-truths, one more good mind open to solutions appropriate for our community, one more good heart willing to take on the task of opposing the insider machine.

     Lorena Vazquez, in her candidate’s statement printed in the Sun-Gazette’s Oct. 8th issue, said “transparency is the number one issue.”  She also listed the need to create an environment, both at council meetings and city hall, where the citizens will be treated with courtesy and respect and their concerns addressed, as well as much-improved street and sidewalk maintenance, water quality, and police protection, which she believes is hampered by poor morale. 

     I agree with her on all these points, and know that Lorena has the chutzpah to work to make things better.  She stood up against the wall erected to protect Scot Townsend’s departure and was one of the avid workers on the recall campaign.  She has invested in herself through her education and positions of employment, and these things would make her a real asset to the Council.  I think we would begin to experience Lindsay in a new way if she were elected.

     So use your ballot wisely:  vote to make Lindsay OPEN to its residents and responsive to our needs.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who misses going to the polls in November.  You can write to her with your concerns c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

Stand Still

Published Oct. 15 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Friday night, in Porterville, I had one of those moments of a lifetime, the kind where you know you’re home no matter where you are.  Writing about it now, I also know I’m home.
    
     I was singing with the Standlees, Tommy and Diane, with my regular singing partner, Jesse McCuin, playing standup bass fiddle.  We were singing “Stand Still,” a song recorded by The Isaacs in 2001.  Diane, with her beautifully clear, strong voice, was on lead; Tommy was playing his wonderful guitar and carrying the first harmony part on the choruses.  My job was to find the middle harmony note, to fill in the triad of the chords on the chorus, and then accompany Diane on the second verse with a kind of ooo-ing descant.
    
      As I moved to the microphone to join in on the first chorus, all I could do was pray the right note would come out of my mouth.  When it did, there was a release of energy I can still feel these three days later.  It was like finding the right word in a sentence, the word that makes the sentence sing instead of puzzle or conflict with the meaning lodged in your heart trying to get out onto the page.
    
     But it wasn’t finding the right note that gave me the thrill.  It was getting to be part of the music, part of the medium carrying the message.  I’d never heard the song before Tommy and Diane asked us to join them for the gig they’d gotten at Porterville’s Main Street Friday night “Concerts in the Park.”  I’d never even heard them sing before, much less the music they perform, which could be called an eclectic mix of old and new Southern Country Gospel.  It’s wonderful music, and they bring it to our ears simply and beautifully with trueness of heart that just shines.
    
     But “Stand Still” hit me right where I’m living, and opened a large window I’d had covered with curtains.  “Stand still - and let God move,” the chorus opens.  I have had so many instances recently when I felt completely confused about what to do, and felt conflicted about my confusion, only to be relieved of both conflict and confusion by going still and waiting until I felt the nudge.  The song reminded me that when I do that, I’m being led.
    
     Quakers have a saying:  “Proceed as Way opens,” and sometimes that happens by doors being shut.  But other times it’s as if someone turned on a light in a hallway you didn’t see before.  That’s what singing with the Standlees was like.
    
     Like so many artists in rural regions, we all make our livings doing something else.  Tommy works for Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District; Diane has her own dog grooming shop on Valencia; Jesse manages the mini-storage here in town, and I scan groceries.  But we sing to have a life, and we make music to help others enjoy or appreciate or understand their own.  So if you see Tommy or Diane or Jesse around, let them know you’ve heard they’ve got music in them.  And if you can think of a place where that music would do some good, let one of us know.
    
     But most of all, if you’ve got confusion and confliction, don’t know where to turn, where to go, or what to do, here’s my suggestion:  stand still.  Let yourself utter the two-word “Oh, help” prayer, and then just let God move.


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Trudy Wischemann is a flute-playing low alto who writes.  You can send her your favorite lyrics c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Sacramento Politicians

Published October 8, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette (slightly edited.)


     Sunday after church I picked up Saturday’s mail and found a flyer from the California Democratic Party (yes, I’m registered D, not R.)  It charged Andy Vidak with broken promises to working people and condemned him for being “Just another SACRAMENTO POLITICIAN.” 

     Considering the flyer’s source (an organization dedicated to getting politicians elected) and the Sacramento postmark, the irony was almost comic.  But then my eye lit on a small light green box near my name and address recommending yes votes on Propositions 1 (the California Water Bond) and 2 (The Rainy Day Fund,) and my sense of humor disappeared.

     Last week I intimated that I don’t think the Water Bond deserves automatic approval just because we here in Tulare County live in a semi-desert dependent on water imported from two watersheds north and are experiencing a drought that is drying up our main source of livelihood.  I still have water coming out of the tap, so perhaps I’m not appropriately panicked.  But these two propositions were crafted by Sacramento politicians to take advantage of the public’s uncertainties about the future, given this drought’s potentially long life, doling out enough goodies to the most powerful stakeholders so they’ll keep quiet.  (Prop 2 has nothing to do with rain, by the way.)  I think both parties should be ashamed.

    

     Governor Brown might be the biggest Sacramento politician with muck on his shoes from this.  Rumor has it he’d like to take one last shot at the Presidency.  I’m sure his good friends Lynda and Stuart Resnick would be glad to help out on that one.  Are there any provisions in the California Water Bond for buying back the Kern Water Bank from them, which they silently wrestled away from the public's ownership?  I didn’t see any - let me know if you find one, OK?

     While you’re looking, you might want to check out the website for “Vote NO on Proposition 1.”   It is a coalition of organizations concerned about the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta and San Francisco Bay, plus organizations like the Factory Farm Awareness Coalition and Food and Water Watch.  I find their arguments compelling, which range from what the bond undermines in terms of public trust doctrine and the principle of “beneficiary pays,” to the blunter facts that it provides “little cost-effective near-term drought relief” and that the proposed dams previously “had been abandoned because of low water yield and financial infeasibility.”

     The most compelling argument to me, however, is that it “sabotages efforts to meaningfully resolve California’s continuing water crisis.”  I agree with their problem statement:  “The water crisis is the result of the over-appropriation, waste and inequitable distribution of limited water supplies and the failure to balance the public trust.”  Let me bring your attention back to one key term:  “inequitable distribution.”  I wonder how Lynda and Stuart’s almond, pistachio and pomegranate crops are doing this year.  I bet their citrus groves aren’t hurting, either.  Somebody want to check?

     Governor Brown, in this term and his first, hasn’t touched inequitable distribution or the big boys’ grip on water.  He learned well from his father, under whose leadership we got a water bond creating the high-cost State Water Project that made farming feasible on those Westside lands the Resnicks farm now.  Now the Sacramento Politicians are asking the public to throw good money after bad, and have corralled most of the activists and media to co-operate. 

     When we find elected officials who can and will address the inequitable distribution of the public’s water supply, we can call them by another name: statesmen.  Until then, the only question left is “Will we ever just say ‘No’?”

     Visit www.ballotpedia.org for good information on the propositions.  See www.noonprop1.org to view the arguments mentioned above.  Note:  On Oct. 8 I received another Vidak flyer, this one from the Republicans claiming Vidak helped author the Water Bond - another reason not to vote for him in my mind.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who is used to being in the minority.  You can send her your reasons for voting yes or no c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

A Little Drought Music

Published in edited form October 1, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette.
    
     Sunday morning, when I woke to a sunrise dampened by orange-edged clouds and robins singing for rain, I felt blessed to have such beauty in my life.  Then the first drops sounded on the patio roof, and I ran outside to the clothesline where I’d hung my cotton quilt to dry the night before.  In my bedroom I unfolded the heavy wooden clothes rack my aunt had used many winters in Washington and spread the quilt on it to continue drying, proud that I’d tricked Coyote into releasing some moisture from those clouds.  I was making a pot of tea when the drops increased to a shower, and went back outside to drag a few more things under cover.  Then I poured a steaming cup and sat inside reveling in this music so familiar to my Pacific Northwestern ears.
    
     Saturday I’d spent time working on an answer to Mas Masumoto’s call for some “art of the drought” in last Sunday’s Fresno Bee (9/22/14.)  He used the example of Dorothea Lange’s photograph “Migrant Mother” and its impact on public opinion during the Okie/Arkie migration from the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s.  I know the photo well, and many of her others:  I worked with the photographer’s husband, Paul Taylor, near the end of his life during my early days at Berkeley.  He knew the power of her art, and when they combined it with his facts and knowledge, they created a document of that drought’s causes and effects - An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion - that was never surpassed. 
    
     This drought is different, at least the one here in California that politicians are trying to fix with legislation and taxpayer monies.  There were no irrigation projects then in the midwestern half of the country when farmers (mostly small independent, tenant and sharecrop families) were dried up and blown off the land.  After awhile, politicians tried to fix things with legislation and taxpayer monies, but ended up benefiting mostly the larger farmers who turned their tenants and sharecroppers out, replacing them with tractors purchased with the government funds.  This, in turn, enabled them to buy out (for pennies on the dollar) their drought-stricken small-farm neighbors still plowing with mules.
    
     About two-thirds down in Mas’s column there’s an uncharacteristically political suggestion that voters should approve the water bond in the upcoming November election.  The point of the piece is that artists should find ways to the voters hearts to help make that happen, although he never comes right out and says so, or explains why they should.  That would be fine with me if I were sure the bond would be used to provide more water where it’s needed, which I think is on the smaller, independently owned farms the irrigation projects were built to support in the first place, but I’d have to be brain dead to be convinced of that.  In California water always flows uphill to the pinnacles of power, and we’re hardly even embarrassed anymore to admit that yes, the big boys and girls will get their share first, and we get to share what’s left.  I think the hope is simply that if there’s more supply, the shortage will have more acre-feet in it and go around a little further.  Maybe this drought’s not so different after all.
    
     Knowing Mas’s good heart, however, I think what he was really calling for was art that would call on us as a people to share the shortage, bond together and lean into the wind, to work on fixing the problems together that this drought has revealed.  Like “Come on, people now, Smile on your brother, Everybody get together, Try and love one another right now,”  that line from the Youngbloods’ song from our era, Mas’s and mine, our beautifully idealistic generation so crassly labeled “Boomers.”  To put our money, our water, our efforts and our faith where our mouths are.  That, of course, would require us to rise up united and take the power back from those who are using the drought to advance their family fortunes, like the Resnick’s and the Westlands’ Fortune 600’s.  Like John Vidovich’s Sandridge Partners, who Judge Harry N. Papadakis “just said no” to a couple of months back.  It would require us - even the educated “us” - to get educated about water in California, and from some entity other than the California Water Foundation, which serves as a mouthpiece for the big boys, teaching us the proper propaganda to make us good citizens of their empires.
    
     After Sunday morning’s blessed rainfall, when God let those raindrops blow where and when He willed, I have a song to suggest we learn to sing in these days of anxious anticipation of the coming water year.  It’s a song by John Pitney, that dairy kid turned Methodist minister from Oregon, titled “I Will Sing,” pure Judeo-Christian tradition straight out of the Book of Habakkuk.  It’s about being thankful for what we have and trusting God will provide, even in times of drought or other hardship.  Here’s the first verse:


When the fig tree’s barren in the field,
I will sing, I will sing.
And the produce of the olive fails,
I will sing, I will sing.
When the fields are yielding up no food,
And the flock be cut off from the fold,
And there be no cattle in the stalls,
I will sing, I will sing.

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Trudy Wischemann is a Pitney disciple who writes for Tulare County.  You can send her your drought music ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.