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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.