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.

 

Here Today

Published April 26, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     There’s a scar healing slowly above my left ankle that I hope will remain.  It’s the gash made by a cat I loved, John Coffey, when he got so excited by my attentions that passion overtook him.

           

     It was his last gash, as it turns out.  About a week later, as I was trying to wipe his nostrils free of mucous, he inexplicably died in my hands.  One moment he was here, the next moment he was gone.           

    

     Between those two moments, my concern for him turned to grief for myself as I was flooded by the love I’d felt for him the past 6 years.  So dear, that cat; so important, our relationship. Gone.  In shock, I buried him, then went wobbly on.

           

     That shift in perspective, from busy-ness to dead still, is what many must have experienced in Fresno this past week as the news spread of the mad man’s shooting spree.  Certainly the victims’ families and friends did:  he was just here this morning, talking about his new job, what we’d have for dinner with the groceries from Catholic Charities, once we get this check in the bank, we’re goin’ for coffee, friend, you and I.  The next moment he’s on the ground bleeding to death or on the way to the ER and there’s a phone call that suddenly makes nothing else important.  For a moment, there’s nothing else.  Nothing.

           

     I got a phone call like that once.  I was a young wife baking cookies for TrickerTreaters while my husband attended a night class for his speech therapist certification.  The phone rang, my mom said “Sit down,” and the rest of the world sliced away as she told me of my brother’s death.  That was forty-five years ago, and I can still feel the shift.

           

     It would turn out to be a turning point for me, once I recovered from grinding to a halt.  The loss both catapulted me forward and dragged me back, over and over, but from that point onward there was no real return to what I had envisioned as a normal life.  I think now that was good, though I try not to be arrogant toward people with normal lives.  Everybody’s got their own row to hoe.

           

     If there is anything good to glean from those senseless tragedies in Fresno (and there were many other deaths in Fresno reported that day – an older woman who’d left her walker behind to eat her nachos on the tracks, in the dark, by herself, run over by a southbound Amtrak train, despite the warning horn and lights – what’s more senseless than that?)  it’s the miracle that we’re still here.  Life is so incredibly fragile, and yet we’re still here, friend, you and I, still breathing.  Still thinking there might be something to accomplish or enjoy in these minutes we appear to have today.

           

     Peace.  Breathe in the day.

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Trudy Wischemann is a reluctant activist who writes.  Thanks to whoever left John Coffey on my porch as a kitten.  Send your sympathy/recovery thoughts c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or  leave a comment below.

 

The Landed

Published April 19, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


      On the radio last week, I heard Johnny Amaral, the spokesman for landed interests in the Westlands Water District, complain about the April 11^th announcement of the 100% water allocation from the CVP.
    
     “It’s good news,” he said, “especially for those who have permanent crops and other high value crops like that.”  But farmers won’t be able to use all that water.  “There’s not going to be land or crop to irrigate because it’s come so late.  It’s not because farmers don’t want to.  Clearly, they want to.  That’s, you know, what they do.”  But: “In order for this to work, the allocation announcement has to come much earlier.”
  
    In all the years I have lived here, I don’t remember a single one where the final allocation was not announced in April or later.  The timing of the announcement is driven by the surveys of the Sierra snowpack, where the water is collected for those allocations.  In some years, they (meaning the state’s Department of Water Resources and the federal Bureau of Reclamation) know earlier, but considering the 5 year drought behind us and snow still falling above us, the timing doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.  Considering that the water delivered to Westlands is Class II water, water deemed “surplus” to the Class I water served to most eastside irrigation districts from the Friant-Kern Canal, Amaral’s comments sounded like the words of a spoiled teenager to me.  Who do they think they are?

           

     They’re the landed.  Those words are often followed by another, like “gentry” or “aristocracy.”  Amaral refers to them as “farmers” to keep the dirt on their hands and off their reputations, but most of the people who run the tractors, sprayers and harvesting crews in the Westlands Water District are not the owners of the land.  Mostly they’re the landless.  The landed keep their hands – and their noses – clean.

           

     I felt the same disbelief when I heard that the decision to drop the Mother of All Bombs (actually, Massive Ordnance Air Blast,) for the first time ever, was made over a piece of chocolate cake.  I don’t care how beautiful it was.  Eleven tons of destruction that cost $16 million to build (according to the website Newsmax) came down on and blew up a piece of earth never seen, never visited, much less understood, with impacts we’ve heard little about except the hoped-for impact on other nation’s views of our president’s willingness to go ballistic, literally.

           

     His decision was dessert, nothing to it.  Made while eating a beautiful piece of chocolate cake at a resort he owns, along with many other properties around the globe.  The purported  words of Marie Antoinette, who was landed in the worst way, filled my head.  Let us eat cake.

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Trudy Wischemann studies land tenure from her home in Lindsay.  You can share your thoughts on land c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.      

   

Landless

Published April 12, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Last Friday, as that rain arrived, I saw a man walking down the sidewalk pushing a bicycle with his left hand and pulling a shopping cart with his right.  His cart was full to overflowing, covered with a blue tarp that flapped mightily in the wind.  His head was bent forward against the pelting rain.  He was headed somewhere, but from all appearances it was not to be under a roof. 

     Our word for such people now is “homeless.”   Years ago we used another word for people who carried all their worldly possessions with them, wandering, looking for a place to perch, and that was “landless.”  Back in the thirties, when dust and drought and the misplaced hopes of government programs drove people from their farms and sharecrop shacks, from their places in the economy as well as their communities, we called them “landless Dust Bowl refugees.”  Sometimes we called them other things, especially we in the receiving regions where their in-migration stretched county welfare budgets past breaking, where their tenuous camps trampled the ground, where their pitiful existence ripped at our hearts and made them hard.

     Even then we did not know that it was having land, even just a little piece of it, that made us suspicious of those who didn’t.  We did not know that it was having a warm place to lay our heads that made us fear these unsheltered ones.  We didn’t know that it was having a place in the economy and in our communities that made us want to drive off these displaced people, send them somewhere else.  Get them out of our sight.

     “Land is the source of all wealth,” wrote Henry George, a philosopher and economist from California’s Gold Rush days.  His first book, Progress and Poverty (1879,) noted the connection between advancing capitalism and increasing poverty, understanding how wealthy people tied up land and made it less available to those who work on it.  Have you ever been in an audience and heard a speaker point out the terrible contradiction that this part of the Valley produces the most food and yet has the most hungry people?  That’s Henry George’s insight written into our economic landscape 150 years later.

     The book I have been editing is a collection of writings about this divide between the landed and the landless.  For years, fear has kept me from finishing it, and not just fear of the largest landed interests.  It is fear of you, the ones with the smallest holdings who have the most to lose, those of us who sit so close to the margin between landed and landless that the very thought of being pushed there makes us push back.

     The question is where to push.  I hope this book will help us ask it and find some answers.  In the meantime, plant your gardens, treasure your neighbors, and keep your powder dry.  There’s work to do.

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Trudy Wischemann writes in Lindsay.  Gratitude to Manuel Mesa for leading the way in personhood.