Last week, when I wrote about the holy experience of Halloween, I didn’t remember that you’d be reading it after the election. The unholy wind from that event (for me) might have blown away the blessing of trick-or-treaters, so I’m glad I did. We may need to remember the importance of neighbors in the near future.
In part to get a break from commiserating phone calls, I said “Yes!” when my friend Betty asked if I’d like to ride along with her to Buttonwillow. She wanted to meet a poet there, Don Thompson, hoping he’d agree to join her in an event this coming March in Bakersfield, where she’ll be reading from her book on the Okie poet Wilma McDaniel. My ears perked up when I heard that he’s been writing from his homeplace for nearly 60 years.
Two days earlier I’d been reflecting on my life right after the election in 1982. Just like now, the days were shortening, the sunlight’s warmth waning as I set off to photograph the two towns in my master’s thesis, Arvin and Dinuba. The project was not funded, nor did my advisor understand the heart of the question I was pursuing. But I’d inherited this job from Paul Taylor, the Berkeley economist who fought to protect the acreage limitation of federal reclamation law, and I knew it had to be done. So I gathered my courage and headed down I-5.
I slept the night in the Buttonwillow Rest Area, which was pretty primitive then. I called George Ballis, the head of National Land for People, from the payphone there. He was in angry despair, having just had his last 10-plus years of work obliterated by the Reclamation Reform Act, a Republican coup. He told me there was no point in updating the Arvin-Dinuba study and hung up. I went anyway.
Last week’s drive to Buttonwillow was more than a trip down memory lane, however. That westside landscape has changed so much in 42 years. We drove by headquarters of corporate giants like Halliburton, Wonderful, and Grimmway where there had been mostly tumbleweeds before. The sense of emptiness has been filled by giant green, well-watered fields and miles of almond and pistachio orchards. Truck traffic abounds. Economic life there is busy, even though it is barely populated.
But I realized what makes that place lovable. The mountains are discernible even on a semi-clear day like we had Friday, and they surround that end of the valley. You can see the ridges that form our watershed more easily than here because the distance from side to side is not as far. A sense of intimacy creeps in, even though the fields and farms seem barren of people. You feel you could get to know this place.
Don Thompson was as open as his landscape. My fear of that place began to melt as he described his life there: the jobs he found to support his art, the people who helped, the work of living as a poet. As we drove back to the east side of Kern County and then headed north toward home, I realized that my concern for the Tulare Lake Basin had just been expanded to include the southwest quarter that I have critiqued and feared for so long.
Before we left him at Buttonwillow’s Starbucks, tucked into a truck stop there on I-5, Don handed us one of his poetry chapbooks from 2012. The watercolor on the cover was thin and light, mostly sky, with low golden hills below punctured by a few old fence posts. Titled “Everything Barren Will Be Blessed,” I felt the gift before I opened the book.
When I got home, the book opened to the poem that gave its title. With Don’s permission, I’m passing the gift along to you as part of our recent exploration of this mega-watershed we call home.
Snow on Elk Hills
Once in a decade maybe, the snow
falls here too, even here
on scrub ugly slopes where oil birds feed.Not much. Just a dusting,
but sufficient to cool slightly
the overheated mindof anyone who stops to look
long enough to see
that everything barren will be blessed.— Don Thompson, 2012
Trudy Wischemann is a remedial poet who writes mostly in paragraphs. You can send her your sightings of barren blessings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
