“Consider the lilies… not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”
Luke 12:27
When I was just a little girl, my father would look at me, shake his head and say ruefully “You’re always sticking up for the underdog.” That seemed odd to me even then, not the observation, but the identification of it as lifelong problem. I was only in kindergarten. Besides, I think I got it from him.
My “underdogs” extended to everything that breathes, and much that doesn’t visibly respire. Even that young, I felt the land beneath my feet to be included, the necessary substrate of the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. This is not something I acquired over time. I came this way.
I’ve found myself reflecting on this birthright characteristic since I began attending water meetings. Most people’s first response, once it becomes clear that I’m working for change in the way we let rich people decide where the water will go in flood time and drought, is to suggest that I’m tilting windmills. I take note of their concern and carry on.
I come by this honestly. First off, there’s that thing about underdogs, which is really a devotion to the idea of equality (i.e., I don’t think there should be underdogs.) Then there’s the story about my dad and The Sewer District.
Dad was a carpenter with a bent for building community. Hammer in hand, he helped start and build the volunteer fire department on Brown’s Point, a little spit of land sticking out into Puget Sound. He also led the construction of the community clubhouse that doubled as the branch library, with boat storage below. But when he tried to organize a sewer district to manage the septic tank overflows that ran freely in open ditches from homes in the Point’s interior, he was defeated by the wealthier beachfront property owners, whose untreated sewage flowed straight into the bay. They were sure they didn’t need a sewer district and certainly weren’t going to pay more taxes to support one.
For Dad, the defeat was real. I think it made him feel ridiculous to have thought he could convince rich people to fork out money for the common good. Sorta like tilting windmills. Twenty years later, the Point had a sewer district, but we didn’t stick around to watch or help make it happen. We moved.
Several years later, during my sophomore year of high school, I got very sick and ended up in the hospital for a few days. I had joined the debate team, and the pressure was real, but so was the companionship. My fellow debaters bought me a paperback copy of “Don Quixote” as a get-well gift, which I still have. It felt like recognition of that innate underdog thing, and perhaps also a gentle warning about tilting windmills.
But last week a pair of photos got me thinking about those windmills Don was tilting. One photo was of a spindly American-style farm windmill face down in the grass, no longer serving its purpose. The photo was taken in Big Sur, where groundwater pumping is all they’ve got. My sense of loss got me to look harder at the other photo of an ancient windmill in southern France built of stone, surrounded by a defensive high wall like a small fortress. That fortified windmill was surrounded by endless vineyards, the picture of agricultural stability.
Together the two photos forced me to look at windmills’ real function: to bring water to the surface from underground, a subject I’m currently thinking about night and day. I realized that ancient stone windmill was likely the property of a land baron in feudal times. It gave them control over water, and thus the surrounding vineyards on land undoubtedly worked by peasants before the Revolution. It was then what the deep-well pumps are now: the key to land profits and empires.
If that’s actually what my friend Don Quixote was tilting, I think he had it right. Press on.
Trudy Wischemann is glad to have words for spears. You can send her your tilting preoccupations 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.
