thebigp

April 10, 2024—printed off 4/10/24f
Victor Davis Hanson
4. The Shooter. Two years ago, during record rainfall and snow melt, the ponds were full, the grass was lush, and the once-ossified cottonwood trees abruptly came back to life as they always do after the end of a drought. Ducks and geese were everywhere. Herons flew in regularly. Bullfrogs croaked all night. The farm teemed with renewed life. And shooters (as in not h****rs) from the town began appearing in real numbers—illegally shooting mallards, shooting quail, shooting ducks, shooting geese, shooting anything that moved, and those that did not.
It became scary to walk at night. The shooters were usually young. They seemed to ignore that even a .22 short can travel a mile if unimpeded. And they were often firing NATO-caliber rounds that could easily go 1.5 miles. So how do you approach someone with a full magazine shooting at things in the air, on the ground, and at a distance?
Carefully. What do you say to such vandals? Please shoot on your own property? Are they in cartels? Are they hitmen practicing? Are they just kids goofing around? Are they serious shooters merely target practicing? Or are they trying to shoot varmints for the neighbor? Who knows?
When they started shooting, the dogs stayed put and tried to break the foundation doors and crawl under the house. Sometimes they stay there for an hour (one reason I replaced the flexible ducting with sheet metal given the damage they do).
So what happened? I walked over waving, smiled, and politely said Propiedad privada. I tried to explain in Spanglish that it is a scary thing for them to shoot without wondering where their bullets will end up. Luckily, the shooter said ‘Ok, already,” gave me the death stare, and slowly backed away to his truck, waving two other shooters with him. I’ve seen them since but never repeated my stupidity.
5. The Injector. Three years ago, I began noticing an epidemic of spent syringes, foil pouches, and occasionally used condoms tossed in the same place where two alleyways met. This went on for about three months. But I never saw the injector, only his flotsam and jetsam. In the dirt of the orchard, sometimes there were torn pieces of cloth, beer cans, and toilet paper among the drug leftovers.
Then I noticed something. The car tracks out of the orchard always went in the same direction to a rental farmhouse, where a brown car and a known gangbanger lived with his family and perhaps maybe another 10 or so in various attached dwellings and trailers.
So, at last, I noticed the type of car and color. And I began alternating the time of morning and evening walks, starting at dawn, and walking after dark, or starting at 9 AM and returning at sunset. I finally turned the corner into the orchard row and there finally he was with two others, the ground freshly littered around them.
He was the renter of a house. I knew it well for a half-century and could name every law-abiding farmer or renter who had once lived there. I asked him to leave. He did not. I asked again. He did not. I took a picture of his car, his license plate, and him. Without warning he gunned it in reverse and headed exactly where I knew he lived.
I forgot about it. One week later I drove home only to see the barn door battered down, one dog limping, the other three chasing the same car in the orchard now speeding out of the barnyard into the alleyway.
I called the sheriff. As soon as I gave him the description, they recognized the thief and said he was responsible for almost every theft in a two-mile radius. They took fingerprints off the door. And they drove over to the rental. The next thing I knew, the family was gone and with them came a year or two respite from the gang activity. Bravo to law enforcement.
From Rural to Surreal—Once Small Farming Became Latifundia: Part Two—F53,B85
April 5, 2024—printed off 4/10/24
Victor Davis Hanson
The second incident was last week. I heard a bullet whiz through the almond orchard’s lower limbs. It sounded like it traveled 3 feet off the ground, about 20 yards from me. I could see that it came from a parked car about ¼ mile away. Two men from a dry pond bottom had been shooting an AR-15-like semi-automatic weapon toward our place. They apparently overshot the bank/backstop in between us, where they had placed target bottles. Accidents will happen.
The third “encounter” was the most eerie and uncouth. Last night, a small compact hatchback was parked alongside the orchard at dusk. As I walked parallel to it, I noticed two things: no one was in it—or anywhere near it among the growing shadows of the orchards.
And second, the hatchback door at the rear was strangely popped wide open. At first, I thought the car was stolen, abandoned, and stripped? Or was the owner nearby trying to steal copper wire from the pump a few yards away? Or was the car broken down and they were attempting to get help somewhere?
So, I walked alongside the compact. Suddenly as I neared, I heard strange noises from what I thought was an empty hatchback and then turned startled.
Laying in the rear section of the car were what looked like two women, one was flat on her back with her legs around the other’s neck, the former with her head down.
Stunned, crede mihi, at first I didn’t know whether they were engaged in some sort of mixed martial arts fight, or one was having a heart attack and receiving CPR, or someone had died. I stopped cold and was about to ask what was going on.
And then in a nanosecond, as I passed the car, the picture became all too clear.
Wanting to flee the scene of such a private interaction, but furious that they simply had trespassed and parked in the orchard, I started yelling out in broken Spanish, ¡Esto es propiedad privada!
I kept on walking, turning back at 20 yards, as they seemed by then to be dressed. As I entered the fourth row of the orchard, they sped off, screaming something out the window.
Is it California etiquette now that the property owner has to apologize for inadvertently interrupting trespassers?
This week—freezer, bullet, wh**ever—prompted me to recall the top ten encounters of the last few years, all emblematic of the decline of rural California.
At the end of the litany, I’ll offer some ideas about what went wrong with us. 1) Are open borders the culprit, even six hours by car north of San Diego? 2) Was it the radical t***sformation of farming from family to latifundia agriculture? 3) Was it the national trend to see private property as communal—in the spirit of squatterism? or 4) Is there really no law anymore, as bogus claims of social justice trump jurisprudence?