Photo Essay

Being Like Wildflowers

/ Merilee / 3 Comments

Winter 2021-22 in California started out with a hefty amount of rain in December.  Too much, actually, since we now tend to get atmospheric rivers of water aimed at the west coast which slam it with too much all at once.

Sort of like if you don’t water your yard for months and it’s dry and baked, and you decide to turn on your hose full-blast and hit that hard soil with a ridiculous amount of water all at one time.  It can hold only so much water before soil starts slipping.  Then you have mudslides all up and down Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu ends up a mess.  For a minute…  But no one really likes to complain about it because we want that rain.  We need the atmospheric rivers, whenever they show up.  Our mountains don’t get enough snow and the reservoirs are running dry.

In December we all thought things were going along swimmingly, that La Nina wasn’t going to be mean to us after all and would have a little mercy, giving us the precipitation we need.  But in January the tap shut off, Santa Ana winds blew again (and again, and again) drying everything out and dashing everyone’s hopes for a decent rainy season.

This not only kills the joy for everyone from farmers to gardeners, but also – wildflower lovers.  There is no Super Bloom for 2022.  A few scatterings here and there of poppies and lupines up along I5 between the LA Basin and the San Joaquin Valley, but not a lot.  I looked.

So when I spent a big chunk of time recently out in the desert, I was not surprised to see hardly any flowers.  A few running alongside the I15, but not much.  So one day I went out on an excursion to see what I could find, if anything.

I went up Jubilee Pass Road over Salisbury Pass at the south end of Death Valley.  Usually you can find flowers at the higher elevations, and I wasn’t disappointed.  They were there in occasional drifts alongside the road.

They were dwarfed, though, stunted and sparse.  But still, they are there if you look carefully.  Even growing in the cracks of the pavement on the road.  Or way up in rocks, which I always find fascinating.   There were a surprising number of gravel ghosts, which always thrills me to find my namesake hovering over the ground without a care in the world.

There’s always joy spending time with wildflowers.  They innocently bloom and bounce in the breeze, enjoying the sunshine and welcoming bees and bugs and are oblivious of the troubles in the world,  whether it’s a Super Bloom or a Little Bloom.

I would like to be more like the wildflowers.

 

The Postcards: Making Art Out Of Mules And Wagons

/ Merilee / 8 Comments

A lot of people did all kinds of things during the Covid-19 lockdown.  Some cleaned their houses and sorted through their belongings over and over again.  Others chose to tear up their yard and start a vegetable garden.  Some people decided to take on greater challenges in their downtime, like beginning the Next Great American Novel.  Like all of the others, I also cleaned my house over and over again and sorted through my belongings.  I re-planted my rose garden and put in new trees.  I did not begin the Next Great American Novel, but I did decide to make – postcards.

These aren’t just any postcards, though.  I  decided to make something that I personally would want to buy.  Something that I cannot find, that I think would be neat to send to someone.  They’re fine art postcards of the Twenty Mule Team of Death Valley that I, along with a partner, made for the Death Valley Conservancy.  My concept was to not only make postcards that are beautiful and a little bit different, but also make them frameable by the recipient (or even the purchaser) if they choose to do so.  I’m really quite proud of them.

I had no idea when I took on this project how much work it was going to be.  It’s a big process making postcards like these.  First, I needed a printing expert to hold my hand while I waded through my ideas, chose paper stocks, envelopes, colors, and textures.  Then I had a graphic designer help me with layouts, find historic fonts and design a folio to hold the postcards that matched precisely what I saw in my mind.  Context was added with text for the both the cards and folio.  Multiple people edited and re-edited the text to make sure it was exactly as it should be.  Once it went to print, there would be no do-overs and the last thing I wanted was for the incorrect century to be printed on 1,000 postcard folios.  That would have been a giant facepalm moment.

The next phase of the project involved getting it all ready for print.  There were multiple press checks to make sure that the kind of black and white I would end up with on the cards was what I wanted to end up with, and that the color of the folio was not too greenish or reddish.  Each and every tiny potential flaw was anticipated, examined and dealt with.  All of these press checks were way across town (which in Los Angeles is a big deal) but it was okay because I was seeing what I’d been working so hard on for six months actually coming to life.  At a certain point, though, I wondered if the postcards I thought were a great idea at the beginning of the pandemic would ever actually become a reality.  But then one day they did become a reality, and when I looked at them, I could see the common thread of myself running through them.  It was apparent that it was time to tell a little bit of my story, and how I came to do all of this.

For years I have photographically documented the Borax Twenty Mule Team® of Death Valley from 2011, when I was first introduced to it by historian and filmmaker, Ted Faye, until its appearance at the 25th Anniversary of Death Valley National Park in 2019.  For the anniversary, the Death Valley Conservancy got to roll their exact replica borax wagons down Highway 190 to Harmony Borax Works, so they could meet their ancestors, one of the surviving sets of original Twenty Mule Team wagons.  It was a powerful and emotional moment, bringing those replica wagons to the motherland – Death Valley.

The first time I ever saw the Twenty Mule Team, my jaw nearly hit the floor. It reminded me of when I saw Death Valley as an eight-year-old kid and later as a forty-something.  I had the identical reaction.  It’s that gut-punch of “epic” that hits you when you’re seeing greatness.  You know you’ll never forget it.

When I saw that long line of mules hitched to ancient borax wagons with the Eastern Sierra Nevada behind them, it took my breath away.  It was the same reaction I had to the folded, buff-colored hills in Death Valley that I saw as that forty-something.  I longed to paint them.  I wanted to do something really big with both – the mules and wagons and the natural beauty of Death Valley.  I wanted to turn them into fine art because that is what they were and always will be to me.  They are pure, unadulterated art.

I started painting Death Valley as a solo traveler in 2006.  It was such an exhilarating experience, that I kept going back.  I liked painting in the desert.  Death Valley is not a friendly place to paint in, though.  It’s hot, extraordinarily dry, sometimes freezing cold, and it can get really, really windy.  Your painting can get picked up by the wind like a sail and go flying across the desert in a split second.  By the time you track it down it’s filthy and your paint is full of sand and grit.  You have to make the choice to either give up, or embrace the dirt being embedded in your painting.  Which can be kind of interesting, actually.  I always allowed the sandy dirt and rocks to stay, to let it be whatever it was.  Most times I think that’s best, anyway.  Allow things to be what they are instead of trying to change them to meet expectations.

Painting in the desert was hard and frustrating.  Many times I’d end up working inside the back of my car.  I would be out all day long in the sun and wind with bugs flying around my face, and ravens trying to steal my sandwich or paint tubes.  I really liked it, though.  With as difficult as it was, I really, really liked it.  The dead silence of the desert was not only refreshing, but it helped me connect with myself.  When you’re not constantly being bombarded with entertainment, and your mind is allowed to just be, you can learn all kinds of things about who you are.  Really valuable things.  Every time I went out to the desert to work, I came back a different person.  I loved that.

After a couple of years of coming home with half-finished paintings, I decided to take a camera with me for reference photos, so I could finish what I had been working on at home.  When I started playing around with the camera, though, I discovered that it could help me tell a visual story that was quite different from painting.  It’s wasn’t a better artistic tool.  It was different. The camera became an extension of drawing and painting for me.

I wanted to approach photography as a painter, not as a photographer.  I was trained to see everything in the abstract first, the large, simple, geometric shapes that make up a composition.  The way that a drawing or painting is composed always comes first, before everything else.  I wanted to compose my photographs as though I was blocking in a painting – seeing the biggest elements first, and everything else second.  I fell in love with being able to shoot photographs from my own, unique point of view, not someone else’s.  It is a love affair that has lasted for over a decade.

For the first several years of my painting trips to the desert, I spoke to no one.  I was completely by myself.  I met people in Death Valley only after I started taking photographs – people like Ted Faye.  It was through Ted that my deeper desert journey really began.  He introduced me to the Twenty Mule Team, which had been revived in the 1990’s by Preston Chiaro of U.S. Borax, and muleskinner, Bobby Tanner. I also met others who have a genuine passion for preserving the history of Death Valley and the surrounding desert.  I have made some of my very best friends out in the desert.

When I visited Death Valley as an eight-year-old, it wasn’t so much the beauty of the place that got to me.  Instead, it was the history.  Most people only know of Death Valley National Park as the “Hottest Place on Earth”, or they think of its extreme, but beautiful natural landscape.  In truth, Death Valley has a huge history connected with it.  A large part of that history has to do with prospecting and mining.

Mining has an enormous place in the timeline of Death Valley.  In particular, the mining of borax, which is its most famous mineral.  In the 1880’s, borax that was mined and processed in Death Valley needed to be transported to the nearest railhead located in Mojave, California, which was 165 miles away.  In order to get the borax from Death Valley to Mojave, teams of twenty mules (or 18 mules and 2 horses) were hitched to enormous, tall and narrow wagons built especially for hauling tons of borax across the desert.  It was a ten-day trip from Death Valley to Mojave for two men and all of those mules, horses, a big tank filled with water and 22 tons of bagged borax.  After unloading, they turned around and headed back to Death Valley with hay and supplies in the giant wagons.

In the winter of 1971, the only thing I really remember about my first trip to Death Valley (other than seeing Scotty’s Castle and being freezing cold), was the story of borax.  Everything was about borax.  From the Borax Museum to the original borax wagons that were on display at Furnace Creek and at Harmony Borax Works.

Those old wagons were GIANT to a little kid and had a vibe about them I couldn’t really put into words, but it was – eerie.  In fact, the whole of Death Valley had an unmistakable surreal energy to it, which I liked.  It felt like the ghosts of history were all around me in that place, as if people and times that were long gone had left behind traces of themselves.  Those haunting feelings stayed with me and I never forgot about them.  Years later I would reflect back on that visit to Death Valley and the way that it made me feel.  It scared me a little, made me just ever-so-slightly uncomfortable, and I liked that.

When I returned as an adult, I again felt that same haunting vibe I had liked as a kid.   I noticed that some of that strangeness I picked up in the area was ending up in my photographs, which I liked quite a bit.  I wanted my photographs to have a surreal timelessness about them and for viewers to feel transported to the past, but have it not clearly defined as to exactly what time period it was.

Over the past twelve years, I have amassed thousands of images of not only Death Valley, but also the Twenty Mule Team.  At the beginning of 2020, I decided to choose a few of my favorite photographs of the Twenty Mule Team to turn them into a set of fine art postcards for the Death Valley Conservancy.  This was not an easy task, though.  It was daunting.  Intimidating.  I had no clue which images to choose because I have hundreds of “favorites”. This went on for months until finally one day I felt the urge to find the common thread running through eight photographs, enough to tell the story of the Twenty Mule Team of the 21st century.  Then it all fell into place like magic.

I knew immediately which photographs would tell the story of the Twenty Mule Team through my eyes and would have that sense of haunting timelessness and history that I love so much.

The postcards ended up being what I originally intended so long ago.  They are pure, fine art, and a period at the end of a journey.

–

The exact replica Borax Twenty Mule Team® wagons are on display at Laws Museum in Bishop, California.  If you would like to purchase a set of the postcards of The Twenty Mule Team of Death Valley, you may do so by visiting the Laws Museum in person, or by contacting the museum directly and ordering a set.  Their website is lawsmuseum.org.

All proceeds go to the Laws Museum and the Borax Twenty Mule Team® so they may both continue their efforts in preserving history.

If you are interested in learning more about the history of the Twenty Mule Team as well as Death Valley, books and videos may be purchased at http://goldcreekfilms.com/.

The Death Valley Conservancy works tirelessly to preserve, restore and protect the history of Death Valley.   If you would like to learn more about what they do and about the exact replica Borax Twenty Mule Team® wagons, you can do so at https://www.dvconservancy.org/.

If you feel compelled to have your own borax wagons built, or any kind of wagon for that matter, the best wagon maker in the world is Dave Engel of Engel’s Coach Shop, in Joliet, Montana at https://engelscoachshop.com/

A owe a huge thank you to the people who have supported me and what I do and who helped me with this project.  Firstly, to Preston Chiaro, President of the Death Valley Conservancy, for understanding me and my work, to Janet Klein of @janetkleinprintworks and Mary Cay Walp, graphic designer, for helping make my postcards a reality, and to Ted Faye of Goldcreek Films for his help and believing in me all of these years.

Nature Is The Ultimate Artist

/ Merilee / 2 Comments

A storm blew into California.  A big storm.

There haven’t been many this year.  It’s been dry with lots of wind and little rain.  I decided it was time to venture back out to the desert for a few days, alone, to photograph that weather.  There is nothing like watching a storm in the desert.

It makes me feel alive.

I headed out the morning the storm hit and by the time I reached the desert, the winds were howling and dust was blowing.  Sheets of ethereal rain dotted the landscape, shifting and changing every second.

Watching a storm cross the land, sometimes with thunder and lightning, winds whipping up dust devils and veils of rain and snow falling like silken threads from the clouds to the earth is something that is pretty much unmatched.

Exciting.  Beautiful.  Magical.

The storm performed for three days in the desert, longer than I thought it would.  Everywhere I turned there was something fresh and new happening in the sky.   From every vantage point, all up and down the desert spilling out from Death Valley and beyond.

It made me realize that the power and wonder of nature can and always will outstrip anything that man does.  No filmmaker, painter or photographer can adequately capture the energy and vibe that is carried in a storm.

Because Nature is The Ultimate Artist.

 

For Pete.

Trees and Bees Make It Better

/ Merilee / 4 Comments

I had to have some trees removed from my yard recently.  Last weekend, in fact.  Birch trees.  They had a disease.

The birch trees had actually been sick for a long time, but I didn’t want to face it.  Each year my gardener or the tree man would come out and cut a little bit more off the tops where the branches and trunks had died back.  They were struggling to put out their leaves in spring, almost as if they had to think about it for awhile, wondering if they wanted to do it one more year.  Should they continue to move onward?…or let life go.

I had to make the decision for them.  It made me very sad.

This whole past year has been sad, really.  It was a year ago today that I went to the San Joaquin Valley to drive the Fresno Blossom Trail with my friend.  The panic over Coronavirus had already started, toilet paper was a hot commodity and Costco had none.  Paper towels and napkins were missing, too, which I thought was weird.  Why were people buying up paper goods?  I couldn’t wrap my head around it.  The Panic Buying of 2020.  It was super-bizarre.

There was talk.  Other countries were struggling with the virus and President Trump was calling it the “China Flu”, which irritated me.  I thought it was a childish thing to say.  My friend and I ate outside at a restaurant and discussed Coronavirus.  She tried to educate me about how bad it really was and I did not want to face it.  This wasn’t really going to happen, I told myself.  But I had a deep sense that it was, and that it was going to be a very bad thing.

We drove out into the orchards on a beautiful day with fluffy, white clouds and breezes, admiring the almond trees in full bloom with bees flying all around.  Peaches and nectarines, too, all dressed in their frilly, pink blossoms.  It’s a sight to behold when the landscape is divided into large rectangles of color.  Whites and pinks of all kinds, stretched out in rows.

Sometimes we saw bee boxes stacked up here and there next to the orchards with swarms of bees flowing back and forth, from flowers to hives.  It’s fascinating, really, to sit inside your car and watch them.

I like bee boxes.  Some are all white, while other stacks are of different colors, which makes them cheerful.  I think bees and bee boxes are happy things.

Bees showed up in my photographs from that day as little black dots zooming over the trees.  I thought about eliminating them, but decided not to.  Why would you do that when the whole point of the photographs is to tell the story of the orchards?  Bees buzzing and making blurry dots in the photographs are a reality.  So they stayed.

Until now, I never did anything, really, with those photographs.  I didn’t feel like it.  I haven’t felt like doing anything at all during the Pandemic.  For a whole year I have done not much other than garden.  The last time I was in Death Valley was in March 2020 right before California shut down.  I came home from my last journey to Death Valley and the Eastern Sierra Nevada right when the state closed.  My local market was empty.  The produce section had been cleaned out as had the meat and dairy sections.  There were no eggs.  Even Stouffer’s lasagna was missing from the freezer section.  Don’t ask about toilet paper or Lysol.

Thankfully paper products weren’t an issue for me and I figured out how to deal with food.  I stayed on my property and cleaned my house, over and over again.  I worked in the garden and became addicted to the news, simply because I wanted to understand what was happening with Covid-19 and…what was going to happen to us all?

I have had to go through troubling and sad times in my life, just like everyone else.  Some years are really great, while other years are filled with grief and sad things, bad people and situations.  It’s part of the ebb and flow of life.  But 2020 really, to me, was deeply disturbing for everyone on the planet.  Not just me.  I actually have had it relatively easy.  Thankfully few people that I know have contracted Coronavirus.  My gardener did, though.  He said he thought he was going to die.  He couldn’t breathe and had a fever that made him feel like he was on fire.  He told his wife he didn’t think he was going to make it.

Hearing about the thousands upon thousands of people who have passed due to this horrible virus along with job losses, people having no food to eat, and losing their homes has taken its toll on me mentally and emotionally, but so has the political environment.  I think that has depressed me almost more than Covid-19.  The fighting and more fighting.  Politicians lying and selling their souls for their careers.  Backstabbing and more-than-usual-icky-behavior on the part of lawmakers and leaders.  Lies and riots.  I became physically sick to my stomach from the events of January 6.  There was no reason for that ever to have happened.

Social media has become a toxic place that I don’t really like visiting any longer.  Ten years ago I liked Facebook.  It was fun.  But it’s not fun anymore.  I have an account with very few friends.  I deactivate my Instagram constantly, even though there are artists and photographers whose work I like to look at.  The world has become a very divided and ugly place with angry people.  It depresses me, and there really is nothing I can do about any of it except to do my part with staying home, wearing a mask when I do go out and to try to not listen to the news.

When my trees were taken out last weekend, it made me feel badly.  I knew that the trees knew that they had to go, but that didn’t make it any better.  It was a death from a virus that is not controllable and it’s killing trees in Southern California.  I still have two more that need to go, but I’m waiting to see if they send out any leaves.

A few days after the trees were removed, I decided to take a drive.  I had to.  I needed some way to get myself out of the depressed state I had been in for months on end.  I headed up to the San Joaquin Valley for just one day, alone in my car, knowing I would encounter no person.  Just trees.  I needed to go back out to the orchards to see the blossoms and bee boxes.  I knew they would make me feel better.

And they did.

 

The Joy of Japanese Anemones

/ Merilee / 9 Comments

Once you plant them, they are with you always.

Every summer their leaves come out and then the stems come up, tall and slender and elastic.  And just like clockwork the first blossom pops open near the end of August.

Anemones. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 8. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 7. Copyright Merilee Mitchell
Anemones 16. Copyright Merilee Mitchell

Throughout September the stems get longer with more and more buds and luminescent, white flowers.

They bounce silently in the breeze.  They have no scent.  Joy emanates from them instead.

They are Japanese anemones.

I’ve had them in pink and I’ve had them in white.  They can be frustrating with their greedy habit of taking over a garden, but when the blossoms are on 3′ tall stems, you can’t be mad at them for liking to dominate.  In winter they disappear again under the ground.

I’ve tried to pull them out once or twice before, then regretted it afterwards, remembering the autumn blossoms, thinking how much I love them.  The plants become so large that they swallow up everything else in the garden, including azaleas.

They always come back, though, no matter how thoroughly I thought I had pulled each and every piece of plant out of the ground.  It makes me happy to have them back even though they completely take over.

Japanese anemones are just one of the things that I love about autumn.  When the light gets a little softer and the air has a slight crispness in the early morning and the setting sun backlights the garden in late afternoon with the most golden of colors.

And the anemones bounce in the breeze.

Telling you to be happy.

Where Secrets Live

/ Merilee / 5 Comments

There’s a place where secrets live.

They float.  In the sky.

Like thoughts.  In the mind.

They hide.  In storms.

In lightning.  And thunder.

In wind.  And rain.

In rays.  Through clouds.

At dawn.  At dusk.

Or deep – At midnight.

They’re yours.  Alone.

Not shared.  Not ever.

These are not the kinds of secrets that one thinks of when they see the word.  Those are usually tarnished with bad things.  Or they’re a really, really good and exciting thing that cannot yet be revealed.  Like a gift that’s waiting to be given.

Those aren’t the kinds of secrets I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the secrets that have no words.

Secrets of emotion that a person cannot talk about or speak of.  They have no voice other than how they make you feel.

Sometimes those secrets are of the pain of betrayal, of being stabbed in the back by one that you trusted.  The way that one feels when the rejection letter arrives.  When the success that’s yearned for is just out-of-reach and the haze of failure hangs like smog in the back of your mind.

When the hand of a loved one is held while they die and the holder is left with the memory of that moment of loss.  It becomes a secret that has no name and so it lives up above.   It floats in that emotion of loss.

It can be that sense of time passing and an emptiness that lingers, thinking about the miles that have already been lived and how much less is left, now.  That has no words and so lives above, floating, wandering like clouds that are lost yet waiting to be found before it’s too late.

The feeling that you wish you could change things in the world and make people understand that they are making things worse, not better, but they don’t want to see it.  It becomes a frustration that is like a pressure that no words can be sewn to.  That pressure ends up as a secret.

It’s not just the melancholy that floats, but other things as well.  Like the way that love makes you feel when you see a beautiful thing and it has no words.  Or when you are near something you love and when you stand with it and look at it, something about it makes your heart sing.  It’s just like when the sun comes through storm clouds in the most exquisite light show and somehow it exactly matches that emotion of love that has no words.

It’s a secret.

They’re all secrets.  Those emotions that have no words.  They are so private that you cannot and will not share them because you don’t have the ability.  So they become secrets that are only for you.

Because only you can understand them.

Graduating Into The Open Ocean Of Life

/ Merilee / 1 Comment

 

It’s that time of year when college students graduate into the open ocean of life.  That big sea of uncertainties, what-if’s, how’s, why’s and what-do-I-do-now’s?…

Young women and men who have been in college for several years and that day comes when they are finished.  It’s over.  Done.  They do the walk, shake the hand, get the diploma and are now faced with the rest of their lives.

“What are we going to do with it???”  It’s big and scary and filled with unknowns, that ocean is.

Some graduates already know what awaits them.  An MBA, medical school, law school, travel or, “I just want to work for a little bit to see what I want to do”, and then hope they can find a job.

There are so many paths, opportunities, goals.  But when you are young and don’t really know precisely what you want to do with your life, the pressure is on to come up with an idea of where you want to go and then navigate your way to it safely.

“I need to feed myself, but I want to do something that helps humanity at the same time.”  Some don’t want to simply go out and make money, they want to make a difference in the world.  Politics?  Maybe.  Serve my country?  That’s a possibility.

“Do I really want to do what my parents did”?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

On June 9, 2019, I watched my son do the walk, shake the hand and get the diploma.  I listened to Yo-Yo Ma give his commencement speech and high five the audience.  I looked at the faces of all the graduates and felt hopeful that they will all find their way and that they will be patient with themselves as they swim into life’s big ocean.

One thing I’ve learned during my time here is that you cannot force life to conform to you.  You can have an idea and a goal, steer yourself onto a particular road, but then you need to allow life to come to you, show you the things that align with who you really are, your unique talents, abilities and passions and then let circumstances develop.  Look for the signs, suggestions, open and closed doors and listen to what life is telling you.

My greatest wish for my son and all college graduates is that they be kind to themselves and aware as they continue on their journeys.  That life ocean is big, but it is filled with wonder and opportunity if you allow it to come to you.