Wildflowers

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.

 

Just Outside The Fence

/ Merilee / 10 Comments

When disaster strikes and it’s all over the news, the media is inescapable, pushing everything at us.  The news tells us about floods, super Arctic freezes and blasting Nor’easters, tornadoes and avalanches.  Naturally it’s assumed that the entire world knew about the horrendous fires that burned California last year, and in particular the Woolsey Fire, because it affected me personally, as well as thousands of other people who live in my area.

The beginning of the Woolsey Fire of November 2018 from the back of my property

I recently returned from an East Coast trip knowing that first thing the next morning I’d have men removing the fence at the far end of our property.  The fence was burned to a crisp back in November.  You wouldn’t think fire would do much to wrought iron, but it does.  So it had to be taken down, sand blasted, repaired, repainted and put back up again, providing a delicate and somewhat humorous boundary that doesn’t really keep wildlife out.  I’ve watched coyotes and bobcats simply jump over that fence.  It’s merely a form of entertainment and exercise for them. The coyotes like to eat my persimmons.

The Woolsey Fire of last November burned our property.  It raged all around the entire neighborhood, taking out one house and torching the area for miles.  It was a fire storm that had us evacuated for five days, living in a motel in Burbank.  It was all that was on the news day and night, night and day.  The Camp Fire in Northern California was going on at the same time along with various other fires all up and down the state.  In essence, California was being burned from one end to the other.

While in New England last week my conversations with other people were interesting.  They either had not heard of the fires at all, or thought they were still burning.  A couple of teenaged girls insisted that the Sierra Nevada Mountains were still burning.

“You can’t go to Yosemite or anywhere in the Sierra Nevada.  It’s all burning.”

“Ugh….no.  No, that was last summer and fall.  It’s now under tons of snow.  There are no more fires in the Sierras.”

“Oh, no, they’re still burning.  The fires are always burning in California.”  This seems to be the impression of California.  It’s either burning or sliding all of the time.

Social media allowed lots of people to vent their antagonism towards the rich and famous during those fires.  It was the Woolsey Fire that took out a huge chunk of houses and businesses in Malibu.  Twitter was filled gleeful people, happy that celebrities and the wealthy were losing their homes.  That was amazing to me.  Why would you be happy that someone lost their home to fire?  Or to any disaster.  A lot of people had their homes burn in 2018.  Rich and not so rich people lost everything in fires all over California.  Why is it funny, desirable or even justified if it’s a celebrity who loses their home?  I never understand this kind of thinking.  It’s clearly sick.  Reading these types of posts really made me dislike Twitter even more than I did before.  In fact, I struggle with social media in its entirety.  I’m not so sure it’s a positive thing, but that’s a whole different topic.

A lot of people associate California, and in particular, Southern California, with mudslides.  Yes, we have mudslides.  Lots of them.   But a lot of the time, mudslides are caused from previous fires that have burned the hills.  Then the rains come and the naked hills slide due to the vegetation being gone and soil structure changes.

When the men removed the fence that’s supposed to keep out coyotes and bobcats, it allowed me to venture out onto the rest of the hill our home sits on.  It was liberating and freeing, not having that fence in place and I realized that the entire hill is absolutely filled with wildflowers.  Lupine, blue dicks, mustard and many others I’ve never seen before.  The abundant rains of this past winter unlocked seeds that probably were dormant for years.

I walked out into the heavy growth of wildflowers to photograph them.  It was a thrill to be standing inside a thicket of flowers, taking their portraits before the men finished welding the fence panels.  I don’t know if I will ever see such a wildflower display again.  Drought has a way of creeping back in when you live in California, and wildflowers don’t like drought.

Actually, in all of the years I’ve lived in California, and that’s been nearly my entire life, I have never once seen so much rain, but also so many wildflowers.  They are just outside my fence, filling the hills that were blackened and charred a few months ago.

It’s like a gift after the disaster.

Photographing The Super Bloom In Death Valley

/ Merilee / 23 Comments

I was there for the beginning of the Super Bloom in Death Valley.  Then I went back for the ending.  I missed the middle, but I had stuff to do, like doctor’s appointments and whatnot, so… I missed that part.  But what I did get to see was pretty surreal.

Big Yellow

The last Super Bloom was in 2005, but I didn’t start going to Death Valley until 2006, so I didn’t get to experience that one.

_DSC6089-1-2

I got my first DSLR in 2008 and the following Spring I took it with me to Death Valley.  There were scatterings of Desert Gold here and there in the valley and I desperately tried to shoot them in such a way as to capture the weirdness of seeing tall, bright yellow flowers waving in the wind in a desolate place.

_DSC5405-1

I didn’t know what I was doing, so the impact was disappointing, washed-out and lifeless.  Over-exposed and flat.  Boring snapshots that said nothing at all.

_DSC6135-1

I was frustrated with that attempt and from then on, I have worked to try to tell the story of the desert so viewers can see and feel it the way that I do.  I want people to feel like they are there with me, experiencing the dryness and the wind, the huge expanse of freedom.

_DSC6140-1-2

Super Blooms happen maybe every ten years or so in Death Valley, when there is enough rain at just the right time to help dormant wildflowers germinate.  Get rain too late and it’s not going to make a huge display of flowers.  But if there is precipitation in the fall, and a good amount in winter, then you just might get a Super Bloom.

_DSC6175-1-2

2016 has been the year.  Death Valley received so much rain last fall that it damaged parts of the park.  But it helped bring on a display of wildflowers that has been pretty incredible.

_DSC5992-1-2

I’ve taken lots of photographs of desert flowers in past years.  There are always a few every spring and I manage to shoot them when I am around.  After I got a macro lens, that’s when it became fun.  There is a whole, tiny world through a macro lens complete with insects and spider webs.  Things you don’t normally see if you’re not really looking.

_DSC5975-1-2

After awhile, though, shooting close-ups of flowers can get boring and even sterile.  You feel like you’re making a guidebook for wildflowers.  I told my friend Amy last week that shooting close-ups of flowers gets monotonous.  She said, “Yeah, it’s like it gets too scientific”.  I laughed.

_DSC6171-1-2

A few of those is ok, but you lose the bigger story.  I want you to see where they are and get a feeling of the harsh conditions these flowers are managing to live in.

_DSC6137-1-2

I decided I had to do it differently, as much as I could.  You need to tell a story about the flowers.  Change the point of view.  Shoot them from up above, lay down on the ground, make silhouettes against the sky.  Capture them as they blow in the wind.  I want you to smell the fragrance through the image and feel their fragility.

_DSC6131-1-2

I have a back injury, so laying down on the ground on the rocks is not always an option, or one I can do the way that I want.  So I have to improvise and force myself to see and shoot in ways that keep the eye entertained while telling a story.

_DSC6128-1-2

That’s what image-making is all about.  Entertaining the eye.

_DSC6205-1-2

There’s nothing quite as magical as walking out in the desert on hard, dried mud and rocks where flowers are blooming from the tiniest, ground-hugging specimens, to tall, waving Desert Gold and Gravel Ghosts.

_DSC6169-1-2

It’s even better when the wind is howling and you wonder, “How am I supposed to shoot you when you won’t stand still?”

_DSC5997-1-2

But I figured it out.  You can’t make the flowers stand still, so you have to work with what is.  Let them blow in the wind and shoot them like that.

_DSC6023-1-2

It’s always super-special when the wind changes direction, becomes fierce and blows up billows of alkali and then I have to quickly hide my Nikon inside my shirt to protect it from grit and sand.  My hat blows off and rolls quickly across the terrain, me chasing after it, cursing.

_DSC6134-1-2

But that’s what makes it fun.  It’s the challenge of working in the desert under the harshest conditions that I like.

_DSC6186-1-2

While shooting a thick stand of flowers on the roadside, I got so involved with them that I didn’t notice a truck coming that was about to take me out.  Then I quickly decided that truck needed to be part of the story, because it was.  And is.  Trucks are always driving up and down Highways 190 and 127.  They are a part of the desert, of Death Valley.

_DSC6115-1-2

I think the best part of this trip was when I decided to sit down in the middle of a stand of desert gold in the wind while the late afternoon sun started to peek through the clouds.

_DSC6190-1

The flowers were above my head, blowing back and forth with their dark chocolate scent all around me and I shot and shot…  and shot.  Just me and the flowers out in the middle of nowhere.  I could have sat there for hours with those flowers.

_DSC5986-1-2

I came home with images that I love, because I decided to just let the flowers do what they wanted to do in the wind and the sun and the clouds.  And I tried to tell the story of their ephemeral life in the desert.

_DSC6088-1-2

Hopefully I’ll still be around when there is another Super Bloom in Death Valley, and I will try again to tell the story of the flowers that bloom when it rains in the desert.