Posts Tagged ‘wayfarer’s chapel’
wayfaring
Originally posted November 22, 2008
today’s photo expedition was sort of a washout. I wanted to get some good photos of the Wayfarer’s Chapel, to talk about how for years, even before I really started paying attention to architecture, I always say pictures of this famous chapel nestled in a grove of redwoods, and how natural it seemed; and then when I saw it in person, I realized how constructed its ‘natural’ setting actually was. but this is the second time I’ve been down there, and my pictures still aren’t coming out right:
last time I went, it was a summer midday and too sunny; this time, a dense fogbank came sweeping, in, at only 2:30 in the morning. also, of course, you don’t need to hang around the Wayfarer’s Chapel for long on the weekends before a wedding party shows up and takes over the chapel, and sure enough, here they came:
about the only shot I got of the surrounding landscape before the fog obliterated everything:
the redwoods around the chapel were imported from Northern California to create the desired effect, and most of the other trees on the site are also non-native: on the left, Italian stone pines (Pineus pinea) and on the right, Canary Island pines (Pinus canariensis). both can be found planted all over Los Angeles, even as street trees.
if you go into the visitor’s center, in the hallway outside the restroom are some pictures of how the chapel looked when the “forest” was first planted, looking like dinky little shrubs.
of course, though I love our Southern California native landscapes, I’m not a native plant purist. I’m perfectly happy with this being a garden rather than just a natural clearing in a redwood forest; but it’s interesting to note how few people realize it’s a garden and not a redwood forest, until they see it in context – or maybe they don’t realize it even then.
anyway, it is a lovely spot, and they do a land-office business in weddings. I thought I was taking pictures of happy wedding bricks, until I looked at my photos and realized how many memorial bricks were in there too:
I wanted to get some pictures of Portugese Bend, one of the most unstable pieces of expensive real estate anywhere in the world, and its crazy wobbly roads and above ground utility pipes, but the fog was so thick when I got out there you’d have to take it on faith that there was any landscape at all.
after the fire and smoke and desert winds we’ve been having, the fog is certainly welcome, and there’s rain in the forecast; nevertheless, the sudden shift in weather seems to be creating disturbances in the atmosphere. my mind keeps wandering, I mean more than usual. at the gym tonight, the machine I was on kept throwing out random numbers on the heart rate readout, though I wasn’t touching the sensors: 93, 105, 192, 145, 86, 170.
