the parsley.blog.landscape.life

9/1/09 – Tuesday.

the light slanting across our parking lot at the end of the day got the attention of the artists in the office.  “red gold underglow,” it was decided.  the sun was going down orange, and I felt around for my camera.

took one shot from the parking lot and headed west toward Venice Beach.  the cameras were out in force, from the real professional-looking numbers to the little digital snapshot cheapies like mine.  cameras never seem to have viewfinders any more; mine still does, but most of the snapshot cameras don’t, so I was surrounded by people peering down at their screens in the orange light, like presbyopes trying to read very small books.

but plenty of people still have cameras that lead you to adopt that intense squint that seems to denote the heartlessness of the true photographer, uninterested in exclaiming at the horror and destruction inherent in what they see;  completely focused on the image.  or, perhaps, on the girl in red.

so I joined the hordes of photographers, wandering up and down the beach and feeling the strange sense that I’d been here before.  not the same beach, not the same fire, but the same impulse; to capture a moment that will be gone long before you can fully realize it has arrived. 

don’t wait, I once was told by a little sticker on a park bench.  don’t wait, you may not have this chance again.  despite some efforts to persuade me, I am not interested in getting a tattoo: but if I did, that’s what it would say.  don’t wait.

I shared some pictures of sunset and smoke and a friend wrote:  Can I like the picture and un-like the cause? another wrote: a shame the price we pay for this.  everyone is very anxious to point out that they can’t really enjoy this beauty for itself.  they don’t seem to feel free to do so.  we must remind one another that the fire is a terrible thing, that it is destructive, that people have died and been hurt, that people have lost what they love.  were we in any danger of forgetting these things?

other pictures were sent to me and I wrote back: those are astoundingly beautiful.  the reply came:  I would have said, terrifying.  I replied: I see no contradiction.

9/2/09 – Wednesday.

the wife of a very important friend of the firm and the boss has died.  terrible news, though she had been ill a very long time and it is not unexpected.  we need flowers to bring for a condolence call.  without thinking, I said – what a great excuse to go to the orchid place!

for condolence, we decided, white orchids.  although the orchid place has many other fancy kinds, they don’t seem to suit the occasion.  white, so often the color of mourning.  is it for purity, for innocence, a desire for blankness in the face of pain?  conspicuous consumption, in ages before washing machines; or conspicuous plainness, in places and times when bright colors were coveted and costly?  someone told me recently that white is the color of mourning because it is the color of bone.  a reminder of our last end.  a memento mori.

normally it takes 24 hours notice to get an arrangement made up at the orchid place, but I prevailed upon them to do it right then.  and while I was waiting, I almost allowed myself to get seduced by some of the most indecent anthuriums I’ve ever seen.  I mean to say, anthuriums are never subtle about their intentions, but these had a dark, dark red to them that was particularly…flagrant.

orchids have a more alien kind of appeal,  more carefully calibrated to the interests of insects, and thus a little more ethereal. anthuriums, on the other hand…

I stood around waiting for my white orchids, thinking about flesh and bone, and the pressure exerted by each, their insistent demands.

the orchid arrangement made up, I pay and go to my car.  white ash is falling on my shirt and on the roof of my car.  but already the air is growing much more humid.  moist air is being pushed up from a hurricane to the south of us.  but the sun went down red again tonight, regardless.

I’ve got to stop tagging every post with “love and loss.”  might as well rename the whole blog.  from “the parsley” to “the love and loss blog.”  in every post, I will discuss how each thing we gain has inside of it the seed of its loss.  and a few people will read it, and they will get depressed.  but  that’s not my intention.

once in a while, I surprise myself with the realization that I’m actually free.  that is, free to see what I’m seeing, or feel what I’m feeling, without having to hold on so hard to the terrible cost of everything.  it doesn’t last, this realization; but then again, it shouldn’t.

8/29/09 – Saturday.

I can tell when the latest round of wildfires has made the national news because I start getting the “are you OK??” messages from certain family members.  never mind that I live, and have always lived in all my years in California, nowhere near a wildland that might burn.  when you see wildland fires on the national news they always look pretty comprehensively destructive.  burn, hollywood, burn.

and in fact this particular fire, the Station fire, is scary enough.  it’s been hot and dry and dusty and very still, so that the giant plume of smoke is mostly hanging in the air, only drifting seaward very slowly.  this is the view from the north 405 this afternoon.  windshield photos are always pretty dicey but this might at least give a sense of the massive scale of the smoke plume.  I see by the LA Times web site that officials would very much like it if people stopped calling 911 to report the smoke.  they are, in fact, aware of the  gigantic fire.

though musing on the metaphorical value of these fires is always interesting, there is more possibility of detachment when you have nothing personally at stake.  not menacing me or my home, check.  not menacing any family or close friends, hmm, it is menacing at least one online acquaintance that I know of, possibly others, so that’s slightly more personal.   not threatening any of our projects, check.  oh, that last one seemed cold-blooded, didn’t it?

but you know as designers we still talk about “our” projects even when they’re built and completely out of our hands.  we utterly fail at detachment.  when they look good,  when people are enjoying them, we beam with pride.  when they’re neglected or underused or being systematically killed by bad maintenance, it hurts.  just today I was lamenting with some colleagues about how hard it is to get the best possible pictures of a landscape project; we hire good photographers and try to run around and get things cleaned up,  but finding that magic moment, as the boss calls it, “after it’s grown in and before they kill it,” sometimes proves almost impossible.  it might have been five minutes, one April.  if you miss it, too bad.  there’s only so much you can do with photoshop.

8/30/09 – Sunday.

I went driving around to look for another photo opportunity.  wrong time of day, blazing noon, and so hazy you can’t entirely tell what you’re looking at.  nevertheless:

the internet is filling up fast with better photos and videos of the Station fire; it’s dramatically visible from all around the basin.  nevertheless, this is my view of it today, with the channelized Ballona creek in the foreground, taken from the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook.

there, interpretive materials in the visitor center explain many things about our local ecology, including what the levels of air quality alert mean.  this is where we’re at today, which means it’s an exceptionally poor day to be climbing three hundred feet on a dusty, blazing hillside at noon.  but then, when was I ever known for good sense.

I still haven’t made a proper visit to the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook and taken the pictures I need to take, but I’ve now been up there briefly twice. and remarked to the friend I was with, the first time, that seeing the California State Parks logo, these days,  fills me with nothing but sorrow.  we got busted, that time,  for not paying our parking, and I hastily stuffed my money in the box, fighting the impulse to follow it with all the money in my wallet.  as if that would do much good.

we’re being gutted!  thanks for understanding!  enjoy your new State Park!

he that hath wife and children, wrote Francis Bacon, hath given hostages to fortune.

to love anything is to become vulnerable, to instantly fail the detachment test.  cities and parks and landscapes, as well as people.

when these grand pyrocumulus clouds appear on the horizon and the light turns those interesting colors, I heartlessly look for my camera, and heedlessly climb up hills.  it’s like a gigantic movie screen, and wouldn’t seem all that real, except you can smell it and taste it and it gives you headaches, even at this fairly considerable distance.    I try to explain to my family that los angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city (or 88, or a hundred, depending on who you ask) and there is really no immediacy for me in the fate of glendora or la canada flintridge, as sad and upsetting as it is to hear about all this destruction.  who is it that I’m really trying to convince?

as a single, childless person who owns very little and lives in the midst of the concrete, you’d think I have no hostages to fortune.  guess again.

I happened to be in South LA (we are told not to call it “South Central” any more) late in the afternoon yesterday, looked up and to the north  from the site I was photographing, and saw a plume of smoke above the San Gabriels.

this picture was taken probably no more than half an hour after the Morris fire broke out in the Angeles National Forest, now well above 750 acres and burning out of control.  a second fire started nearby, today.  even here at home on the Westside, there is a thick pall of smoke in the northeastern horizon, and the setting sun is casting the most beautiful pink-gold light.  time to open up a new file in the photo database under Southern California: “Fires 2009.”

here’s one from the “Fires 2007″ folder, from the roof of the Kaiser parking garage, October 07.  you can just see, very tiny, downtown LA, against the smoke coming from the south, some of it all the way from San Diego county.

I was there for the annual skin inspection, getting another little piece of me taken off, just in case.  the cloudy landscapes of my pale ancestors did not prepare my DNA for life in Southern California; once my mom had a few melanomas taken off her back, I was doomed to the yearly skin inspection and the occasional removal of some small piece of my external self.  although really, when it comes to the dangerous stuff like melanoma, the original sin was already committed long ago; just one or two sunburns at the crucial moment in childhood and the timer is set.  no amount of sunscreen and careful shielding as an adult will make any difference.  prometheus only had to get his hands on that fire just once.

but of course everybody knows what the original sin of Los Angeles was, and why we are regularly punished with fires, with floods, with drought, with smog, with riot and unrest, with the plagues of our own false values.  it wasn’t fire that we stole.  here’s a good book I’m reading, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, by William Alexander McClung:  (nice name, he must come from pale cloudy people too?):

In the Arcadian mythology of California…acts of “improving”, epitomized by, but not limited to, the funneling of water from the Owens Valley, have become its primal error.

and later on in the book:

Defined as the land of low rainfall, the West of course includes Los Angeles, which, as everybody knows, hauls its water from afar.  This importation, which is logically comparable to bringing fuel to heat northern cities, but is rarely so defended, arouses embarassment or even guilt over the compromising of a dry wilderness landscape.

so you see, los angeles, the sunny golden dream, the object of desire and jealousy,  burns every year in the fires of envious rage.   when our disasters befall us, people in the rest of the country are often known to take a certain amount of glee in our misfortune.  we deserve it; we asked for it.  we are eternally culpable for living somewhere we shouldn’t be and taking something that didn’t belong to us.  (unlike, you see, all the rest of anglo America.)

when the riots came in 92, I was in San Francisco, not long out of college and working at a nonprofit; trying to get home from a work event while helicopters circled and windows smashed around me.  but nobody said, afterward, that there were riots in San Francisco because San Francisco deserved punishment for its extremes of wealth and poverty, its envies, its injustices, and its beauty and pleasures, although it had all of these things.  the riots started in Los Angeles, and only the beauty and pleasures of Los Angeles really deserved them.

well, nature is having another go at us this week, for all our errors.  the smoke is getting everywhere, like joyce’s snow, falling like the descent of our last end, upon all the living and the dead.  and upon the lucky and the unlucky, the poor and the rich, south LA and the smug entitled Westside, and on all the guilty.  I would say it is also falling on the innocent, but there aren’t any of those here.